Tag: Los Angeles Times

Amusing

Weakness – Obama’s Choice Is Not To Choose On Iran

Obama votes Present on Iran!

Do it, President Obama, please. Take the side of democracy.

Declare yourself and your nation on the side of hope and change where it is more than a slogan and better than a rationalization for ever-bigger government. Stop measuring the success of your diplomacy with Iran by the degree to which the grinning, hate-filled stooge of a clerical junta will “temper” his rhetoric about the pressing need to destroy Israel and slow his ineluctable pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Instead, choose a higher standard. Look to history. Look to the aspirations of the students risking their lives and livelihoods to protest a sham election. Stop fawning over the mythological Muslim street only when it hates America, and look to the real Iranian street at the moment of its greatest need, when its heart may be open to loving America.

You often invoke President Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon to justify your domestic agenda. You and your supporters invite comparisons to Camelot. Well, what of John F. Kennedy’s most solemn vow? “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

No, we should not bomb Iran, or invade it. Those prices are too steep; those burdens are too heavy. But maybe you could lift a finger for democracy?

During the campaign you mocked those who belittled your rhetoric as “just words.” Well, what you’ve offered so far is less than just words. You’ve put a fresh coat of whitewash on Iran’s sham “democracy.” On Monday, you proclaimed yourself “troubled” by the events in Iran, before hinting that you’d negotiate with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad no matter what an investigation into his “landslide” victory found. Then there was your pre-election mumbling about “robust debate [that] hopefully will advance our ability to engage them in new ways.”

Of course, debate in Iran has been robust only if you are grading on a curve. Ahmadinejad’s main opponent, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was an accidental reform candidate. The mullahs had disqualified about 400 others, leaving in the race only four presumed hacks deemed to be pliant enough not to rock the boat. Mousavi’s popular support and the robustness of the debate he ignited were an unintended consequence of a rigged election, not the intention of a democratic regime. Going into the election, you chose to celebrate the process, to placate a theocratic politburo.

Reportedly, you are biding your time, waiting to see what happens, as if it is a great mystery. Your campaign lived and breathed YouTube. Check it now, check it often. You and your team promised “soft power” and “smart power.” Well, let’s see some of that. Because by not clearly picking a side, it appears you have chosen the wrong side.

Do you fear antagonizing the powers-that-be in Iran? That ship has sailed. Though I am sure they’re grateful for your eagerness not to roil the seas around them. Is it because you think “leader of the free world” is just another of those Cold War relics best mothballed in favor of a more cosmopolitan and universal awe at your own story?

“Enough about those people bleeding in the street. What do you think of me?” Is that how it is to be?

During the Bush years, what was best about liberalism had bled away. One of the worst things about the Republican Party has always been its Kissingerian realpolitik, the “it’s just business” approach to world affairs that amounted to a willful blindness to our ideals beyond our own borders. The Democratic Party may not have always gotten the policies right, but it had a firm grasp of the principle.

In the 1990s, liberals championed “nation building,” and conservatives chuckled at the naivete of it. Then came Iraq, and Republicans out of necessity embraced what liberals once believed out of conviction. The result? Liberals ran from their principles, found their inner Kissingers and embraced a cold realism whose chill emanated from the corpse of their ideals.

Labor unions, such as the AFL-CIO, once battled tyranny abroad on the grounds that workers everywhere need democracy. Today, the president turns a blind eye to the independent labor movement in Iran, and the unions and Democrats spend their time trying to figure out how to eliminate the secret ballot in the American workplace.

So far, “hope and change” has meant spending trillions we do not have on expanded government we do not need. Meanwhile, the huddled masses of Iranians yearning to breathe free think hope and change means something more. But the new American colossus stands all but silent, her beacon dimmed, her luster tarnished.

Please, Mr. President, prove me wrong.

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What a horribly weak response from the leader of the Free World.
Barack Obama is a disgrace.

Amusing

Democrats Wallow in a ‘Culture of Corruption’

How in the hell did this slip past the censors at the LA Times?

Some days you have to ask yourself, my God, what if these people were Republicans?

Democrats took back Congress in 2006 and the presidency in 2008 in no small part because of their ability to bang their spoons on their high chairs about what they called the Republican “culture of corruption.” Their choreographed outrage was coordinated with the precision of a North Korean missile launch pageant. And, to be fair, they had a point. The GOP did have its legitimate embarrassments. California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham and lobbyist Jack Abramoff were fair game, and so was Rep. Mark Foley, the twisted Florida congressman who allegedly wanted male congressional pages cleaned and perfumed and brought to his tent, as it were.

Of course, it wasn’t as if Democrats were without sin. Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson was indicted on fraud, bribery and corruption charges in 2007, after an investigation unearthed, among other things, $90,000 in his freezer. Then-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was busted in a prostitution scandal.

But that’s all yesterday’s news. Let’s look at the here and now. Barack Obama, who vowed he’d provide a transparent administration staffed with disinterested public servants with the self-restraint of Roman castrati, appointed an admitted tax cheat to run the Treasury Department — and he’s hardly the only one in the administration.

New York Rep. Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is under investigation for, among other things, failing to report income from his Caribbean villa. Meanwhile, Sen. Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, got sweetheart deals from subprime lender Countrywide and has yet to adequately explain his too-good-to-be-true deal on his million-dollar “cottage” in Ireland, which he may have gotten in exchange for finagling a pardon (from President Clinton) for a felon. Oh, Dodd also secretly protected those AIG bonuses that raised such a ruckus last month.

Rep. Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania, Nancy Pelosi’s moral authority on military matters during the Iraq war, has been revealed as a kleptomaniac of sorts, delivering as much of the federal budget as possible to various cronies and lobbyists.

John Edwards, who had an affair even as he was scoring Oprah-points as the supportive husband during his wife’s battle with breast cancer, is being investigated by the feds for the improper use of campaign funds. It looks like the silky haired champion of the little guys may have used their donations to bribe the alleged “baby mama” into silence.

And it would be a shame to let it pass that Obama’s Senate seat was put up for sale by the then-Democratic governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, and Illinois Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. is under investigation for trying to buy it.

But you know what? We ain’t seen nothing yet. For starters, the real corruption isn’t what the media are ignoring or downplaying as isolated incidents. It’s what the media are hailing as bold, inspirational leadership. The White House, as a matter of policy, is rewriting legal contracts, picking winners (mostly labor unions and mortgage defaulters) and singling out losers (evil “speculators”) while much of the media continue to ponder whether Obama is better than FDR.

If a Republican administration, staffed with cronies from Goldman Sachs and Citibank, was cutting special deals for its political allies, I suspect we’d be hearing fewer FDR analogies and more nouns ending with the suffix “gate.”

Take Obama’s “car czar,” Steven Rattner. According to ABC’s Jake Tapper, Rattner is accused of threatening to use the White House to smear a Chrysler creditor if it refused to back the administration’s bankruptcy plan. He’s also connected to a massive pension fund scandal involving the investment firm he used to run. One allegation is that conspirators used investments in the low-budget movie “Chooch” to expedite their alleged chicanery. Chooch, by the way, is Italian slang for “jackass,” which just happens to be the Democrats’ mascot.

More to the point, political corruption is inevitable whenever you give hacks — of either party — too much discretion over public funds. Businesses look to Washington for profits instead of to the market. The thing is, this has become the governing philosophy of the Democratic Party, from banking and cars to healthcare and now student loans. The federal government is taking over, and the culture of corruption inevitably trickles down. That in itself should be a scandal. Call it “Choochgate.”

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