Law of the Bad Premise

State of the Union: Lame Duck Rising

Even Obama, Biden and Pelosi seemed bored during the State of the Union Address. Obama couldn’t even gin up enough energy to discuss “Gitmo”. But it does not matter what he said. It’s all over for his presidency.

The Democrat Party now understands just how bad they blew it in 2009. This is good for the country, although bad for their party. They were the proverbial “dog with a bone” peering at its reflection in the water. The Party saw an illusion of maximum gain and went for the second bone—-and now all is gone. They sought maximum change in health care, maximum change in energy policy, maximum Miranda rights for terrorists, and maximum deficit spending. But the American public does not want any of it. Consequently, Obama may have set the land speed record to “lame duckness” by any president in history. read more…

Scott Brown's Victory: Grandiosity Takes it on the Chin

“I mean in a way Obama is standing above the country, above—-above the world, he’s sort of God” (Evan Thomas, Newsweek)

When the Intrade betting line was 83-17 in favor of Scott Brown, (at 3 pm Tuesday), I was still suspicious. Democrats outnumber Republicans 3-1 in Massachusetts. But the simple message of Scott Brown did prevail. One can legitimately call his win “historic.” It felt like a mini-presidential race. Brown was in the right place at the right time with the right message.

So much of life is unpredictable. In the grand scheme of things, we control very little of our circumstances. Sometimes the best one can do is respond when given the opportunity. We can each imagine our favorite sport’s analogy, so apt for this election. The conditions under which Brown was running, however, was ripe with opportunity and he responded. read more…

Is the GOP Worthy of Governance?

The Democrat Party’s “40 year majority” will come to a close 38 years early. The unbearable trinity of Pelosi, Reid, and Obama has managed to alienate a nation desperate to support new leadership. They accomplished this by an insistence on unwanted quasi-Socialist policies and an irritating propensity to lead with their chin in foreign policy. The era of Obama is over, even as his Health Care proposal will likely pass. But does this mean a new era of Republican leadership is about to begin? This remains to be seen.

Peggy Noonan, a former Reagan speechwriter who supported Obama, has views similar to many who consider themselves centrist. She now realizes her support for Barack Obama was misguided. Yet she is tempted to take a “pox on both your houses” approach. She remains skeptical of the Republican Party, as I imagine many voters do. In her recent opinion essay in the Wall Street Journal she states:

“The question isn’t whether they’ll win seats in the House and Senate this year, and the question isn’t even how many. The question is whether the party will be worthy of victory, whether it learned from its losses in 2006 and ‘08, whether it deserves leadership. Whether Republicans are a worthy alternative. Whether, in short, they are serious.”

I had grown weary of many of Ms. Noonan’s commentaries. Her support for Obama was predicated on an obvious misunderstanding of his politics, nature, and ideology. But her implicit challenge to the GOP is spot on. While the critique premised in her comment is not completely fair, without question Republicans are viewed with skepticism. After all, it was a Republican administration which brought us bailouts, supported expansionary and unsustainable housing policies, expanded domestic spending, proposed an immigration policy as unpopular as the Democrat’s current Health Care Bill and made “earmarks” a household name. Worst of all, the party seemed to lose any sense of foundational principles. Just what do Republicans stand for?

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"Negro-Gate" and the Three Most Senior Democrat White Males

The era of Barack Obama was over before Harry Reid who, like an 18^th century New Orleans Anne Rice vampire, rose from his crypt to educate us on the finer points of octoroons, quadroons, quintoons, light skinned negroes and negro dialects.

…But in case there was any doubt, Obama’s reaction to our 75 IQ Senator from the gambling capital of the West just helps seal the deal. Shouldn’t Obama at least have had the common decency to point out the obvious? The “obvious” is that Reid is at least an anachronistic confused fool. For what it’s worth, I did not like Trent Lott’s comments either, as much as they could have easily been excused away. But this is not about Lott, because the Republican Party punished Lott for his comments. The Democrats, on the other hand, praise Reid for his apology, even as I am quite sure he has no clue what he is apologizing for. I am also not surprised the same groups who attacked Mitt Romney for being Mormon, didn’t slither out of the DC garbage bins to accuse Reid’s Mormon religion for its overly white sensibility. Time magazine “delicately” referred to this as Romney’s Mormon Question. read more…

Japanese "Allegedly" Bomb Pearl Harbor

Leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, including Said al-Shihri second from the left.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Muslim Nigerian “charged” with the failed attempt on the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight now has a public defender. So we will be hearing a lot about “allegedly this and that” for the next few years. He will be tried in criminal court instead of a military tribunal despite the fact that “he was trained, equipped and directed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” according to Senator Lieberman.

The Left has always been consumed more by domestic politics over military affairs, at least since the Vietnam War. Victor Davis Hanson of National Review Online notes that one-third of all terrorist plots since 2001 occurred last year, 2009. This has happened even as the Obama administration has nominally kept most of the Bush-Cheney policies in place, including those most loudly objected to by the left; the Patriot Act, renditions, military tribunals, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But there is a difference between a nominal policy and the degree to which one’s will is committed to them. read more…