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[23 NOV 11] Holman Jenkins: If Only Obama Had Been This Guy Give Obama credit for one world-historical achievement: He makes Jimmy Carter look good. |
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[13 OCT 11] Krauthammer: Obama's Scapegoat Strategy "What do you do if you can't run on your record—on 9 percent unemployment, stagnant growth and ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see? How to run when you are asked whether Americans are better off than they were four years ago and you are compelled to answer no? "Play the outsider. Declare yourself the underdog. Denounce Washington as if the electorate hasn't noticed that you've been in charge of it for nearly three years. But above all: Find villains." |
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[11 OCT 11] VDH: When the Zealots Are No Longer Zealous "In reading about Democratic and liberal uneasiness with Obama, one theme seems constant. There is a sort of repressed anger that Obama has somehow embarrassed many of his supporters, as if their ecstasy of 2008 now seems almost adolescent." |
| [3 OCT 11] VDH: The Coming Post-Obama Renaissance |
| [1 OCT 11] The Obama Presidency by the Numbers |
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[18 SEP 11] George Will, speaking on ABC's This Week: "He went to Massachusetts to campaign against Scott Brown; Brown is now a senator. He went to New Jersey to campaign against Chris Christie, who's now governor. He went to Virginia to campaign against Bob McDonnell, who's now governor. He campaigned for the health-care plan extensively, it became less popular. He campaigned in 2010 for the Democrats, they were shellacked. He began, in a sense, his presidency flying to Copenhagen to get Chicago the Olympics; Chicago was the first city eliminated. There is no evidence that the man has the rhetorical powers that he is relying on." |
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[17 SEP 11] Rex Murphy: The media's love affair with a disastrous president "Much of the Obama [2008 campaign] coverage was orchestrated sychophancy. They glided past his pretensions. ... The media walked right past the decades-long association of Obama with the weird and racist pastor Jeremiah Wright. ... Every doubt they hid from themselves about Obama, every potential embarrassment they tucked under the blanket of their superior sensibilities. ... As a result, the press gave the great American republic an untried, unknown and, it is becoming more and more frighteningly clear, incompetent figure as President." |
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[11 SEP 11] Robert Tracinski: Obama: The Obsolete 'Post Office President' "The pace of commercial and technological innovation is not news. It is a daily reality we take for granted. But the story underneath it is what politicians like Barack Obama refuse to acknowledge, and it is what makes all of their fake jobs programs and 'infrastructure banks' so futile and destructive. When geniuses like Barack Obama decide to use the power of government to impose their ideas and grow only the kinds of enterprises they favor, the result is not brisk innovation but the dead hand of static ideas. That is the lesson of the government's failed experiment with solar panel maker Solyndra, which President Obama touted last year as the wave of the future, and whose technology was rendered obsolete before they even finished building their gleaming new factory backed by $600 million in federal loan guarantees. And it's not just Solyndra. The whole solar and 'alternative' energy sector is crashing. These companies were not profitable and have not become profitable. The moment government subsidies and loan guarantees evaporate, so do they. So much for Obama's career as a high-tech venture capitalist. Too bad the money he's risking is ours." |
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[8 SEP 11] White House Video Praising Solyndra as Recovery Act Success Story Posted on the White House blog May 26, 2010, just six months before Solyndra almost went bankrupt and was bailed out by a White House campaign bundler. In September 2011, the company went bankrupt anyway, triggering thousands of layoffs and costing hundreds of millions in wasted taxpayer dollars. |
| [17 JUL 11] Welcome Back: Jimmy O'Bama |
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[3 JUN 11] Nile Gardiner: "the American superpower is heading towards the economic abyss" "After 29 months of the most left-wing presidency in US history, profligate spending, massive bailouts and useless stimulus measures have made America poorer, not richer, and threaten the long-term economic foundations of this great country. President Obama's big government experiment has been a dangerous failure, only further proof that the deadening hand of federal intervention is the last thing America needs at this time. The United States needs more economic freedom, less government regulation and spending, and lower taxes if it is to create jobs, wealth and prosperity, a message that seems to have been lost on the Obama presidency as it drives the United States towards the financial abyss." |
