Obama Is In Charge; This Is on Him

By David Limbaugh

Friday, May 31, 2013

Well, let's see. Obama promised to get the economy moving, greatly improve our health care system and reduce its costs, give us the most transparent government, and usher in a new era of bipartisanship and racial harmony.

Some 4 1/2 years into Obama's presidency, his economy is still as lethargic as a basset hound, and we're seeing disastrous developments on Obamacare. A smorgasbord of major scandals is unfolding, and we've got record levels of partisan angst and heightened racial tensions stoked by this administration.

So many shocking stories are emerging that we probably miss half of them. Did you see the Washington Post report about how Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius personally asked health industry groups to contribute to Enroll America, a pro-Obamacare front group that is, according to The Heritage Foundation, working to "educate" the public about the law's supposed benefits?

Obama and his band of fellow liberal ideologues have an agenda of fundamentally transforming America, and they're sticking to it -- no matter what kind of problems it creates, corruption and lies it entails, or disharmony it generates among Americans.

Perhaps this is another reason Obama never bothers to admit, much less apologize for, his failures. In his mind, his agenda is moving forward and that's what matters. The plethora of scandals and the myriad economic and health care failures may be an annoyance to him, but in the end, he's getting his way. If things don't change, we are moving rapidly toward statism overall and toward a single-payer health insurance system. To paraphrase him, "it may take 15 years, but we'll get there."

Meanwhile, the "What, me worry?" president is, yet again, busy fundraising and campaigning in his hometown of Chicago, insisting to his adoring die-hard fans that "Washington is not broken" and that he could not be more eager for Democrats to recapture control of the House in order to have Nancy Pelosi back as speaker. Not only is Obama not contrite but he wants more authority.

Obama seemingly has endless time to play golf, take vacations and hopscotch the United States on Air Force One to fundraise and campaign, but he's too busy to know or even be bothered about an unfolding crisis in Benghazi, the deliberate alteration of talking points to mislead the press and public about the cause of the consulate attack, the selective targeting of conservative groups by an unscrupulous Internal Revenue Service (which just so happened to do his bidding in successfully suppressing Republican voter turnout), and the criminal investigation of innocent journalists.

It's one thing for Obama not to be a details man, but how about a little focus -- or even a superficial awareness -- on very serious matters?

What we are seeing from Obama (and his administration) is what we should expect from a person who has been mostly a political agitator and activist for his entire adult life, without any experience in rolling up his sleeves and getting his hands dirty in actually solving the problems.

His style of governance is best-depicted by his frustrated utterance at the failure of BP to plug the Gulf oil leak fast enough to suit him: "Just plug the damn hole."

Obama doesn't really understand how business or even government works, but it doesn't keep him from making specific promises he doesn't know he can keep.

He repeatedly asserted, unequivocally, that Obamacare would bend the cost curve down and wouldn't infringe on religious liberty. He told us that if we liked our insurance plan, we would be able to keep it.

Have you been reading the headlines lately? "Obamacare Is Driving Some Doctors To Stop Taking Insurance Altogether." "In California, Obamacare to Increase Individual Health Insurance Premiums by 64-146 Percent." "ObamaCare to trigger health insurance cancellation notices." "Like your health care policy? You may be losing it." "Obamacare's Liberty-Crushing Mandate in Court."

Could it be that the public is finally waking up and at least willing to reconsider its foolish blindness to this administration? A new Quinnipiac University poll finds that American voters say -- by a 76-17 percent margin, including 63-30 percent among Democrats -- that a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate charges that the IRS targeted conservative groups.

Further, voters aren't keen on Attorney General Eric Holder's investigating the matter himself, and he has only a 23-29 percent job approval rating. As Holder is President Obama's alter ego, this is significant.

But what we've yet to see is Obama himself being held accountable for his fraudulent promises, his policy failures and this staggering corruption.

Like it or not, these things are his doing. He is in charge; he is the one who made the false promises; he established the policy goals that are to be achieved at almost any cost; and he has created the climate leading to this lawlessness. In the modern vernacular, this is on him.

Paranoid or Prescient?

By Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Government is now so huge, powerful and callous that citizens risk becoming proverbial serfs without the freedoms guaranteed by the Founders.

