Robert Samuelson:

“What we need from the next president is somebody who will not just tell you what they think you want to hear but will tell you what you need to hear.”

– Barack Obama, Feb. 27, 2008

One job of presidents is to educate Americans about crucial national problems. On health care, Barack Obama has failed. Almost everything you think you know about health care is probably wrong or, at least, half wrong. Great simplicities and distortions have been peddled in the name of achieving “universal health coverage.” The miseducation has worsened as the debate approaches its climax.

There’s a parallel here: housing. Most Americans favor homeownership, but uncritical pro-homeownership policies (lax lending standards, puny down payments, hefty housing subsidies) helped cause the financial crisis. The same thing is happening with health care. The appeal of universal insurance — who, by the way, wants to be uninsured? — justifies half-truths and dubious policies. That the process is repeating itself suggests that our political leaders don’t learn even from proximate calamities.

How often, for example, have you heard the emergency-room argument? The uninsured, it’s said, use emergency rooms for primary care. That’s expensive and ineffective. Once they’re insured, they’ll have regular doctors. Care will improve; costs will decline. Everyone wins. Great argument. Unfortunately, it’s untrue.

A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that the insured accounted for 83 percent of emergency-room visits, reflecting their share of the population. After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, emergency-room use remained higher than the national average, an Urban Institute study found. More than two-fifths of visits represented non-emergencies. Of those, a majority of adult respondents to a survey said it was “more convenient” to go to the emergency room or they couldn’t “get [a doctor's] appointment as soon as needed.” If universal coverage makes appointments harder to get, emergency-room use may increase.

You probably think that insuring the uninsured will dramatically improve the nation’s health. The uninsured don’t get care or don’t get it soon enough. With insurance, they won’t be shortchanged; they’ll be healthier. Simple.

Think again. I’ve written before that expanding health insurance would result, at best, in modest health gains. Studies of insurance’s effects on health are hard to perform. Some find benefits; others don’t. Medicare’s introduction in 1966 produced no reduction in mortality; some studies of extensions of Medicaid for children didn’t find gains. In the Atlantic recently, economics writer Megan McArdle examined the literature and emerged skeptical. Claims that the uninsured suffer tens of thousands of premature deaths are “open to question.” Conceivably, the “lack of health insurance has no more impact on your health than lack of flood insurance,” she writes.

How could this be? No one knows, but possible explanations include: (a) many uninsured are fairly healthy — about two-fifths are age 18 to 34; (b) some are too sick to be helped or have problems rooted in personal behaviors — smoking, diet, drinking or drug abuse; and (c) the uninsured already receive 50 to 70 percent of the care of the insured from hospitals, clinics and doctors, estimates the Congressional Budget Office.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Some have remarked at the unusually harsh rhetoric accorded to the Israelis over the Jerusalem issue, especially the assumed American loss of face. Perhaps. But this administration has been embarrassed quite a lot, whether Putin’s snub of the missiles-for-Iran-help deal, the pathetic outreach video et al. to the obnoxious Ahmadinejad, Chavez’s various antics, and the more subtle Chinese putdowns.

In each of these cases, American outrage seemed muted in comparison to what was accorded the Israelis—after all, a democracy thinking of building houses in Jerusalem is not quite like autocracies annexing Tibet, absorbing parts of Ossetia, sending agents into Columbia, or building a nuke on the sly. Instead, the American pique I think is intended to signal a rather sizable change in our foreign policy. Whereas in the past we argued with the Israelis privately, and put pressure on them through diplomatic channels, now we have joined the chorus of its public critics. And when the United States echoes the popular chorus of Europe, or even mimics the invective of the Arab world, there simply is no other power around to stop what will soon become a piling-on party.

The message is out—say or do what you please about Israel, and it will more likely now resonate with the U.S. I wish this administration had at least said something as curt to the Syrians or Iranians for their past support for chronic infiltrations across their borders into Iraq to kill American soldiers, rather than pondering whether to build apartment buildings in Jerusalem endangers American soldiers. Whether Israel and the Palestinians, or the British again in the Falklands, or the Columbians, or the Hondurans, or the Poles and Czechs, there is no particular advantage in being a pro-American democratic ally; attention and outreach instead come from being our antithesis.

Roger Simon asks Is the Jewish Love Affair with the Democratic Party about to End?

For all of my looooong life, the Jews have been so deep in the pocket of the Democratic Party it would make Chris Matthews blush. Maybe… just maybe… (I know old habits die hard)…. thanks to Barack Obama, that is about to end. The well-put lede from this morning’s WSJ opinion piece details the situation:

In recent weeks, the Obama Administration has endorsed “healthy relations” between Iran and Syria, mildly rebuked Syrian President Bashar Assad for accusing the U.S. of “colonialism,” and publicly apologized to Moammar Gadhafi for treating him with less than appropriate deference after the Libyan called for “a jihad” against Switzerland.

When it comes to Israel, however, the Administration has no trouble rising to a high pitch of public indignation. On a visit to Israel last week, Vice President Joe Biden condemned an announcement by a mid-level Israeli official that the government had approved a planning stage—the fourth out of seven required—for the construction of 1,600 housing units in north Jerusalem. Assuming final approval, no ground will be broken on the project for at least three years.

The Obama administration has taken the admonition to “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer” to a new level. They want to make love with their enemies while taking their friends to the woodshed and beating the living daylights out of them. And take them they did, time after time. First Biden, then Hillary, then some semi anonymous character at the State Department dressing down Ambassador Oren (talk about disrespecting your betters!), then on to the talk show circuit with the droning Gibbs and Obama’s “best Jew” David Axlerod. His other “best Jew” Rahm Emanuel was nowhere in evidence, as far as I know. (Interesting, that).

