The problem with Obama isn’t that he doesn’t know anything; it’s that so much of what he knows isn’t so.

The president’s problem is that he has neither experience in, nor understanding of, the private economy. He has worked exclusively in the nonprofit and government sector.

He has an unlimited faith in government and limited trust in private industry. And the president surrounds himself with people who share his myopia.

When the president visited plants from Buffalo to San Francisco on his much-touted jobs tours during the spring and summer, he was there to tell workers that government saved or created their jobs.

But that is not how it’s done. Job creation happens when individuals take personal risks: A man notices that all his friends and neighbors have garages stuffed with junk they don’t want and starts a new business with $700 in startup capital and an old beat-up truck. A few years later, Brian Scudamore’s 1-800-GOT-JUNK has 100 franchises across the country.

A young woman decides her chocolate chip cookies deserve to be enjoyed beyond her family. Debbi Fields borrows money, opens a small storefront, and within seven years, her company, Mrs. Fields Cookies, had revenues of more than $45 million.

These individuals created great wealth for themselves, but they also created thousands of jobs for other people. The fallacy in Obama’s thinking is the assumption we’d be better off taxing rich people more and having government spend the money directly.

So when Obama finally realizes there’s no such thing as a shovel-ready project, he’s admitting he’s wasted our money — billions of dollars — not his own. But his only answer is to raise taxes so he can spend yet more. It’s the kind of thinking that dooms his presidency and our economy.

And, thankfully, Progressivism itself. It’s just too bad that so many people childishly buy into the Hopeychangey illogic that they end up having to learn the hard way, and the rest of us suffer for their pig-headed ignorance.

Shameless liars update! So much of what they know isn’t so — and almost everything they say isn’t.

Clueless commies update! Maybe it IS that Obama doesn’t know anything after all:

We opened the front door in 1979, also a time of severe economic slowdown. Yet today, Home Depot is staffed by more than 325,000 dedicated, well-trained, and highly motivated people offering outstanding service and knowledge to millions of consumers.

If we tried to start Home Depot today, under the kind of onerous regulatory controls that you have advocated, it’s a stone cold certainty that our business would never get off the ground, much less thrive. Rules against providing stock options would have prevented us from incentivizing worthy employees in the start-up phase—never mind the incredibly high cost of regulatory compliance overall and mandatory health insurance. Still worse are the ever-rapacious trial lawyers.

Meantime, you seem obsessed with repealing tax cuts for “millionaires and billionaires.” Contrary to what you might assume, I didn’t start with any advantages and neither did most of the successful people I know. I am the grandson of immigrants who came to this country seeking basic economic and personal liberty. My parents worked tirelessly to build on that opportunity. My first job was as a day laborer on the construction of the Long Island Expressway more than 50 years ago. The wealth that was created by my investments wasn’t put into a giant swimming pool as so many elected demagogues seem to imagine. Instead it benefitted our employees, their families and our community at large.

That’s how you really “save or create jobs,” Mr notmypResident.

It’s not too late to include the voices of experienced business people in your efforts, small business owners in particular. Americans would be right to wonder why you haven’t already.

He hasn’t; he can’t; he never will. It would involve admitting how wrong his cherished Left-wing radicalism truly is — yet another thing the Big Boss Jackass is utterly incapable of doing.

Sweeeet:

ANAHEIM, Calif. – Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on Saturday urged a roaring crowd of Republicans to exhaust themselves over the next two weeks to take back California and the country for the “little guy.”

The former vice presidential candidate addressed more than 2,000 supporters at a Republican National Committee rally in Orange County, a conservative stronghold in a state where Republicans hope to make gains this year.

“The momentum is with us but now is not the time to let up, now is not the time to celebrate — not quite yet,” Palin told a crowd wearing T-shirts reading “Proud Conservative” and buttons reading “Is it 2012 yet?”

“We can’t be thinking that it’s over yet and we’ve got it in the bag. As Yogi would’ve said, ‘It ain’t over till it’s over,’” she said, referring to New York Yankees great Yogi Berra.

“Soon we’ll all be dancing,” Palin added.

Well, I suppose we could all dance a little now, even if it is premature. Just a little soft shoe now, and then a full-tilt frug November 3 — on their graves. But you can easily see why totalitarians are so terrified of the monster Palin; I mean, just listen to this pre-Halloween recipe for real horror:

Invoking former President Ronald Reagan, Palin told the roaring crowd she wanted a return to principles he espoused: “lower taxes, smaller, smarter government, less overreach and intrusion, strong, unapologetic national defense.”

That is some radical, extreme stuff right there. No wonder Progressivists who think they’re entitled to run every aspect of every American’s life are so scared of her — and us. After all, as the saying goes, we want to take over the government…and make it leave everybody the hell alone. BOOGABOOGABOOGA!

(Via AP)

Update! YIKES. Stoaty shows us a liver-quivering image that demonstrates what horror is REALLY all about.