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[28 MAY 11] Barone: "Unexpectedly!"—Pro-Obama media always shocked by bad economic news "Any comparison of economic coverage in the Bush years and the coverage now would show far fewer variants of the word 'unexpectedly' in stories suggesting economic doldrums." |
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[27 MAY 11] The Virginian: I hope the Democrats run Obama in 2012 "I hope the Democrats don't have any second thoughts about running Obama for re-election. Let him run on his record." |
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[27 MAY 11] Stephen Green: The Obama Dilemma "President Obama has a problem. No, not the economy, although that surely isn't doing his popularity any favors right now. When a President loses control of Congress midstream, typically he turns to foreign policy—where the President's import can't be understated—to gin up his numbers. Let's take a look around the world and see how that's going for Obama, shall we?" |
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[27 MAY 11] The Virginian: I hope the Democrats run Obama in 2012 "I hope the Democrats don't have any second thoughts about running Obama for re-election. Let him run on his record." |
| [11 MAY 11] Who's the Idiot? Obama or Us? |
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[24 APR 11] Non-Self-Distancing Obamacon Declares "Out of [The] One, Many" David Brooks: "[Obama] is multiple animals. You know, I would say we're all - we all have multiple personalities. My psychobabble description of him is he's a very complicated person who has many different selves, all of them authentic, but they come out in different contexts. And he is — has always has the ability to look at other parts of himself from a distance, and so it means he has great power to self-correct and I think it gives him power to see himself. It means that he rarely is all in. "You know, President Bush didn't have as much - many multiple selves, so when he made a decision he was all in, he was just going to be there. But as I think President Obama is much more cautious, because he's a man of many pieces and many parts and not all of which I understand or I think anybody understands. But it may — it leads to that caution that we see time and time again and almost a self-distancing I see." |
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[23 APR 11] Jonah Goldberg: The Unhappy President "The list of people I feel sorry for is long. It includes not just the people I know personally who are suffering from misfortune, but the billions around the world having a rough time: Japanese earthquake victims, targets of ethnic cleansing, etc. Then there's the supplemental list, such as the guy in the middle seat on a long flight. But one guy who doesn't make the list is Barack Obama. And yet the president seems eager for people to know he feels aggrieved." |
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[20 APR 11] Scott Johnson: Obama As Political Historian "Obama's historical ignorance could be a full time beat for somebody who does this work for a living, and it tells us something truly important about Barack Obama. His ignorance is as broad as it is deep." |
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[28 MAR 11] Libya vs. Iraq "Bush was a stupid frat boy and a baby-killer. Obama is awsum! His bracket picks were outstanding, too." |
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[27 MAR 11] VDH: President Obama's Ten Libyan Paradoxes "In the Arab Middle East constitutional government works mostly 1) in Israel; or 2) when the U.S. (e.g., in Germany, Italy, Japan) removes a tyrant, destroys his government, occupies the country, writes the Constitution, and puts tens of thousands of troops on the ground to rebuild the society and shoot those who would hijack the reform--as in Iraq. Oddly, these are the two countries Obama has most criticized." |
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[19 MAR 11] Steyn: The Audacity of Golf "By the time you read this, President Obama will be taking a well-deserved break from the 54th hole of today's scheduled golf game and the grueling responsibility of picking out his Final Four priority high-speed-rail projects on ESPN by relaxing on a beach in . . . Libya? Japan? No, Brazil." |
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[04 MAR 11] Krauthammer: From Baghdad to Benghazi "Now that revolutions are sweeping the Middle East and everyone is a convert to George W. Bush's freedom agenda, it's not just Iraq that has slid into the memory hole. Also forgotten is the once proudly proclaimed 'realism' of Years One and Two of President Obama's foreign policy - the 'smart power' antidote to Bush's alleged misty-eyed idealism." |