But back to my lede. Is the Jewish love affair with the Democratic Party about to end? I know many will be skeptical. And they should be. But I suspect something is brewing. This kind of excessive and weirdly paternalistic attitude to the state of Israel, directed so clearly from the top, seems to come out of a kind of unexamined personal animus. The long record that Obama has of friendship with virulent enemies of Israel has not gone unnoticed.

Randall Hoven in American Thinker

“Mr. President, I’ll try to be brief.  There’s a lot to talk about.  I’d like to focus it though on the deficit, impact on the deficit, which we’re all talking about.  And I must tell you, maybe I’ve been around too long, but I am always reluctant, after being here 37 years, to tell people what the American people think.  I think it requires a little bit of humility to be able to know what the American people think.  But — and I don’t, I can’t swear I do.  I know what I think, I think I know what they think, but I’m not sure what they think.”  Vice President Joe Biden (winner of the Biden-Palin debate of 2008), Feburary 25, 2010.

President Cocky demonstrates his gracious bipartisanship.

Senator Foolish exposes himself.

Does he think old people should pay the same life insurance premiums as young people? Is that segregation?

Then there was this exchange.

Obama: I just want to focus on Medicare Advantage, because I haven’t seen an independent analyst look at this and say seniors are healthier for it, or taxpayers are better off for it. That’s what we’re talking about reforming. We’re not talking about cutting benefits under the Medicare program as is required under law. What we’re talking about is Medicare Advantage. And you know, it may be that some people here think that it’s working. I know that there’s some Republicans who are sitting at this table who don’t think it’s working. You can argue and say okay, let’s not do Medicare Advantage, and let’s not close the donut hole, for example. Or, you know, there may be other ways you want to spend that money. But I just want to establish whether we’ve got some agreement that the Medicare Advantage program, which is what we are proposing to reform, is actually not a good deal to taxpayers or for seniors, and certainly not a good deal for the 80% of seniors who aren’t in Medicare Advantage, because by the way, they’re paying an extra premium of about $90 bucks a year to subsidize the 20% who are in Medicare Advantage.

John McCain: I’ll just make one comment. Why in the world, then, would we carve out 800,000 people in Florida that would not be, have their Medicare Advantage cut? Now I proposed an amendment on the floor to say everybody would be treated the same. Now Mr. President, why should we carve out 800,000 people because they live in Florida to keep their Medicare Advantage program, and then want to do away with it?

Obama: I think you make a legitimate point.

Oh, where to begin? First, mister bow-tie Harvard man doesn’t even know how to pronounce Steve Jobs’s surname. Nor does he know that, far from needing handy brochures to explain those scary computers to a nation of computer-phobic dolts, the personal computer took off the instant that it became useful. For number crunchers, that was the moment VisiCalc went on sale.

The arrogance (and ignorance) of this man and Valerie Jarrett — who speaks for Obama — is galling, astonishing and amusing.

As for the tea party people, I saw clips of ordinary citizens at last summer’s townhall meetings who had read the House bill and could quote from it. How many of the Dem Cong who voted for it could say the same?

Ann Althouse:

… a NYT article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg that’s mostly about Barack Obama’s lack of skill in getting members of Congress to do what he wants. It begins with a description of a January 15th meeting in the White House, in which Obama was “playing ‘marriage counselor’” with various members of Congress. Supposedly, “he coaxed, cajoled and prodded them,” but in the end people, including Obama, were frustrated and angry. Stolberg then analyzes Obama’s ability:

Ever since his days as a young community organizer in Chicago, Mr. Obama has held fast to the belief that by listening carefully and appealing to reason he can bring people together to get results, an approach that in Washington has often come up short.

He’s dealing with members of Congress, not local Chicago people. Why would his listen-and-reason approach translate easily to this new environment? Maybe he should have taken a little time to work in the Senate and get to know its ways and its characters before deciding he was ready to be President.

Mr. Obama has not been the sort to bludgeon his party into following his lead or to intimidate reluctant legislators. And while he has often succeeded by relying on Democratic leaders in Congress to do his bidding — the House and Senate, after all, both passed versions of the health legislation last year — it is not clear whether his gentle, consensus-building style will be enough.

Stolberg tries to burnish the Obama image, but read between the lines: The point there is that he hasn’t led. Stolberg quotes Representative Louise M. Slaughter, a New York Democrat: “If you are asking me if he dominates the room, I would have to say no.”

But his defenders and some historians say that perhaps more than any modern president since Lyndon B. Johnson, Mr. Obama has been aggressive in trying to work his will with Congress. During his 13-month-old presidency, he has had countless one-on-one meetings with lawmakers — a technique that some scholars and strategists say evokes memories of Johnson…

But he’s not much like Johnson. Johnson was quite a different sort of character, but he’d developed his skills by operating in the Senate for 12 years.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Is there any logic in the confusion of the Obama administration’s actions and statements on fighting the war on terror?

On the one hand, we had a two-year campaign (2007–08) of damning the Bush protocols, from renditions and military tribunals to Guantanamo and Predator strikes. Then, the Obama administration unleashed Eric Holder and John Brennan, who in highly partisan fashion attacked the anti-terrorism policies implemented from 2001–08 and reflected the themes voiced by Obama himself in his Al-Arabiya interview and Cairo speech, many of which were reified by the Mirandizing of the Christmas Day bomber and the announced civilian trial of KSM in New York.