So now if you merely acknowledge the plain reality that 9/11 was perpetrated by Muslims, you’re an “Islamophobe?” Meanwhile, though, idiotic 9/11 Trutherism is perfectly acceptable, and not even remotely offensive to “people” like this? Cool. Got it. Just another shining example of liberal “tolerance,” “civility,” and the superiority of their tremendous “intellects,” I guess.

It’s the long march through the institutions, stupid:

For the better part of two generations, the best political science departments have concentrated on equipping students with skills for performing empirical research and teaching mathematical models that purport to describe political affairs. Meanwhile, leading history departments have emphasized social history and issues of race, class and gender at the expense of constitutional history, diplomatic history and military history.

Neither professors of political science nor of history have made a priority of instructing students in the founding principles of American constitutional government. Nor have they taught about the contest between the progressive vision and the conservative vision that has characterized American politics since Woodrow Wilson (then a political scientist at Princeton) helped launch the progressive movement in the late 19th century by arguing that the Constitution had become obsolete and hindered democratic reform.

Then there are the proliferating classes in practical ethics and moral reasoning. These expose students to hypothetical conundrums involving individuals in surreal circumstances suddenly facing life and death decisions, or present contentious public policy questions and explore the range of respectable progressive opinions for resolving them. Such exercises may sharpen students’ ability to argue. They do little to teach about self-government.

I think it ought to be pretty obvious to all of us by now that the failure begins way, way earlier than at the university level.

Five reasons why they hate her. I’ll just excerpt the main one:

3. Palin and the tea party are destroying the GOP.
You’ve heard the spiel: The Republican Party is in the midst of a civil war between moderate incumbents and far-right challengers backed by Palin and the tea party. Driving Charlie Crist from the GOP and defeating establishment figures such as Robert Bennett, Lisa Murkowski and Mike Castle spells electoral doom for the party. The only chance Republicans have for long-term success is to move to the center in a bid to win over millennials and Latinos.

But demographics aren’t destiny, and no one knows what the future holds. The reality, right now, is that Palin and the tea party are saving the GOP by dragging it back to its roots and mobilizing conservative voters.

Remember, by the time Palin arrived on the national scene, the Republican Party was depleted, exhausted and held in disrepute. An unpopular war in Iraq, an economy in recession and GOP corruption had driven away independents. Meanwhile, massive government spending and a liberal immigration policy had dispirited conservatives.

This is where Palin came in. In the wake of Obama’s historic victory, she and countless other grass-roots activists could have abandoned the GOP and turned the tea party into a conservative third party. They didn’t. They decided instead to refashion the Republican Party from the ground up, pressuring it to live up to its limited-government ideals. Now, two years after Obama’s win, Republicans are poised to reap major gains in the midterm elections. Palin and the tea party haven’t hurt the GOP one bit.

The others are notable too, but this one alone explains one hell of a lot. They’re terrified of Palin; they’re terrified of the prospects of Tea Partiers’ salvaging whatever small part of America Progressivism hasn’t already destroyed; they hate everyone involved in this effort; and there is no lie too egregious, no smear too despicable, and no fraud too audacious for them to shy from in keeping us on the hot rails to socialist Hell.

Pretty remarkable that this usually reliable DNC propaganda organ allowed this article to get past their liberal anti-truth firewall. But unlike the NYT, the WaPo does occasionally allow a dissenting viewpoint to see the light of day. Occasionally.

(Via Insty)

And can we coexist with the one we’ve got, which with rare exceptions is nothing like decent?

Non-Muslim countries and regions should make it clear that we are not prepared to be condescended to as infidels, that the Judeo-Christian traditions of the West antedate those of Islam (we are all Abrahamists and Gabriel called on our preceptors first), and that the widespread mistreatment of Christian minorities in some Muslim countries should produce proportionate retaliation, but not at the expense of the civil rights of our own Mulsim minorities. The Muslim massacre of a million Christian blacks in the Sudan should have received a much more energetic and righteous response than it has. And the mad idea of a large mosque almost adjacent to the World Trade Center site should never have gained any traction at all. That debate makes our entire society look like idiots, with Michael Bloomberg, Maureen Dowd, Katie Couric, et al. all thoughtfully holding hands as proverbial “useful idiots.” The less house-trained Islamists who now frolic in and degrade the United Nations and some of its agencies and commissions should be sent packing. Militant Islam should be recognized as an antagonist, and moderate Muslims should be courted, much more systematically than they have been; Indonesia should be treated as a major power in the world, despite having a (very talented) president who rejoices in the name of Bambang. The debate should not be between ourselves about how to deal with Muslims, it should be between Muslims about the unwisdom of provoking us all.

Yep. I’ve said for a long time now that our every enemy should tremble at the very thought of American boots hitting the ground in their shitty little countries; likewise, rather than bending over backwards to placate permanently-aggrieved Muslims whose neverending outrage is usually nothing more than a tactic, we ought to be looking for ways to make the idea of spitting in our faces very damned unpalatable indeed for them.

An important point about the Chilean mine disaster and the remarkable rescue:

If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?

Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.