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[25 FEB 11] Kyle-Anne Shiver: State Budget Battles Herald the Return of the Grown-Ups "Now that Obama's Clintonian triangulation has lasted for a nanosecond, the real adolescent Barack has once again emerged in full public view. Following a back-against-the-wall compromise on tax rates and a somewhat-presidential speech in Tucson, our out-of-control teen in the White House produced another dream-scheme budget and tried to pass it off as 'investments' for 'winning the future.'" |
| [7 JAN-24 FEB 11] MOTS ... nothing changed. |
| [6 JAN 11] We Need A Fashion "Reset" Button |
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[6 JAN 11] VDH: The New Sophists "The public might have better believed the deficit nostrums of [Obama's] former budget director Peter Orzag had he not retired after less than two years on the job to position himself for a multimillion-dollar billet at Citigroup—itself a recent recipient of some $25 billion in government bailout funds." |
| [6 DEC 10] Gallup: Bush job approval rating higher than Obama's |
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[4 DEC 10] Glenn Reynolds: "The Nigel Tufnel presidency" "Tufnel was the fictitious heavy metal guitarist in This Is Spinal Tap. In a classic scene, he displays his guitar collection and a special amplifier that—unlike all other amplifiers in existence—has knobs that go all the way up to 11, instead of just 10. That's what Obama has done: In his first two years as president, he's taken us to 11 in so many ways." |
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[22 NOV 10] James W. Ceaser: The Great Repudiation "If November 2010 represents the future in American politics, it is not the one progressives expected." |
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[15 NOV 10] Timothy Dalrymple: The Wages of Spin "The problem is not that Obama has not been selling. He has never stopped selling. The problem is that the American people aren't buying it-- because they are not buying him. The American people are not foolish; the problem is not with the sales pitch. The problem is, in part, the product. As Obama himself once said, a pig with lipstick is still a pig. But the deeper problem is that so many American people no longer find the salesman credible." |
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[28 OCT 10] Malcolm: Obama's got his midterm mantra down, so why isn't anybody listening? "There can't be more than two or three breathing Americans who haven't heard Obama's economy storyline several times by now: You know, about the eight years of failed you-know-whats by you-know-who, about the huge hole Obama inherited after spending $750 million of other people's money to buy responsibility for the presidency and how the national ship isn't sinking as fast as it was 22 months ago. Never mind all those new 0's on the national debt. And the still missing Recovery Summer. And Guantanamo. And DADT. And who crashed the national car into the ditch? And who wants the keys now? And who has to get in the back seat? And something about a Slurpee, moving forward?" |
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[3 OCT 10] Selena Zito: Connected by Disconnect "Americans voted for change in 2008 in record numbers. What they got was no different from the guy they voted against in 2004. Obama is no less out of touch than John Kerry, whom America watched windsurf before the 2004 election." |
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[30 SEP 10] Michael Wolff: What Do We Do With Barack Obama? "People are edging away from him. It's buyer's remorse with recrimination—self-recrimination. How did everybody get it so wrong is a question many people seem to be asking themselves—not least of all these people slinking out of the White House. It is not just that he has turned out to be something different. In fact, reasonably, he isn't that different. The more powerful sense of remorse or at least sheepishness may come from people now asking themselves how and why they came to think of him as different than he was. More confounding, they may not really now be able to remember just who exactly they thought he was. Some mass misperception put Barack Obama in the White House and now nobody knows what to do with him." |
| [25 AUG 10] Stossel: Where Are the New Jobs? |
| [17 AUG 10] (WSJ) A Tea Party Manifesto: "The tea party movement is not seeking a junior partnership with the Republican Party, but a hostile takeover of it." |
| [11 AUG 10] Fouad Ajami: The Obsolescence of Barack Obama: The magic of 2008 can't be recreated, and good riddance to it |
| [5 AUG 10] Ed Morrissey: ObamaCare: The sum of all fears |
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[13 JUL 10] John Dickerson/Slate: Death of a Salesman: Obama is not a great pitchman for his policies "Candidate Obama used to joke about rays of sunshine coming in when he started to speak. Now he brings the clouds. He's spent a great deal of time talking about the Recovery Act and health care reform, but the political fortunes of those programs are dismal, which suggests his ability to persuade and change minds is seriously damaged." |