Is that perennial fear an exaggeration? Survey the current news.

We have just learned that the Internal Revenue Service before the 2012 election predicated its tax-exempt policies on politics. It inordinately denied tax exemption to groups considered either conservative or possibly antagonistic to the president's agenda.

If the supposedly nonpartisan IRS is perceived as scoring our taxes based on our politics, then the entire system of trust in self-reporting is rendered null and void. Worse still, the bureaucratic overseer at the center of the controversy, Sarah Hall Ingram, now runs the IRS division charged with enforcing compliance with the new Obamacare requirements.

Recently, some reporters at the Associated Press had their private and work phone records monitored by the government, supposedly because of fear about national-security leaks. The Justice Department gave the AP no chance, as usually happens, first to question its own journalists. The AP ran a story in May 2012 about the success of a Yemeni double agent before the administration itself could brag about it.

In fact, the Obama White House itself has been accused of leaking classified information deemed favorable to the administration -- top-secret details concerning the Stuxnet computer virus used against Iran, the specifics of the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, and the decision-making behind the drone program -- often to favored journalists. The message is clear: A reporter may have his most intimate work and private correspondence turned over to government -- a Fox News journalist had his email account tapped into -- on the mere allegation that he might have tried to do what his own government had in fact already done.

Now, the civil rights divisions of the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have issued new speech codes for campuses, focusing on supposed gender insensitivities. The result is that federal bureaucrats can restrict the constitutionally protected rights of free speech for millions of American college students -- including during routine classroom discussions -- in ways they feel are proper and correct.

Eight months after the Benghazi mess, Americans only now are discovering that the government, for political reasons, failed to beef up security at our Libyan consulate or send it help when under attack. It also lied in blaming the violence on a spontaneous demonstration prompted by an Internet video. That pre-election narrative was known to be untrue when the president, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney all pedaled it.

The problem with an all-powerful, rogue government is not just that it becomes quite adept at doing what it should not. Increasingly, it also cannot even do what it should.

Philadelphia abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell may well turn out to be the most lethal serial murder in U.S. history. His recent murder conviction gave only a glimpse of his carnage at the end of a career that spanned more than three decades. Yet Gosnell operated with impunity right under the noses of Pennsylvania health and legal authorities for years, without routine government health code and licensing oversight.

In the case of Boston terrorist bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, his loud jihadist activity earned him a visit from the FBI, and the attention of both the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security. But all that government monitoring was for naught. Tsarnaev was not detained, but allowed to visit Dagestan and Chechnya -- both located in the supposedly dangerous region that prompted his family's flight to the U.S. in the first place.

In all of these abuses and laxities there is one common theme. Bureaucrats, political appointees, regulators, intelligence officials and law enforcement personnel wanted to fall in line with the perceived correct agenda of the day. Right now, that party line seems to be protecting the progressive interests of the Obama administration, going after its critics, turning a blind eye toward illegal abortions, in politically correct fashion ignoring warnings about radical Islam, and restricting some rights of free speech to curtail language declared potentially hurtful.

Conspiracists, left and right, are sometimes understandably derided as paranoids for alleging that Big Government steadily absorbs the private sector, taps private communications, targets tax filers it doesn't like, and lies to the people about what it is up to. The only missing theme of such classic paranoia is the perennial worry over the right to bear arms.

I went to several sporting goods stores recently to buy commonplace rifle shells. For the first time in my life, there were none to be found. Can widespread shortages of ammunition be attributed to panic buying or production shortfalls caused by inexplicably massive purchases by the Department of Homeland Security at a time of acrimonious debate over the Second Amendment?

Who knows, but yesterday's wacky conspiracist is becoming today's Nostradamus.

When Did We Vote to Become Mexico?

By Ann Coulter

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

At first I thought the IRS scandal was leaked to distract from the Benghazi scandal. But that didn't make sense because the IRS scandal is a more obvious abuse of power than the White House lying about the murder of four Americans in Libya.

Before I had resolved which scandal was distracting from which, we found out the Department of Justice was spying on The Associated Press -- not to protect national security, but to prevent the AP from scooping the White House. Then, this week, it broke that the Department of Justice was also spying on Fox News for reasons that remain unexplained.