This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill’s rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock’s president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.

Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That’s why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.

In an open economy, you will never know what is out there on the leading developmental edge of this or that industry. But the reality behind the miracles is the same: Someone innovates something useful, makes money from it, and re-innovates, or someone else trumps their innovation. Most of the time, no one notices. All it does is create jobs, wealth and well-being. But without this system running in the background, without the year-over-year progress embedded in these capitalist innovations, those trapped miners would be dead.

Another point: the contrast between a real leader and the sad oaf we have squatting in the Oval Office:

The leadership of Chile President Sebastian Pinera, believing fiercely in globalization and free markets, and not believing in limits, seemed to make a critical difference.

Pinera refused to shut out foreign expertise. As the world focused on Chile’s miners underground, the rescue operation above was characterized by an Apollo 13-like sense of mission. Failure was not an option.

That gave the mission an international flavor a la “Star Trek.” Unlike President Obama, who invoked the Jones Act to spurn foreign offers of help in April’s Gulf oil spill, or Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who said “nyet” to American naval rescue ships after the Kursk nuclear sub sank in Arctic waters in 2000, leaving 29 to die at a depth of 650 feet, Pinera brought in the best brains outside his country to improve the odds of success.

And another important point of comparison:

Sadder still is what happens in China, where miners are routinely left for dead after mines collapse — a big reason more than 2,000 parish in such accidents each year.

“Lucky people who were born in Chile. … If it was us, we would definitely have been buried alive and died,” a Chinese wrote on the Internet, as quoted by the Christian Science Monitor.

Pinera is different. He focused on avoiding conflict and laying blame while the rescue was still on. He took accountability himself by firing incompetent inspectors on his own side, but didn’t condemn business or shut down an entire industry, as Obama did with his Gulf moratorium, only now being lifted.

Pinera worked with local officials instead of bickering with them or throwing up bureaucratic obstacles because they belonged to the wrong party. Sadly, that’s what Obama did with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who had to take matters into his own hands in building berms when Louisiana’s coast was threatened by the April spill.

Chileans, by contrast, said the crisis united them as never before. That takes leadership, and it comes about only because Pinera believes in openness, free markets, transparency and putting himself last.

Well, you’ll certainly never see our God Emperor doing anything remotely like that. But hey, if the Progressivists had their way and we were all starving and freezing to death in Gaia-friendly caves, there’d be no need for nasty things like mining or drilling for oil in the first place. So, see, they really do have the “solution” to all our problems. Well, except for the problem of starving and freezing in caves, the actual solution for which — free market capitalism –they can only freeload off of, while snottily condemning, undermining, and attempting to destroy it.

The addle-pated gorgon would be almost funny if she weren’t so thoroughly disgusting:

MARION, Ohio – In a radio interview, former White House correspondent Helen Thomas acknowledges she touched a nerve with remarks about Israel that led to her retirement. But she says the comments were “exactly what I thought,” even though she realized soon afterward that it was the end of her job.

“I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive,” Thomas told Ohio station WMRN-AM in a sometimes emotional 35-minute interview that aired Tuesday.

“They distorted my remarks, which they obviously have to do for their own propaganda purposes, otherwise people might wonder why they continue to take Palestinian land,” said Thomas, a daughter of Lebanese immigrants who over the years did little to hide her pro-Arab views. There was no explanation of whom “they” referred to.

And no explanation, either, of just how her remarks were “distorted” by “them.” Because, umm, y’know, they weren’t. But this terrorist-symp excrescence has been confusing “reporting” with “distorting” throughout her interminable career.

She issued an apology, she told the radio interviewer, because people were upset and she thought she had hurt people. “At the same time, I had the same feelings about Israel’s aggression and brutality,” Thomas said.

Asked whether she’s anti-Semitic, she responded “Baloney!” She said she wants to be remembered for “integrity and my honesty and my belief in good journalism” and would like to work again.

And she would certainly be remembered for all those things, if she’d ever once shown any evidence of possessing the merest shred of any of them.

Ed defends his use of “McCarthyism”:

Note: People objected yesterday to the use of the word “McCarthyism” in my post, but I use it for two reasons. First, it’s a term that the Left throws out with abandon any time people dissent from their orthodoxy and have the temerity to question their motivations. Second, it is a clear, concise description that immediately conveys the kind of guilty-until-proven-innocent abuse of power from government officials when it occurs.

Some people objected because later information proved Joe McCarthy correct in general about Communist infiltration in the government, but that doesn’t acquit McCarthy of his abuse of power. He accused people without evidence, many of them the wrong people, and did so as a representative of the government that is supposed to protect the individual presumption of innocence until evidence proves contrary. McCarthy was a dangerous man, and perhaps even more for the discredit he heaped on the anti-Communist effort when the Soviet Union was at its most aggressive.

Fair enough, really, and on careful reflection, I can’t really disagree. It’s certainly true that we all ought to be very damned wary of government officials slinging accusations around — even if they later prove to be correct on the merits. I missed that point, and I really shouldn’t have. I should note, too, that commenter “Goober” made the same point yesterday as well.