| [22 JUN 10] Ed Driscoll: All The President's Rubes |
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[15 APR 10] Lileks: No Taxation Without Satirization "We won't see a Value Added Tax soon, but progressives have patience. Ideally, they would like America to be as much like Europe as possible before continental drift brings the continents together, but if there are still some details to clear up as the land masses come within hailing distance, fine." |
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[4 APR 10] Reynolds: Progressives can't get past the Knowledge Problem "In his 'The Use of Knowledge In Society,' Friedrich Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants and needs exists in no single place in any economy. The economy is simply too large and complicated for such information to be gathered together. Any economic planner who attempts to do so will wind up hopelessly uninformed and behind the times, reacting to economic changes in a clumsy, too-late fashion and then being forced to react again to fix the problems that the previous mistakes created, leading to new problems, and so on." |
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[27 MAR 10] Gutfeld: Anger Is A Right We are angry not because we lost, but that we lost to losers. I'm not talking about Obama or the Dems. They're winners, sadly. I'm talking about progressivism. The reason why I'm angry and my friends are angry is because the greatest, most winningest country in the history of the world just embraced the loser's doctrine. |
| [5 FEB 10] Krauthammer: The Great Peasant Revolt of 2010 |
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[13 DEC 09] Steyn channels Obama:
"There are those who say there is no evil in the world. There are others who argue that pink fluffy bunnies are the spawn of Satan and conspiring to overthrow civilization. Let me be clear: I believe people of goodwill on all sides can find common ground between the absurdly implausible caricatures I attribute to them on a daily basis. We must begin by finding the courage to acknowledge the hard truth that I am living testimony to the power of nuance to triumph over hard truth and come to the end of the sentence on a note of sonorous, polysyllabic if somewhat hollow uplift." |
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[10 DEC 09] VDH: Why Are We Tiring of Obama? A litany of mistakes and malapropisms; negligence, naivete, and narcissism; ignorance and idiocy |
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[4 DEC 09] Tina Brown: Obama's Fog of War "The real reason this gifted communicator has become so bad at communicating is that he doesn't really believe a word he is saying." |
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[30 NOV 09] Fouad Ajami: The Arabs Have Stopped Applauding Obama A Saudi academic in Jeddah, previously "smitten with" POTUS44: "He talks too much." Hope & Change! |
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[21 NOV 09] The Miracle of ObamaCare Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV): "Today we vote whether to even discuss one of the greatest issues of our generation - indeed, one of the greatest issues this body has ever face [sic]: whether this nation will finally guarantee its people the right to live free from the fear of illness and death, which can be prevented by decent health care for all." |
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[10 NOV 09] VDH & Robert Baer: Chaosistan, a 50/50 chance by March 2009 moderator Peter Robinson: "a cheerless note on which to end" |
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[9 NOV 09] Paul Rahe: Obama's Gestures "This president has ample time to do damage to [America], a country that, there is reason to suspect, he deeply hates." [10 Nov 09] Postscript 1. Postscript 2. |
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[8 NOV 09] Cassandra at Villainous Company: Obama doesn't give a rat's ass about the Military he commands "Life is full of mysteries, but chief among them in this Marine wife's mind at the moment is, 'Just how stupid does this White House think we are?' If the events of the past few months have shown us anything, it's that Barack Obama has little enthusiasm for - nor interest in - one of the most important duties of an American President: his role as Commander in Chief of the nation's armed forces." |
| [7 NOV 09] Toby Harnden: Americans "wistful for Bush"? The "Bloodless Obama" |