But all that said, Obama never shut down Guantanamo; has not tried KSM in New York; has kept the wiretaps, intercepts, renditions, and tribunals he once castigated; has escalated the war in Afghanistan; and has kept the status-of-forces agreements that Bush negotiated with the Iraqis — and Joe Biden now claims that Bush’s Iraq agreements were Obama’s greatest success!

Most importantly, Obama has vastly increased the Predator assassination missions along the Afghan-Pakistani border. If one were to sort out the politics of all this, one would conclude that Obama’s cynical strategy looked something like this:

1) Run against Bush as the candidate of the Democratic party’s hard-Left, anti-war, pro-ACLU base.

2) When elected, pacify that same base with soaring multicultural-outreach rhetoric of the Cairo sort and grand gestures, such as promising to close Guantanamo, investigate former CIA interrogators, appoint a Muslim-American liaison to the Islamic world, and end waterboarding.

3) Meanwhile, up the fighting in Afghanistan and the Predator assassination missions to prevent another 9/11-style attack.

Bottom line?

a) Obama really does (privately) believe that radical Islamists wish to kill us, and apparently has decided the only effective means of combating them is to copy the Bush strategy but drop the “smoke ‘em out” rhetoric and substitute hope-and-change therapeutic banalities as we blow up suspected killers. The more conservatives rail about the KSM trial, the more Obama gains trust with the Left, and the more he can keep quietly killing suspected terrorists in Waziristan. (Dead men need no Miranda rights.)

b) So at home, Obama’s calculation is even more cynical: He assumes that left-wing hatred of Bush’s war on terror was never principled, but was always about partisan politics, and that left-wingers were far “angrier” about Bush’s waterboarding of three admitted terrorists than they ever will be about Obama’s assassinating suspected terrorists along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

c) Conservatives are then supposedly put in a bind: They may be angry that Obama demagogued the issue for two years as a candidate, and they may be upset that he so brazenly reversed course and emulated what he had demonized, and they may be mad about the hypocrisy of the hard Left — but they are also relieved that Obama is fighting terror and killing terrorists, and might even be impressed that he is doing so as a Nobel Peace laureate immune from the criticism that nearly destroyed Bush, and as someone who quietly executes suspected terrorists by remote control but worries publicly about confessed detainees in Bush’s gulag.

I think that sums up the present Obama policy, which is far more cynical than confusing. I have no idea whether it is sustainable.

Legal Insurrection:

…Among the variety of analyses upon which I base what I am about to say are some decidedly from the left, Wonk Room and Firedoglake, as well as CATO, ATR and the NY Times.

Put aside all the other criticisms, one thing becomes clear: The plan does nothing to control health care costs, and everything to increase those costs.

There are no market mechanisms to encourage consumers to price shop or to introduce price competition into the health care industry.

To the contrary, the plan continues the trend towards divorcing consumers from price decisions as to services and products; there also is no incentive to decrease demand because a large percentage of the population will receive government subsidies.

Yet because of the new insurance price control mechanism, the private insurance system will not be allowed to recoup the costs of such coverage.

This is a balloon which must burst, and it will several years down the road.

The result of the burst will be a collapse of the private insurance sector, and a government unable to pick up the pieces without severely rationed care (even if coverage remains expansive in theory, the care will not be available).

Obama’s plan (and so too the House and Senate versions) is the worst of all worlds. It is a replica of the housing bubble, thrill for the first few years, and then the bill becomes due without any way to pay for it.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Those who accuse former Bush administration officials of criminality for having supported enhanced interrogation techniques are nearly silent about the ongoing and vastly increased targeted assassinations ordered by the Obama administration, and I for one am confused by this standard of attack.

If a suspected jihadist on the Afghan Pakistan border were to be asked his choice, he might very well prefer to be apprehended, transported to Guantanamo, and harshly interrogated rather than blown to bits along with any family and friends who happen to be in his vicinity.

To make things simpler, water-boarding the confessed architect of the murder of 3,000 innocents, on a moral scale, seems less atrocious than executing suspected terrorists, as we are now doing. Since the easy denunciations of criminality are moral rather than legal — no one has actually convicted a John Yoo or a Dick Cheney of anything — surely we should hear something about these capital sentences handed down from the sky on those who, quite unlike KSM, are suspected, rather than confessed, killers.

This is not a question of either advocating the use of water-boarding or criticizing the Obama administration for its judge-jury-and-executioner Predator attacks against probably dangerous terrorists. It is simply a matter of curiosity about why in the former case there is loud moral outrage but in the latter, far harsher instance, relative silence.

Since we have transformed this War on Terror into a criminal-justice matter rather than a traditional conflict in which uniformed combat soldiers are pitted against non-uninformed combat soldiers on a global battlefield, it is not persuasive to say that in one case non-uniformed suspects are in our custody while, in the other, they are only in our cross-hairs. It is time critics made the case that targeted assassinations fall within the legitimate bounds of a war in which we are properly engaged, while the water-boarding of three confessed terrorists was morally unacceptable torture of no utility and contrary to any of our own past protocols concerning apprehended and non-uniformed belligerents. Otherwise, their exercise in moral outrage is blatantly selective and reduced to a partisan belief that the evil Bush and Cheney are guilty of crimes, while the contemplative Obama is simply struggling with a moral crux.