I’ve been hammering away here about the Left routinely turning falsehood into received wisdom by simple repetition — many mentions here of the “Incompetent Katrina response” meme come immediately to mind — for so long that it clouded my vision on this one, I suppose. Mea maxima culpa on that, folks, and my apologies to Ed for what could have been interpreted as jumping on him unfairly.

Unbelievable. Even for them.

The Doc packs more stinging wallops — at more ripe, juicy targets — into his opening paragraph than most of us do in an entire day’s blogging:

The Democrats have suddenly begun attacking the Chamber of Commerce with bizarre vigor. It’s odd for them to shout so loudly about foreign campaign contributions, when President Obama set records for collecting them through his circus funhouse of a Web site in 2008, and every move this Administration makes showers B-movie villain George Soros with profits. Presumably they are relying on the media to ignore these inconvenient truths, but this might prove to be a dangerous assumption. The liberal media is tired of opening its lunch box to find a few crumbs and a taunting note from Fox News. They have discovered audiences want information, not hours filled with has-been pundits and disgraced politicians discussing how much they hate Sarah Palin.

You know what you must do from here, grasshopper.

Update! Treacher gets in a pretty good lick of his own, right at MSDNC’s glass jaw: “The only ‘leaning forward’ going on is America reaching for the remote.” Grab them ankles, teabagging serfs!

Damned excellent analysis, and a thrice-worthy companion piece to yesterday’s linked American Thinker essay on Left psychopathy:

Why don’t leftists ever recognize their fantasies as self-serving delusions? I believe it is because most leftists, and certainly the professional intellectual leftists who fabricate and sell those fantasies for money and prestige, live in a nonempirical world. Empiricism is the final test of any idea. This is the fundamental idea of science but it holds true in all fields of human endeavor. An idea must manifest in a physical form and interact with the material world before its truth can be truly verified. Business people have ideas of businesses all the time but the only real test of the idea is to create the business and see if it thrives. Generals create weapons, tactics and doctrines only to see them all disintegrate when real war breaks out. Engineers build objects and machines that must work.

Leftists, however, live in a world isolated from physical consequence. They pay no material consequence for the failure of the ideas. It is not as if any of the leaders of the Kent State rioters ever ended up with hands bound, kneeling in the mud of a Cambodian rice paddy waiting for a raped and brainwashed 12 year old to suffocate them by wrapping a plastic bag tightly over their heads. No radical leftwing radical professor of the era lost his job for failing to predict the psychotic nature of the Khmer Rouge or the consequences of the horrific rule of Cambodia. No American leftists has ever paid a serious material consequence for any error, no matter how sweeping. It is always someone else who pays.

It was the Kulaks, Ukrainians, idealistic communists and others who paid the price for Stalin, not the legions of western leftists who ignored his crimes and cheered him on. It was the Chinese peasants who starved to death during the Great Leap Forward and not the college student with the “Mao more than ever” t-shirt. Less dramatically, it is the poor of America who suffered from crime, permanent joblessness and the disintegration of families because of leftists’ policies, not the ivory-tower intellectuals who created those policies.

In the specific case of Indochina, the “peace” movement failed catastrophically to bring peace to anyone. The people of Indochina suffered horribly. However, since the “peace” movement ended with the far left dominant in American politics and culture, American leftists see it as a great victory and seek to recreate it at every opportunity. Why shouldn’t they? They personally or collectively don’t expect to pay any material consequence for their selfishness and self-absorption.

But perhaps the era of the left’s isolation from physical consequence has ended. During the Vietnam era, the military they despised protected them from the communists they lionized, but today’s military cannot protect them from the terrorists who filter across borders. It is not inconceivable that the left’s de facto support of various terrorists may someday literally blow up in their faces. The vitality and uniqueness of America once protected them from the consequences of their economic ideas (such as runaway unions), but today America is not so vital nor so unique and must fight for its place in the world economy.

Ironic, isn’t it, that the primary reason America is now neither so vital nor so unique is the Left’s success at deriding, defiling, and dismantling both those qualities? That they themselves have shattered the shield that protected them from an honest and just reckoning with the consequences of their bullheaded blunders?

Much, much more at the link, all of it worth your time and attention — including the truth about the Kent State “martyrs.” You won’t be surprised to learn that they’re nothing near as saintly as the Left’s revisionist history would have it, as those of us who accurately remember the era already knew well enough. Go ye and read of it, for it is good.

As if any further proof were needed, beyond his associations past and present; his policy preferences; his general furtiveness and core dishonesty; his clear contempt for America and the Constitution; his reflexive tendency towards divisiveness and conflict with anyone who dares to disagree with his collectivist notions; and above all, his blank stupidity, and the risible claims of his “brilliance” in hopes of deflecting attention from his all-around inadequacy and incompetence:

America’s socialists saw the Harold Washington campaign as a model for their ultimate goal of pushing the Democrats to the left by polarizing the country along class lines. This socialist “realignment” strategy envisioned driving business interests out of a newly radicalized Democratic party. The loss was to be more than made up for through a newly energized coalition of poor and minority voters, led by minority politicians on the model of Harold Washington. The new coalitions would draw on the open or quiet direction of socialist community organizers, from whose ranks new Harold Washingtons would emerge. Groups like ACORN and Project Vote would swell the Democrats with poor and minority voters and, with the country divided by class, socialism would emerge as the natural ideology of the have-nots.