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[19 OCT 09] Krauthammer: Decline is a Choice: The End of American Ascendancy "Renunciation of primacy abroad provides the added resources for more social goods at home. To put it in the language of the 1990s, the [current] expanded domestic agenda is fed by a peace dividend—except that in the absence of peace, it is a retreat dividend. And there's the rub. For the Europeans there really is a peace dividend, because we provide the peace. They can afford social democracy without the capacity to defend themselves because they can always depend on the United States. So why not us as well? Because what for Europe is decadence—decline, in both comfort and relative safety—is for us mere denial. Europe can eat, drink, and be merry for America protects her. But for America it's different. If we choose the life of ease, who stands guard for us?" |
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[8 OCT 09] Do the Watusi: Art, imitation, and the Obamas Comment: "Obama also owns a painting called Canines Playing Canasta" [5 Nov 09] Update: Never mind. "It didn't fit the space right." |
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[30 Sep 09] Obama's Wrecking Crew Paul Rahe: "At some point, if these [economic advisors] have any self-respect, they will have to separate themselves from the current administration." |
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[9 SEP 09] Obama bloviates to a joint session of congress John Hinderaker: "This was not, to put it kindly, a speech that was directed at thinking people." |
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[7 SEP 09] "When I'm president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely" — Obama, 9/26/2008 |
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[12 AUG 09] Surgeons dissect Obama: "Uninformed, ill-informed, incorrect, alarming, dangerous, and wrong" Whole Foods offers a tangy recipe for health care Priorities: No American Should Have to Choose Between Health Insurance and Getting Drunk |
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[7 AUG 09] Opposing "health insurance reform" with Brooks Brothers suits and swastikas Jonah Goldberg: "The world's most famous community organizer is whining about community organizing" Picky, picky: No Treats From Obama |
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[5 AUG 09] Know Your Town Hall Mob Agitators! Well-dressed! Desperate! Heartless! Health-hating! Plutocratic! Fishy! bonus: NYT Nobel-winning economist proves the popularity of Canadian healthcare |
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[30 JUL 09] Joe Biden Said That: a gaffe clearinghouse Dan Quayle was derided as an "idiot" because he misspelled "potato." Anything else? |
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[19 JUL 09] "We know that you are a great civilization, and your accomplishments have earned the respect of the United States and the world." — President Obama, March 20, 2009 Videotaped remarks to the Islamic Republic of Iran in Celebration of Nowruz |
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[9 JUL 09] Tigerhawk: The thirty-five percent solution |
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[27 JUN 09] "Universal coverage": We're from the government and we're here to help! |
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[10 JUN 09] The $787 Billion Mistake "schlock economics" |
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[7 JUN 09] The Grand Unification Theory of Sucking Our economy as managed by Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Howard |
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[26 MAY 09] TOUGH TALK! The US is "prepared to use adverbs" if necessary |
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[25 MAY 09] "Trust me: I'm lying!" |
| [21 MAY 09] Cheneyku |
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[16 MAY 09] Transcript of BHO's WHCD speech from an alternate universe in which he makes fun of himself instead of taking thinly veiled shots at his detractors |
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[12 APR 09] Obama's Teleprompter's Blog Reflections from the Hard Drive of the Machine that Enables the Voice of the Leader of the Free World |
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[10 APR 09] Bad Paintings of Barack Obama NOTE: Proprietor periodically experiences bouts of remorse and takes site offline. My guess is he really admires BHO, but resents that people who don't continually link to his site. |
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Victor Davis Hanson [12 APR 09] President of the World: Adulation and admiration--then hell to pay [14 May 09] Cracks in the Facade |
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[4 APR 09] Obama's military procurement upgrades President Girlyman's strategy to remake US defense |
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[3 APR 09] World's Greatest Orator Does anybody understand what this guy is talking about? |
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[3 APR 09] Is this a set-up? If so, what's the punchline? |
| [6 MAR 09] Meltdown |
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[27 FEB 09] Commandante Obama |
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[21 JAN 09] Building a Religion |
| Merch for the Age of the New Messiah |
updated: 23 November 2011
launched: 21 January 2009