Mickey Kaus

Unions vs. stimulation: The home “weatherization” jobs in the stimulus bill were subjected to Davis-Bacon wage regulations–a favorite of the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department–under which federal Labor Department officials establish “prevailing wage” rates that must be paid. Why do unions like this system? Because the ”prevailing wages” are determined in a way that guarantees they are usually more than the actual market wage, sometimes by large margins.  All that finagling takes a certain amount of bureaucracy, however–and time. ABC’s Jonathan Karl:

According to the GAO report, the Department of Labor spent most of last year trying to determine the prevailing wage is for weatherization work, a determination that had to be made for each of the more than 3,000 counties in the United States. [E.A.]

As a result, the Department of Energy apparently weatherized only 22,000 homes under the program. Another pre-existing program, which doesn’t have to comply with Davis-Bacon, appears to have weatherized about 100,000 homes, if my math is right.

That’s OK. It’s not as if speed was important last year in terms of putting people to work. … Oh wait, it was. [Insert now-embarrassing Obama quote here]

“If you allocate money to weatherize homes, the homeowner gets the benefit of lower energy bills. You right away put people back to work, many of whom in the construction industry and in the housing industry are out of work right now. They are immediately put to work doing something,” [E.A.]

Instead, a year was wasted on mindless, union-demanded bureaucratic attempts to disingenuously replicate the labor market. Did Obama not know this would happen when he allowed the stimulus to be Davis-Baconized, or did he not care? [Update--Choice #3: He knows and cares, but is too weak to stand up to the unions.]

Charles Krauthammer:

In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president’s own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable.

Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared.

The tyranny of entitlements? Reagan collaborated with Tip O’Neill, the legendary Democratic House speaker, to establish the Alan Greenspan commission that kept Social Security solvent for a quarter-century.

A corrupted system of taxation? Reagan worked with liberal Democrat Bill Bradley to craft a legislative miracle: tax reform that eliminated dozens of loopholes and slashed rates across the board — and fueled two decades of economic growth.

Later, a highly skilled Democratic president, Bill Clinton, successfully tackled another supposedly intractable problem: the culture of intergenerational dependency. He collaborated with another House speaker, Newt Gingrich, to produce the single most successful social reform of our time, the abolition of welfare as an entitlement.

It turned out that the country’s problems were not problems of structure but of leadership. Reagan and Clinton had it. Carter didn’t. Under a president with extensive executive experience, good political skills and an ideological compass in tune with the public, the country was indeed governable.

It’s 2010, and the first-year agenda of a popular and promising young president has gone down in flames. Barack Obama’s two signature initiatives — cap-and-trade and health-care reform — lie in ruins.

Desperate to explain away this scandalous state of affairs, liberal apologists haul out the old reliable from the Carter years: “America the Ungovernable.” So declared Newsweek. “Is America Ungovernable?” coyly asked the New Republic. Guess the answer.

Obama met with the Dali Lama behind closed doors and without media coverage lest he inflame the Chinese. The Chi-Coms are very touchy about smashing Tibet.

So why let a photographer take this photo?

It’s worth 10,000 words to the Chinese. It shows the world that Obama is so meek, he’ll hustle a dignitary out a side door like a cheap hooker in order to placate them.

Hugh Hewitt:

The New York Times lead story at this hour is a classic of agenda journalism:  Blame gridlock for the deeply worrying deficit and debt problem, and not the Democrats who control both houses of the Congress and the presidency.

When the GOP lost control of the House and Senate, the annual budget deficit was $161 billion.  President Obama’s budget for next year –with no stimulus and no TARP– calls for $1.6 trillion in red ink.

Thus in three years of democratic control the deficit has swell from 161 billion to 1,600 billion.

That’s the opposite of gridlock –that is one party rule by the party of massive spending and unlimited pork.

The president and his congressional allies can indeed use reconciliation on budget matters with no controversy whatsoever.  They have the ability to slice and dice the deficit.  On fiscal matters they only need 51 votes in the Senate, and they have 59.  They can raise taxes.  And they most assuredly can dramatically and deeply cut the spending and the size of government.

But the Democrats don’t want to.  MSM’s unwillingness to candidly cover this obvious fact –this defining reality of D.C.– is why it is so utterly out of gas with the average American.

“Gridlock” is MSM code for “It isn’t Obama’s fault,” when in fact the deficit and debt are his fault and will remain his fault.  He doesn’t need a bipartisan commission to lead the charge against the out-of-control spending and massively burgeoning federal government.  He needs a bipartisan commission to cover the fact that he wants the spending to rise and the government to expand.

Progress.

Barader was seized in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and US intelligence forces, according to US government officials quoted in the New York Times. Mullah Barader has been in Pakistani custody for several days, with US and Pakistani intelligence officials both taking part in interrogations, according to the officials.

Though Barack Obama has banned US agencies from using forms of torture such as waterboarding, Pakistani questioning techniques are frequently brutal.

Sounds a lot like rendition, the program liberals screamed bloody murder about during Bush’s eight years.

Of course, with Obama it’s different.

Just as it was when Bill Clinton used it.

Chicago-style politics at work.

Sen. Evan Bayh waited until one day before the filing deadline to announce his retirement, making it easy for the White House to choose who runs for Bayh’s seat — the hell with Indiana voters.

Hoosier politics took an unexpected turn Monday night when Democratic Senate candidate Tamyra d’Ippolito accused the White House of conspiring with party officials to secretly draft Rep. Baron Hill to run against her.