Figures pushing this broader strategy at the 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference included ACORN adviser Frances Fox Piven and organizing theorist Peter Dreier, now a professor at Occidental College and an adviser to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. That is to say, Obama’s connection to socialist ideologues didn’t end with hisrecruitment into the ranks of community organizers. It began there and blossomed into a quarter century of intricate relationships with both on-the-record and in-all-but-name socialists. I’ve spent the last two years in the archives unraveling the connections. Here are a few.

The pattern of misdirection upon which President Obama’s political career has been built has its roots in the socialist background of community organizing. ACORN, Reverend Wright, and Bill Ayers were all routes into that hidden socialist world, and that is why Obama has had to obscure the truth about these and other elements of his past. More important, the president’s socialist past is still very much alive in the governing philosophy and long-term political strategy of the Obama administration.

The truth is there, for anyone with the intestinal fortitude to take a look at the sordid mess. Obama is, was, and always will be a radical Leftist, period — no matter how he tries to wriggle and squirm away from the facts for political purposes. He should never have gotten anywhere remotely close to the position he now holds. And in an America that still truly revered its most basic principles, he wouldn’t have.

Interesting to note, though, that the story of Obama’s rise to power is also the story of the Democrat Socialist Party’s descent into the anti-American, totalitarian cesspool it has become. This ain’t your grandfather’s Democratic Party, nor is it Harry Truman’s, or arguably even FDR’s; not even close. Even the abominable Woodrow Wilson, inspiration though he is to his benighted pseudo-intellectual descendants, might look askance at this motley collection of grifters and envy-driven, anti-prosperity nihilists.

Instead, it’s a frothing, half-mad rabble of radicals, crooks, liars, layabouts, thugs, and outright thieves — a guileful, unscrupulous criminal enterprise aimed at overturning and destroying everything that made this nation great, using the most devious and duplicitous means imaginable.

No, of course not; perish the thought. But they’re at war with us. Crucial bit:

In the real world, of course, the Islamists are unlikely to win over the long run of, say, 50 or 100 years. But those views do mean that these 50 or 100 years are going to be filled with instability and bloodshed.

Equally, Badi’s claims do not mean all Muslims must agree, much less actively take up arms. They can have a different interpretation, simply disregard the arguments, and be too intimidated or materialistic or opportunistic to agree or to act. Yet hundreds of thousands will do so and millions will cheer them on. And by the same token, neither the radical nor the passive will assist in moving toward more moderation or peace or compromise.

Well, will the problem go away if people in the West condemn “Islamophobia” or make concessions or apologize or produce a just peace? No.

That sums it up well enough. But you should definitely read it all.

(Via Mike Totten)

Update! Another wakeup call from Greenfield:

Isn’t presuming to know what Islam is about better than Muslims do, the same kind of arrogance toward the Muslim world that liberals routinely accuse America of? And doesn’t that drive Muslims toward greater acts of terror just to define clearly what Islam really is? In the words of the Ayatollah Khomeni; “Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless… Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors!”

That is the great liberal farce, in which liberals begin by lecturing Americans on what Islam really is, and then conclude by lecturing Muslims on what Islam really is. And the Muslims laugh in their faces, when they aren’t blowing them off. Liberals haven’t convinced very many Americans that Islam is a religion of peace, and they certainly aren’t going to convince very many Muslims.

Here is the ugly truth about Faisal Shahzad. He was practicing his religion. Just like a Catholic accepting communion or a Jew praying in the morning. Because his form of religious practice is illegal in America, Faisal Shahzad was obligated to practice it covertly. As countless other Muslims in America, Canada, Australia and Israel practice it covertly, giving money to terrorists or training as terrorists themselves.

To justify their policies, the left and much of the right presents a completely distorted image of Islam to the country. Distorted because it is missing its most basic ingredient, Jihad. Without Jihad there would be no Islam. The story of the Koran is the story of Jihad. It is the story of Mohammed’s rise to power by making war on all non-Muslims.

The media and the politicians can pretend that Faisal is some sort of aberration, but he’s not. He was only a young Muslim man who wanted to practice his religion and get to heaven. The problem is that the Koran proclaims that to get to heaven, he has to step over the bodies of infidels. And we are a country of infidels.

That’s about the size of it, whether you’re observant enough — and willing enough to confront your own desperate but wholly unsubstantiated wish to believe that most Muslims are “no different than us” — to admit it or not.