Meanwhile, Sens. Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and John McCain are working feverishly to turn the country into Mexico.

So now I think all the scandals are intended to distract from Rubio's amnesty bill.

For decades, Mexicans have been about 30 percent of all legal immigrants to the United States, while only a smidgen more than 1 percent come from Great Britain. Is that fair? Granted, their food is better, but why is it the norm is to have nearly 30 times as many Mexican as British immigrants?

We have been taking in more immigrants from Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and Colombia, individually, than from England, our mother country. There are nearly twice as many immigrants from El Salvador as from Canada, and 10 times as many as from Australia.

Why can't the country be more or less the ethnic composition that it always was? The 50-1 Latin American-to-European ratio isn't a natural phenomenon that might result from, say, Europeans losing interest in coming here and poor Latin Americans providing some unique skill desperately needed in our modern, technology-based economy.

To the contrary, it's result of an insane government policy. Teddy Kennedy's 1965 Immigration Act was designed to artificially inflate the number of immigrants from the Third World, while making it virtually impossible for anyone from the nations that historically provided our immigrants to come here.

Pre-1965 immigrants were what made this country what it was for a reason: They were the pre-welfare state immigrants. From around 1630 to 1966, immigrants sank or swam. About a third of them couldn't make it in America and went home -- and those are the ones who weren't rejected right off the boat for being sick, crippled or idiots.

That's why corny stories of someone's ancestors coming here a half-century ago are completely irrelevant. If their ancestors hadn't succeeded, their great-grandchildren wouldn't be here to tell the story because no one was given food stamps, free medical care and housing to stay. (And vote Democrat.)

Now we're scraping the bottom of the barrel by holding ourselves out as the welfare ward of the world and specifically rejecting skilled immigrants.

As Milton Friedman said, you cannot have open borders and a welfare state. The reason a country's average immigrant matters is that the losers never go home -- they go on welfare. (Maybe if they had to work, immigrants wouldn't have as much time to build bombs.) Airy statements about wanting to end welfare aren't going to change that implacable fact.

It should not come as a surprise that a majority of recent immigrants are following a path that's the exact opposite of earlier immigrants. The immigrant story of lore is that the first generation is poor but works hard, then the second, third and fourth generations soar up the socioeconomic ladder.

But innumerable studies have shown that Mexican first-generation immigrants work like maniacs -- and then the second, third and fourth generations plunge headlong into the underclass.

By now, Mexicans are the largest immigrant group in America, with about 50 million Hispanics living here legally.

Marco Rubio's amnesty bill will soon make it 80 million. First, there are at least 11 million illegal immigrants, a majority from Mexico, who will be instantly legalized. Then we'll get their entire extended families under our chain migration system.

I wouldn't want that many Japanese! I wouldn't want that many Dutch (not that there are that many Dutch)! Why do we have to become a different country? Was there a vote when the country decided to turn itself into Mexico? No other country has ever just decided to turn itself into another country like this.

The nation's plutocrats are lined up with the Democratic Party in a short-term bid to get themselves cheap labor (subsidized by the rest of us), which will give the Democratic Party a permanent majority. If Rubio's amnesty goes through, the Republican Party is finished. It will be the "Nancy Pelosi Democratic Party" versus the "Chuck Schumer Republican Party."

When that happens, the cover-up of murder in Benghazi, a little IRS abuse or governmental spying on journalists will be a good day for civil liberties.

A majority of Americans still do love this country -- including, one hopes, legal immigrants who thought they were leaving Mexico. But a policy that will change America forever is about to slip through under the cloak of endless scandals from the corrupt Obama administration.

Why They Fight

By Cliff May

Thursday, May 30, 2013

In his 6,000-word speech at the National Defense University last week, President Obama devoted only one paragraph to the ideology of those who proclaim themselves America’s enemies. But those 101 words are worth a closer look.

“Most, though not all, of the terrorism we face is fueled by a common ideology,” the president began. Quite right: Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Iran’s rulers, Hezbollah, Hamas, and many others who utilize terrorism do indeed see the world through similar lenses. The president did not name their ideology, but most of us have come to employ such terms as “jihadism,” “Islamism,” “political Islam,” and “radical Islam.”