As the only other Democrat in the field, d’Ippolito became the presumptive front-runner for the Democratic nomination when Sen. Evan Bayh announced Monday that he would not seek re-election. Indiana Senate candidates must collect 4,500 signatures to appear on the ballot, including 500 from each of the state’s nine congressional districts.

As of 9:30 p.m. Monday d’Ippolito told The Daily Caller she was 1,000 signatures short and had volunteers across the state planning to work through the night to accomplish the goal before the noon deadline on Tuesday.

However, d’Ippolito said she was informed Monday that Hill, a blue dog who represents Indiana’s 9th District in the House, already has the necessary signatures and is sitting on them until the deadline. She accused White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel of colluding with Hill and the Democratic party county chairs to secretly supplant her as the nominee.

Mike Allen and Jim Vanderhei write in Politico about Dick Cheney’s criticism of Obama and Dem’s reaction to it.

…In an interview taped Saturday night for “Meet the Press,” Biden unloaded on his predecessor, saying Cheney is “wrong,” is “trying to rewrite history,” and “either is misinformed or he is misinforming.”

“I’m not gonna guess about his motive,” Biden told “Meet the Press” moderator David Gregory. “Dick Cheney’s a fine fellow. He’s entitled to his own opinion. He’s not entitled to rewrite history. He’s not entitled to his own facts. … What is he talking about? … I’m not being facetious: Maybe he’s not fully informed of what’s going on … I don’t know where he has been. Where was he the last four years of the last administration?”

Oh, y’know, winning the Iraq war.

Biden is so delusional, he’s been rewriting history, taking credit for the success in Iraq that he opposed. That’s not just rewriting history, it’s raping it.

The backlashes to Cheney over the past year have become every bit as vicious as his own attacks. Some nonpartisan national security analysts have called Cheney’s critiques distorted and even demagogic. Some prominent liberal commentators have called them unpatriotic, and possibly mentally unbalanced. Even a conservative Republican senator respected on foreign policy issues recently called Cheney’s criticism of Obama unfair.

Who are these unnamed critics? What gutless writing.

The former vice president’s success in driving the Obama debate has prompted a secondary debate of its own: Why does Cheney do it?

Cheney associates say he abandoned plans for a sedate post-Bush administration retirement of fly-fishing and memoir writing because he is genuinely concerned that Obama is a weak leader who is responding to political pressures in modifying war and terror policies that Cheney himself was instrumental in crafting.

Or maybe Cheney is a patriot who worries for the security of the nation he served and loves.

FYI: If generosity is the measure of a man, Joe Biden and his wife averaged charitable donations of $329 a year for the most recent decade. In 2007, the Cheneys donated 75% of their total income to charity.

NY Post

Remember Joe the Plumber?

He was the blue-collar dude who confronted Barack Obama late in the 2008 campaign with this challenge: “Your new tax plan’s going to tax me more, isn’t it?”

Nonsense, replied the candidate: “From 250 [thousand dollars a year] down, your taxes are going to stay the same.”

Indeed, he insisted, 95 percent of “working people” would see their taxes go down in his administration.

Well, think again.

A year into his presidency, Obama now says he’s “agnostic” on what was the principal plank in his economic platform: No tax hikes for individuals making $200,000 a year or less — or for households with a combined annual income under $250,000.

President Obama has insisted that his administration treated the Knicker Bomber just like Bush handled Richard Reid, aka, the Shoe Bomber.

But facts are stubborn things. Bill Burck & Dana Perino explain.

…Let’s briefly review what the Bush administration actually did after 9/11.

Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force on Sept. 18, 2001, authorizing President Bush to use “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons” who perpetrated the attack. With this congressional authority and his own authority as commander-in-chief, President Bush issued a military order on Nov. 13, 2001, authorizing detentions of non-citizen members of al-Qaeda as unlawful enemy combatants.

Richard Reid’s failed attack occurred on Dec. 22, 2001, and he was arrested the same day. Reid was charged in a criminal complaint a few days later. Richard Reid is not a U.S. citizen (he’s a citizen of the U.K.). As such, he could have been subject to President Bush’s military order. In late December 2001, however, there were no military commissions in operation, Guantanamo was not yet open to hold detainees, and no one was being held in the U.S. as an enemy combatant. By contrast, there was a well-established civilian system to handle Reid, and that system had clear rules mandated by the Supreme Court on how to treat criminal defendants, including reading them their Miranda rights shortly after arrest and respecting their right to remain silent.

Flash forward to May 8, 2002, about five months after Reid’s arrest. This was the day Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen believed to be a member of al-Qaeda, was arrested in Chicago. Guantanamo had been open for about four months and held numerous unlawful enemy combatants, non–U.S. citizens who’d been captured in the war in Afghanistan. The Defense Department had also issued regulations in March 2002 on how military tribunals would operate.

Contrary to popular mythology, Padilla was no garden-variety suspected terrorist. He was believed to be an agent of al-Qaeda and, specifically, of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. As a U.S. citizen, he could evade detection even more easily than did the 19 terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. Padilla was detained without criminal charges for a month on what is called a “material witness” warrant. The government believed he had evidence about a conspiracy to explode a “dirty bomb” in a U.S. city — an attack that, if successful, could kill or injure thousands — but might flee before he could provide this evidence to the grand jury that was investigating the 9/11 attacks.

The Bush administration used that month to decide what to do with Padilla. It had two obvious options and one riskier option. (more…)

From a demonstration in Teheran today.