I could’ve attached this as an update to the “New low” post below, but it’s just too delicious to languish away down there. Come for the exposure of the sleazy lie, stay for the groveling-coward backpedaling:

White House officials acknowledged Friday that they had no specific evidence to indicate that the chamber had used money from foreign entities to finance political attack ads.

“The president was not suggesting any illegality,” Bob Bauer, the White House counsel, said. Instead, he said Mr. Obama’s reference to the chamber was meant to draw attention to the inadequacies of campaign disclosure laws in allowing groups to spend large amounts of money on politics without disclosing their donors.

Yeah, right. Spoken like a truly greasy, squirming lawyer trying to defend a most un-presidential president, who just stepped in a pile of his own deceitful bullshit and fell in right up to his scrawny neck. Ed lets the White House vermin have it with both barrels, although he makes the same mistake as the one I noted earlier:

Is that how it works in the United States in the era of Hopenchange? The President makes an accusation of lawbreaking without any evidence of it, and the entity accused has to prove their innocence? In this country, the government has to prove its case, not the defendant, and even before making an accusation of wrongdoing usually has to have some evidence of the crime in the first place.

This kind of rhetoric is nothing short of McCarthyism. The government makes baseless accusations and then blames the people accused for not clearing themselves. Will Obama start appearing at rallies with his “little list” of an ever-changing number of foreign contributors? The White House launched the same kind of baseless attacks on the Koch family and Americans for Prosperity this summer and have yet to offer one substantial piece of evidence that any of these groups or people have done anything wrong at all, except to oppose Obama’s policies.

This is an administration that apparently has never learned the difference between being a political campaign and serving in the government. In the former situation, this would constitute slander, which is bad enough. When it comes from the government, it’s a form of tyranny — an attempt to use the power of government to silence dissent.

It is all of that, certainly, made only somewhat less sinister by the usual bumbling Obamian incompetence. But we need to stop enabling the Left’s “McCarthyism” subterfuge; McCarthy, as I said, was perfectly correct, and there’s very little reason to fall into the trap of using the word as a smear.

It really does explain everything, you know. In fact, it’s the only explanation possible.

Leftists really believed that Obama embodied their moment. Obama held all the cards — majorities in both houses, a slavish press that viewed him as no less than a godling, an enthusiastic public, even an acquiescent international establishment, overlooking a few holdouts such as Kim and Ahmadinejad. No left-of-center president has had a smoother road before him — not FDR, not Lyndon Johnson. Yet Obama’s efforts amount to utter failure — not because of opposition from the “party of no,” not because of circumstances, not because of sabotage, but because of Obama’s “success” itself. He got the bills passed, guaranteed that their execution would be in the hands of extraconstitutional figures beholden only to him, and got them funded by means both legal and illegal. All of it was put into play with a smoothness that only Chicago thuggery combined with socialist chicanery could accomplish. He launched them, and they crashed, and they burned.

They crashed and burned because they cannot work. Not in a universe with natural laws that operate the way they do and with human nature constituted as it is. They have never worked anywhere they have been tried — not in Europe, not in Asia, not in Africa, nowhere across this wide world. Obama’s grand schemes have been attempted previously. The failures were hurriedly stuffed down the memory hole, enabling the left to hope for another shot sometime down the line. (No small number of people in this country — many of them not doctrinaire leftists by any means — truly believe that FDR “ended” the Depression.) 

But today they have a problem — several, in point of fact. The first is that the memory hole has in large part been filled in over the past decade and a half by such things as the internet and the New Media. It’s no longer a simple matter to shove nationwide failures out of sight. It may not even be possible. 

The second is the fact that this time, they bet the house. They put everything down on Obama. Because it had to work. Because the third time was the charm. Because O was the messiah. And now they’re sitting in the casino dead broke, without another dime to lay on the table, and through the doorway they can hear the shouts of the people whose money they embezzled.

This is why the left is being overwhelmed by psychosis. Because they are up against the wall with no way out. Under such circumstances, the strong individual bites the bullet and runs for daylight. The weak fall apart. It’s been a long, long time since anyone defined leftists as “strong.”

He’s dead right. If you read only one thing I link to today — hell, this week — then this should probably be it. Dunn’s conclusion in particular ought to leave a bitter taste in the mouths of these pestilential fools.

Well, look at it this way: if it had been an aggrieved Muslim tossing a shoe, I’m sure the liberal media would’ve been all over it.

Oops; too late. But how could anyone possibly do a better job of making you look bad than you’ve already done yourself?

He’s going to flip out completely and go into full-on meltdown mode when his idiotic policies get a thorough and undeniable repudiation at the polls in a few more weeks. And it’s going to be a beautiful thing to watch. Couldn’t happen to a nicer totalitarian asshole, if you ask me.

Remember, notmypResident Hussein Ogabe ain’t a Muslim, and any speculation about the roots of his fawning sympathy for Islam is utterly ridiculous, and quite possibly insane.

Scheduled for release on the new network The Hub — formerly Discovery Kids — which launches today (Time Warner and DirecTV carry it in the city), is a cartoon beloved in the Arab world and received timidly in Britain last year, “The 99.”