The president described this ideology as “a belief by some extremists that Islam is in conflict with the United States and the West.” This, too, is accurate. If you read the writings of Osama bin Laden, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and such Muslim Brotherhood intellectuals as Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna, there can be no doubt that, by their lights, this conflict is inevitable.

The extremists also believe, Obama continued, “that violence against Western targets, including civilians, is justified in pursuit of a larger cause.” He refrained from defining that cause, though earlier in the speech he did mention that “deranged or alienated individuals” have been “inspired by larger notions of violent jihad.”

More specifically, they believe that Muslims have been divinely commanded to wage war against those who refuse to accept Allah as the supreme authority of the universe; Mohammed as Allah’s prophet; the Koran as the revealed and unchanging word of Allah; and sharia as the law that mankind must obey.

They believe, too, that the world is divided between the Dar al-Islam, the lands where Muslims rule, and the Dar al-Harb, the lands where infidels rule. They reject the possibility that the two realms can — or should — peacefully coexist. On the contrary, the Dar al-Islam must do whatever is necessary to defeat and destroy the Dar al-Harb.

Many Westerners find it difficult to comprehend that people actually hold such beliefs. These Westerners — there is no tactful way to say this — are ignorant of world history, the millennia of conflicts in which one group after another has attempted to impose its language, culture, religion, and DNA on others.

The use of religion or ideology to justify such aggression and domination is hardly new. Contrary to much wishful thinking, “conflict resolution,” tolerance, multiculturalism, and similar newfangled Western ideas have not been universally embraced.

Next, the president said: “Of course, this ideology is based on a lie, for the United States is not at war with Islam.” That is something of a non sequitur: As noted above, a central tenet of the ideology he’s discussing holds that Islam is at war with the United States and other nations that persist in rejecting Islam’s message — and that the conflict must continue until the infidels submit.

Further: “And this ideology is rejected by the vast majority of Muslims.” Here, Obama returns to solid ground. Most Muslims have no wish to wage jihad against non-Muslims, no desire to strap their children into bomb vests or even to give money to the Islamic “charities” that support such missions. But if only 5 or 10 percent of the world’s more than a billion Muslims do see such efforts as virtuous, we’re still looking at an enormous movement — one lavishly funded by the plentiful oil under lands ruled by Muslims.

The president noted that Muslims “are the most frequent victims of terrorist attacks.” There can be no question about that — in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mali, and many other corners of the world. What’s more, the extremists reserve their most vehement hatred for fellow Muslims who reject their ideology, who — as they see it — have abandoned the true faith in favor of a watered-down interpretation of Islam. They call such Muslims apostates, and the punishment for apostasy is death. This is among the reasons so few Muslims dare speak out against the fundamentalists.

Obama concluded his single-paragraph disquisition with this: “Nevertheless, this ideology persists.” Yes, it does, and that raises the key strategic question: What is to be done? The president answers: “This war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

Wars do end — but rarely because one side declares them over unless, of course, that side is prepared to accept defeat. Imagine President Roosevelt, circa 1943, deciding it was time to end the “wars” in Europe, Asia, and North Africa, even as German and Japanese troops continued to spread fascism. Imagine President Kennedy saying it was time to wind down the Cold War even as the Soviets were expanding the frontiers of Communism. The ideology that confronts us today is no less totalitarian, no less supremacist, and no less bellicose.

Surely, what history advises is that appeasement is a policy certain to fail. Surely, what democracy demands is that we stand up to those who threaten our freedom — even if that means paying the price and bearing the burden of a long war.

Send Us Your Violent Bigots, Yearning to Butcher Our Citizens

By Ann Coulter

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

It's been a bad few weeks for cultural assimilation. Last month, two welfare-receiving immigrants in the United States, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, set off bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring hundreds. By the end of the week, they had murdered a cop and engaged in a wild shoot-out and bomb-throwing melee with the police.

Last week, a couple of ethnic Nigerians butchered a British soldier with meat cleavers in broad daylight on a bustling street in a London suburb, then boasted about the murder in video interviews with bystanders. (On the bright side, they did not claim to be princes and ask for your life savings.)