For what it’s worth, Obama being a tool of Israel is news to Israelis. Obama’s approval rating there is 4% compared to Dubya’s of 88% when he left office.

Megan McArdle:

…at some point, Obama has to take responsibility.  Listening to his defenders reminds me of those people who sit around whining about how their Dad was really distant and critical . . . I mean, fine, you apparently had a rotten childhood, but Dad can’t get come and get you off the couch and find you a girlfriend and a better job.  Girls and employers get really creeped out if they try.

Whatever George W. Bush did or did not do, he’s no longer in office, and doesn’t have the power to do a damn thing about the budget.  Obama is the one who is president with the really humongous deficits.  Deficits of the size Bush ran are basically sustainable indefinitely; deficits of the size that Obama is apparently planning to run, aren’t.  If he doesn’t change those plans, he will be the one who led the government into fiscal crisis, even if changing them would be [sob!] politically difficult.

I have a serious question for the people who are mounting this defense:  at what point in his presidency is Obama actually responsible for any bad thing that happens?  Two years?  Five?  Can we pick a date for when bad things that happen on Obama’s are actually in some measure the responsibility of one Barack Obama, rather than his long gone predecessor?  And then stick with that date?  Conversely, can we agree that as long as the bad things that happen are really George Bush’s fault, any good things that happen should probably be chalked up to his administration as well?

It was darkly amusing to hear Barack Obama, interviewed by perky Katie Couric, defend his handling of the Knicker Bomber:

I think that the most important thing for the public to understand is we’re not handling any of these cases any different (sic) than the Bush Administration handled them all through 9/11.

9/11 is when the issue began, but no matter.

But Bush is the purported war criminal who ruined America’s good name.

The WSJ notes:

…the Administration has tried to break from its predecessors on several big antiterror issues, and it is on those that it is suffering the humiliation of having to walk back from its own righteous declarations. This is Dick Cheney’s revenge.

Begin with Mr. Obama’s executive order, two days after his inauguration, to shut the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay within one year. The President issued this command before undertaking a study to determine how or even whether his goal was feasible. In his May speech, Mr. Obama declared, “The record is clear: Rather than keep us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security.”

Mr. Obama’s deadline has come and gone, and Guantanamo remains open. In part this is the result of political opposition from Americans—including many Congressional Democrats—who understandably do not want terrorists in their backyards. Another problem is that European allies, while pressing for Guantanamo’s closure, have been reluctant to accept more than a handful of detainees who are deemed suitable for release. The upshot is that Congress may never appropriate the money to close Gitmo, and Mr. Obama never mentioned the prison in his State of the Union address.

The Administration similarly has been backing away from its intention, announced in November, to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other enemy combatants in civilian court a few blocks from Ground Zero. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who at first endorsed the trials, has since reversed himself and urged the Administration to “do the right thing” and move the trials somewhere else, preferably to a military base.

The same day, New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer asked officials to find another venue. Within hours, Mr. Obama ordered the Justice Department to do just that, and Mr. Schumer has since said any trial shouldn’t be held anywhere in New York state. Meanwhile, bipartisan support is growing in Congress to block money from being spent on any civilian trial for KSM, anywhere.

The Administration seems to have thought no more deeply about the potential legal pitfalls of civilian trials than about the security and logistical problems. Mr. Obama himself responded to criticism by suggesting that what he had in mind was a series of show trials, in which the verdict and punishment were foreordained.

When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked him in November to respond to those who took offense at granting KSM the full constitutional protections due a civilian defendant, the President replied: “I don’t think it will be offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.” Mr. Obama later claimed he meant “if,” not “when,” but he undercut his own pretense of showcasing the fairness of American justice.

Jennifer Rubin:

Noting Obama’s decision to skip the U.S.–European Union Summit and spurn its host, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Jackson Diehl sees a pattern by Obama of withdrawal from and growing indifference to international affairs. He writes:

It’s not just Zapatero who has trouble gaining traction in this White House: Unlike most of his predecessors, Obama has not forged close ties with any European leader. Britain’s Brown, France’s Sarkozy and Germany’s Merkel have each, in turn, felt snubbed by him. Relations between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu are tense at best. George W. Bush used to hold regular videoconferences with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Obama has spoken to them on only a handful of occasions.

Diehl raises a number of issues here. First, Obama was never that game on international commitments. He told us again and again — although Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton tried to hush him up on this — that he wasn’t going to make an open-ended commitment of American troops in Afghanistan. He repeated in his West Point speech and in interviews that his concern was rebuilding at home (i.e., his ultra-liberal domestic agenda). Beyond Afghanistan, much of his foreign policy arguably can be seen as conflict avoidance — don’t ruffle the Russians, don’t draw a line with Iran, don’t get the Chinese upset about human rights — precisely so he can focus resources and attention on his beloved health-care, cap-and-trade, and other domestic proposals.

Second, to the degree he was inward-focused from the get-go, Obama certainly has become more so as his domestic agenda and poll numbers have cratered. He begrudgingly dragged himself to the microphone to address the Christmas Day bomber (though he was uninformed, and misinformed the public that we were dealing with an “isolated extremist”). He zipped by national-security matters in his State of the Union speech. Maybe once he got that Nobel Peace Prize, he just lost interest.

And finally, could it be (Diehl is certainly providing some evidence) that Obama is less effective as an international diplomat that the Cowboy from Crawford? You mean Obama hasn’t bonded with any foreign leader, as George W. Bush did with Tony Blair, for example? (Well, returning the Winston Churchill bust and the cheesy gifts to the Brits probably didn’t help Obama with that ally.) He’s not keeping up with key leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan the way Bush did, we are told. And then there is the Israel debacle. I don’t suppose Obama would win any popularity contests in Honduras, Poland, or the Czech Republic either.