The program chronicles the adventures of 99 superheroes, each of whom embodies an attribute of Allah.

No higher an authority than President Obama praised the work of the comic’s creator, Kuwaiti psychologist Naif al-Mustawa. At an April meeting with Arab entrepreneurs, Obama said, “His superheroes embody the teachings of the tolerance of Islam.”

The Hub, a joint venture with Hasbro toys, announced in May that it would produce and air episodes of “The 99.” But then, murmurs of dissatisfaction turned into a cry.

How can a secular nation endorse a children’s show aimed at pushing one religion?

A Times of London columnist wrote last year that the show’s mission was “to instill old-fashioned Islamic values in Christian, Jewish and atheist children.”

JWF asks the obvious question: “How long until this is being shown in the classroom?” I doubt we’ll have long to wait, unless we put the brakes on these lunatic Progressive capitulationists and their anti-American agenda for good.

It ain’t about feminism; it hasn’t been in a long, looong time.

So let’s get this straight.  NOW has endorsed the man whose team wanted to castigate a female opponent as a “whore,” and come out in opposition to the pro-choice woman and successful entrepreneur running on the other ticket. And they jumped into the race in less than a day after that audio surfaced.

Clearly, NOW is more concerned with Democratic Party status than with the actual progress of women, which Whitman represents, even though Whitman supports NOW’s biggest policy issue. NOW’s leadership doesn’t even have the fig leaf of abortion to cover its transparent toadying to the Democrats.

Same thing with the NAACP, who are no more concerned with civil rights than NOW is concerned with women’s. Both groups of deceitful charlatans are about promoting Democratic Socialists, Progressivism, and general hard-Left chicanery, and nothing more. More from Kirsten Powers:

Yes, sexism matters—as does gender. But whereas you never hear anyone claim that men should vote a particular way because of their gender, feminists have no trouble treating women like pre-schoolers who have to be herded into the right camp, a camp that is apparently preordained at birth. In an interview with Katie Couric last year, Gloria Steinem said that where conservative women stand “is squarely against what most women need and want. If [women] still vote for them, they are voting against themselves, which is quite tragic to me.”

This kind of attitude should be antithetical to feminist thought because it is infantilizing to women.

Yep — just as it is to blacks, Hispanics, and every other certified “oppressed victim” group the Democrat Socialists intend to keep on their grubby little plantation.

Update! Almost forgot to include the first link to Captain Ed.

And with the sleazy passel of grifters currently running the criminal enterprise misnomered the “Democratic” Party, that’s saying something. But my God, the balls on our sorry excuse for a Pee-resident, and his henchmen too.

“Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie: They’re Bush Cronies. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: They’re Shills for Big Business,” the ad’s narrator says. “And they’re stealing our democracy. Spending millions from secret donors to elect Republicans to do their bidding in Congress. It appears they’re even taking secret foreign money to influence our elections.”

The president leveled a similar charge while on the campaign trail last week in Maryland, saying, “Just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations.”

“Have these people no shame?” Rove said of the attacks leveled at him and the Chamber. “Does the president of the United States have such little regard for the office he holds that he goes out there and makes these kind of baseless charges against his political enemies? This is just beyond the pale. How dare the president do this?”

“This is a desperate and I think disturbing trend by the President of the United States to tar his political adversaries with some kind of enemies list, without being unrestrained by any facts or evidence whatsoever.”

The punchline here, of course, is that one of the means by which the jug-eared son of a bitch hijacked American democracy and stole the ’08 election — aside from vote-suppression efforts by his pet goons in the New BlacKKK Fascist Party, and who even knows how many hundreds of thousands of instances of vote-fraud by his ACORN sneak-thieves — was via a long list of all kinds of financial chicanery up to and including…wait for it…accepting secret, illegal foreign campaign contributions. You were supposed to have forgotten all about that by now, assuming you’re among those who penetrated the Zombie Media blackout and knew of it at all. But Doug remembers, presenting a recounting of the shocking jiggery-pokery that helped put this swindler in the office he’s so manifestly unfit for. Glenn hasn’t forgotten, either.

Time to do more than just pay Democrat Socialist-style lip service to draining that swamp. Too bad this November we won’t have the opportunity to give it the good, thorough, top-down scrubbing it so desperately needs.

Update! Via Allahpundit, this guy gets it mostly right:

The Democratic National Commitee is using the same sort of tactic and logic that Sen. Joe McCarthy used in the 1950s: Level a headline-grabbing and unsubstantiated charge, like the State Department is filled with communists, and then say it is up to the State Department and the employees so charged to prove it is not true.

So much for hope and change; this is the politics of fear, slander and divisiveness on the eve of an election that looks as if it could deliver a damning verdict on the first two years of the Obama administration.