Also last week, immigrants, mostly Muslims, began rioting in peaceful Sweden -- burning schools to the ground, torching cars and throwing rocks at the police. (Who among us hasn't lost his temper trying to assemble an Ikea china cabinet?)

Supporters of the West's current immigration policies can't keep ducking reality. So they try to shut down debate by calling their opponents racists, xenophobes, know-nothings and fascists.

The English Defense League (EDL), for example, is portrayed in the media as a bunch of racist football hooligans. So I was surprised to learn that the EDL has not only a Jewish division, but a gay division. (Harvey Fierstein could be their president!) They expressly support Israel against Muslim terror and burn Nazi flags at their rallies.

Apparently it is considered "fascist" to oppose actual fascists immigrating to your country.

A few years ago, an opinion piece in The New York Times denounced the pro-gay positions of anti-immigration groups such as the EDL for "co-opting" gays. The co-opting is so thoroughgoing that the anti-immigration Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was himself gay. He was assassinated by a vegan animal rights activist upset at criticism of Muslims.

But surely members of the EDL oppose Britain's immigration policies out of ignorance?

It briefly seemed so. A month ago, the head of the EDL, Tommy Robinson, provoked a round of liberal sneering when he tweeted: "welcome to twitter homepage has a picture of a mosque. what a joke." Various media outlets leapt to point out that the photo was, actually, the Taj Mahal.

The liberal Guardian mocked: "It's worth pointing out that the 'mosque' that started this ... was in fact the Taj Mahal, the marble mausoleum in India. It's almost as if the very existence of the EDL is based on false information, suspicion and idiocy."

Except -- oops --– it wasn't the Taj Mahal. It was a mosque -- the Grand Mosque in Muscat, Oman, to be precise -- as The Guardian quietly admitted in an altered photo caption after stealthily removing the comment about the EDL's "idiocy" for imagining it was a mosque. It's almost as if the very existence of The Guardian is based on false information, suspicion and idiocy.

Britain, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Spain have recently enacted, or are considering enacting, further restrictions on immigration, alarming immigration enthusiasts. The New York Times reported this week that the "right-wing Swiss People's Party" is requesting a referendum on immigration.

Wait a second! A referendum doesn't sound fascist at all. In fact and to the contrary, it's always the advocates of unrestricted immigration who try to avoid letting the people vote. Marco Rubio and the rest of the pro-amnesty "Gang of Eight" don't even want the country to know they're about to vote on a mass immigration scheme.

Liberals say, "Basic human rights are not subject to a vote!" -- and then define "basic human rights" as "the right of people who don't live in your country to move there."

Manifestly, opponents of open immigration are not fascists, anti-Semitic, anti-gay, intolerant or idiots. But as long as we're on the subject, may we inquire into the tolerance and other Western values of the potential immigrants themselves?

Last week, U.S. law enforcement officials reported that Muslim immigrant Ibragim Todashev admitted that he and Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev had murdered three Jewish men in a Boston suburb on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack. (Which also, I believe, was the work of immigrants.) The victims' throats were cut from ear to ear, nearly decapitating them. One was Tamerlan's best friend.

Searching The New York Times' webpage for "English Defense League," turns up this multicultural story out of Saudi Arabia: "Online Campaign Draws Attention to Case of Saudi Father Accused of Rape and Torture." The father, Fayhan al-Ghamdi, a prominent Islamic cleric, served only a few months in a Saudi Arabian prison for allegedly raping, burning and fatally beating his own 5-year-old daughter.

It's not just Muslims who aren't warming to Western values. Polls by the Anti-Defamation League going back decades have shown a steady decline of anti-Semitism in the U.S. But a 2002 poll showed a surprising upsurge.

While 17 percent of all Americans were said to hold "strongly anti-Semitic" views, 35 percent of Hispanics did -- as did 44 percent of foreign-born Hispanics.

(Note to Sheldon Adelson: It may be time to give your Hispanic employees a raise.)

Liberals get a kick out of accusing their opponents of what they themselves are guilty of. But this may be the most audacious reverse-guilt play yet. For objecting to the importation of primitive, violent, child-rape-forgiving bigots, the opponents of mass immigration are accused of bigotry.