So to sum up, the president who campaigned to restore our standing in the world and practice “smart” diplomacy isn’t much interested in the world, expends little time and no effort in bolstering democracy and human rights, and doesn’t have effective relationships with key allies — at least not as effective as were Bush’s. Well, he did run as “not Bush,” and now he’s living up to that particular campaign promise. Too bad: the result is the most error-strewn, irresolute, and ham-handed foreign-policy apparatus since the Carter administration. Maybe living in Indonesia as a child wasn’t sufficient foreign-policy preparation after all.

…The president’s advice came in answer to a question from Sen. Mike Bennet, D-CO, who is facing a difficult re-election fight back home and wanted to know what Democrats and Republicans can do “to fix this institution so that our democracy can actually withstand the test that we’re facing right now.”

“You know what I think would actually make a difference, Michael? I think if everybody here — excuse all the members of the press who are here — if everybody here turned off your CNN, your Fox, your blogs,” Obama said, before being interrupted by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA, who piped up, “And MSNBC!”

Obama, appropriately reminded of the network with shows more friendly to liberals, continued, “Just turn off the TV — MSNBC, blogs — and just go talk to folks out there, instead of being in this echo chamber where the topic is constantly politics. … It is much more difficult to get a conversation focused on how are we going to help people than a conversation about how is this going to help or hurt somebody politically.”

You mean talk to folks at, say, town hall meetings?

Kurt Anderson in New York magazine, “Is Democracy Killing Democracy?”

The tea-party movement takes its name from the mob of angry people in Boston who, in 1773, committed a zany criminal stunt as a protest against taxes and the distant, out-of-touch government that imposed them. Two years later, the revolution was under way and—voilà!—democracy was born out of a wild moment of populist insurrection.

The original tea party “mob” consisted of 30-130 men, many of whom took the time to dress up as Mohawk Indians, hardly evidence of emotion run amok. Sounds more like a colonial version of a Code Pink stunt.

Except not, because in 1787 several dozen coolheaded members of the American Establishment had to meet and debate and horse-trade for four months to do the real work of creating an apparatus to make self-government practicable—that is, to write the Constitution. And what those thoughtful, educated, well-off, well-regarded gentlemen did was invent a democracy sufficiently undemocratic to function and endure. They wanted a government run by an American elite like themselves, as James Madison wrote, “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”

They wanted to make sure the mass of ordinary citizens, too easily “stimulated by some irregular passion … or misled by the artful misrepresentations” and thus prone to hysteria—like, say, the rabble who’d run amok in Boston Harbor—be kept in check. That’s why they created a Senate and a Supreme Court and didn’t allow voters to elect senators or presidents directly. By the people and for the people, definitely; of the people, not so much.

Which is why we have a democratic republic, not a democracy.

So now we have a country absolutely teeming with irregular passions and artful misrepresentations, whipped up to an unprecedented pitch and volume by the fundamentally new means of 24/7 cable and the hyperdemocratic web. And instead of a calm club of like-minded wise men (and women) in Washington compromising and legislating, we have a Republican Establishment almost entirely unwilling to defy or at least gracefully ignore its angriest, most intemperate and frenzied faction—the way Reagan did with his right wing in the eighties and the way Obama is doing with his unhappy left wing now.

Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and their compatriots are ideologues who default to uncivil, unbudging, sky-is-falling recalcitrance, as Keith Olbermann does on the left. Fine; in free-speech America, that’s the way we roll. But the tea-party citizens are under the misapprehension that democratic governing is supposed to be the same as democratic discourse, that elected officials are virtuous to the extent that they too default to unbudging, sky-is-falling recalcitrance and refusal. And the elected officials, as never before, are indulging that populist fantasy.

Just as the founders feared, American democracy has gotten way too democratic.

Maybe the rabble in this analogy are the American voters, who, spurred on a by an Obama-smitten news media, emotionally elected a hope/change candidate with no executive experience.

Or that the Dem Cong, which passed a $787 spending bill with no reflection, no time to even read it, wasn’t behaving as an ignorant mob?

In that case, the genius of the US system shined, with citizens rising up and electing a single senator who could upset the radicals in the Democrat party.

This new la-la-la-la-la-la refusenik approach to politics is especially wrong in the Senate, which was created to be the “temperate and respectable body of citizens” that could, owing to its more gentlemanly size and longer terms, ride above populist political hysteria. And it’s ironic that the most effective tool on behalf of tea-party purity, the cloture-proof filibuster, is a crudely undemocratic maneuver, permitting a minority of 41 to defeat a majority of 59.

Anderson implies that speaking out against massive federal spending and a crudely written healthcare overhaul bill (so bad Democrats had to bribe their own to pass it) is populist hysteria. (See the Great Peasant Revolt two posts down.)

The angry electorate of 2009 was using the American political system as is, not demanding direct democracy.

(How fitting that “filibuster” and “tea party” both derive from maritime criminality—to filibuster is to freeboot, or hijack debate like a pirate.) Senate filibusters used to be rare, a monkey wrench used only in cases of emergency, meant to allow debate to continue unimpeded and to protect minority opinion from being ignored.

In the sixties, the decade of civil rights and the Great Society and Vietnam, there were never more than seven filibusters during one Senate term; in 2007–2008, scores of Republican filibuster threats resulted in cloture motions. The Democrats aren’t innocent in this downward spiral of truculence: Under Bush, they regularly filibustered to stop the confirmation of judicial nominees.

How nice of you to notice, Kurt. In those days, the NYT regularly peddled stories about the sanctity of the filibuster.

Charles Krauthammer:

…after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health-care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a “jobs bill.”

This being a democracy, don’t the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don’t they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid, and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking “in the plain words of plain folks,” because the people are “suspicious of complexity.” Counseled Blow: “The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, ‘Mr. President, we’re down here.’”

A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are “a nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive.”

Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself “for not explaining it [health care] more clearly to the American people.” The subject, he noted, was “complex.” The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.

Then there are the emotional deficiencies of the masses. Nearly every Democratic apologist lamented the people’s anger and anxiety, a free-floating agitation that prevented them from appreciating the beneficence of the social agenda that the Democrats are so determined to foist upon them.

That brings us to Part Two of the liberal conceit: Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement, and self-interest.

It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozick’s masterwork, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, “proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification.” The right, you see, is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.

This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obama’s social democratic agenda — which couldn’t get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts — is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.

By contrast, Democratic opposition to George W. Bush — from Iraq to Social Security reform — constituted dissent. And dissent, we were told at the time, including by candidate Obama, is “one of the truest expressions of patriotism.”

Mark Steyn:

At the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Obama singled out for praise Navy Corpsman Christian Bouchard. Or as the president called him, “Corpseman Bouchard.” Twice.

Hey, not a big deal. Throughout his life, the commander-in-chief has had little contact with the military, and less interest. And, when you give as many speeches as this guy does, there’s no time to rehearse or read through: You just gotta fire up the prompter and wing it. But it’s revealing that nobody around him in the so-called smartest administration of all time thought to spell it out phonetically for him when the speech got typed up and loaded into the machine. Which suggests that either his minders don’t know that he doesn’t know that kinda stuff, or they don’t know it either. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, they don’t know what they don’t know.

Which is embarrassingly true. Hence, the awful flop speeches, from the Copenhagen Olympics to the Berlin Wall anniversary video to the Martha Coakley rally. The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they’re the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they’re having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of The West Wing they can only conceive of the public — and, indeed, the world — as crowd-scene extras in The Barack Obama Show: They expect you to cheer and wave flags when the floor-manager tells you to, but the notion that in return he should be able to persuade you of the merits of his policies seems entirely to have eluded them.

But, since Obama’s mispronunciation is a pithier summation of the State of the Union than any of the dreary 90-minute sludge he paid his speechwriters for, let us consider it: Is America a Corpseman walking?

Well, we’re getting there. National Review’s Jim Geraghty sums up Obama’s America thus: “Unsustainable is the new normal.” Indeed. The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as “unsustainable.” So let’s make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in Spaceballs (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”

Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001–2008, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP average 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

Eli Saslow writes in the WaPO about Obama’s attempt to connect with the hoi polloi.

…He is a rare president who comes from the middle class, yet people still perceive him as disconnected from it. As he arrived in Nashua, nearly two-thirds of Americans believed that his economic policies had hurt the country or made no difference at all; almost half thought he did not understand their problems.

Clinton was middle class, as was Truman, Nixon, Carter and Ford. LBJ didn’t wind up middle class, but he sure started there.

Obama has made it his goal in the past 10 days to convince them otherwise. In Nashua, he hoped to connect with the unemployed despite holding the country’s most prestigious job; to disparage Washington politics despite being a product of them; to have a self-described “direct conversation with the folks of New Hampshire” even as bomb squads, Secret Service officers, political dignitaries and television cameras occupied every corner of the room.

His visit to Nashua was his fourth domestic trip in less than two weeks, and it included a stop at a small business and a question-and-answer session in a high school gymnasium. He took off his jacket during his speech, rolled up his sleeves and put one hand in his pocket. He dropped his g’s and departed from scripted remarks to make jokes about “leakin’ ” roofs and “buyin’ new curtains.”

Oy.

…during his campaign for the presidency, Obama bungled some of his early attempts to connect with blue-collar workers, complaining about the price of arugula at Whole Foods and visiting a bowling alley only to roll an embarrassing score of 37. Some political rivals continue to disparage him as an elitist. Even his aides have sometimes worried that his intellect can be mistaken for condescension and that his composure can seem like detachment.

Obama is an academic elitist like many leftists.

They just know so darned much about everything they can’t resist butting into our lives any which way they can.

Those shortcomings were evident last month when Obama invited the previous two presidents to join him at the White House for a news conference about the U.S. relief effort in Haiti.

George W. Bush was simple and frank: “Just send us your cash,” he said.

Bill Clinton spoke without notes and verged on tears as he recalled his personal connection to the devastated country: “I have no words to say what I feel,” he said. “I had meals with people who are dead.”

Obama, meanwhile, spoke from prepared notes, looking all business, glancing to his left and to his right to establish eye contact while standing with perfect posture behind the lectern.

Accused* Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is likely to be executed after being tried and convicted, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Sunday.

Gibbs spoke on CNN’s “State of the Union.” The Obama administration has begun looking for places other than the heart of New York City to prosecute Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators in the face of fierce criticism tied to security and costs.

Wasn’t the whole point of this pointless trial to demonstrate to “the world” (Euro elites) that America isn’t a nation of lawless meanies?

* KSM is not just accused;  he gloatingly admitted doing it.