Only one problem here: McCarthy, long smeared and vilified by Lying Leftists terrified of being exposed as exactly what they were (and are), was right all along. And then there’s this:

Foreign-connected PACs
Election cycle: 2010
Total: $12,204,154
To Dems: $6,517,903
To Repubs: $5,581,701

You know, for people whose every damned utterance is an outrageous lie — who couldn’t tell the truth about anything even if you held a knife to their withered ‘nads to guarantee it — you’d think they’d be better at it than this. And as usual with Leftists, when they start screeching and moaning about something awful — just AWFUL — they say the Right is doing, peek past the smokescreen and you’ll see they’re doing a lot more of it themselves — every single time.

Know how the excuse liberals make for the failure of communism is always that it hasn’t been properly implemented? Or how their Mark-1, Mod-0 complaint about the repeated failure of their mutton-headed initiatives is always that it just didn’t go far enough, and the only way to truly fix things is to do more of it? Well, brace yourselves for the voice of delirium, straight from the fever swamps, the lunacy turned all the way up to eleven:

No matter what happens this November, we know what will be at least one aspect of the corporate media’s response: they will tell us that President Obama and the Democrats must move more to the center….

The truth is that neither President Obama nor the Democratic Congress has been particularly liberal. They have been liberal relative to the extreme right that the corporate media largely accepts, rationalizes, and enables as the new iteration of the Republican Party, and they have been marginally liberal relative to the corporatist conservatism of most in that media, but on an honest scale, that is not really liberal. 

Uhhhhh HUH. Thanks for your input, Renfield. Now if you would, kindly go back to scratching yourself bloody, soiling your diapers, and baying at the moon.

How do you even begin to debate someone whose premises are so warped, so demonstrably at variance with reality itself? It’d be easier to describe Beethoven’s Ninth to a gibbering ape. Even more howling schizophrenia at the link, if you can believe it.

Root causes:

America can’t move forward until it cleans out this legal swamp. The accretion of law has made democracy inert – a sludge heap of programs and entitlements swarming with special interests – while also slowly suffocating the American spirit.

Changing leaders or parties will not solve this problem. Decades of accumulated law and bureaucracy have made it impossible for anyone to use common sense. A new President can ride into Washington on the mighty steed of public opinion – Yes We Can! – but will immediately get stuck in the bureaucratic goo.

What’s required to revive America is major structural overhaul. This is a task of historic proportions – not unlike the simplification of law by Justinian in ancient Rome. Our founding fathers never imagined that democracy would become a one-way ratchet – always adding laws but never repealing them. Nor did they intend law to be a form of central planning. The Constitution sets forth our governing goals and principles in only 16 pages.

The core principle of this overhaul should be this: Restore free choice at every level of responsibility.

For example, let all public schools operate with the same freedoms, and accountability, as charter schools. Give officials the responsibility to balance different interests – not be forced by legal threats to give away scarce common resources to whoever threatens a lawsuit. Make public employees accountable for failure – but at the same time, stop telling them how to do their jobs.

A great streamlining would re-invigorate democracy. Cleaning out old mandates and entitlements would allow political leaders to make choices to meet today’s needs. Radically simplifying law would allow people, including members of Congress, to actually understand it.

The goal is not to build a libertarian utopia. A crowded society requires regulatory red lights and green lights. The goal is to pull law back so it provides a framework for free choice, not a software program that tries to dictate daily choices.

It’s a good piece overall, but I really can’t remember ever hearing any libertarians propose that we ought to do away with traffic lights. It’s an insidious, cheap way of attempting to discredit libertarianism that we see all too much of, pretending that libertarianism and anarchism are interchangeable terms. They aren’t. But other than that gripe, he’s right on target.

Without the gauzy film of sick romanticism through which they usually prefer to ogle the abominable cur:

So for many, the questions remains: how did such an incurable doofus, sadist and epic idiot attain such iconic status?

The answer is that this psychotic and thoroughly unimposing vagrant named Ernesto Guevara de la Serna y Lynch had the magnificent fortune of linking up with modern history’s top press agent, Fidel Castro, who — from the New York Times’ Herbert Matthews in 1957, through CBS’ Ed Murrow in 1959 to CBS’ Dan Rather, to ABC’s Barbara Walters, to most recently, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg — always had American reporters anxiously scurrying to his every beck and call and eating out of his hand like trained pigeons.

Some things never change. May he burn in hell for a thousand years, along with all the rest of the rogue’s gallery of mass-murdering heroes of the Left. Might be a good time to recall this, too:

How anybody with half a lick of sense can take ANY of these people at all seriously — or give them an instant’s credit for good intentions — is beyond me.

(Via Insty and Powerline)

Carville seems a bit…frustrated:

The weakest messages assert we should “go forward, not back.” Voters are not moved by Democratic messages that say ‘go forward, not back,’ mention President Bush, compare then and now, or even that hint the economy is “showing signs of progress.” No matter how dramatically these messages set out the record of Republican obstructionism, their work for the wealthiest and Goldman Sachs, the millions of jobs lost and Democrats’ support for jobs, small business and new industries – these messages falter before the Republican attack.

The messages get lower scores and lose voters. After hearing this battle of Republican and Democratic messages, 8 percent shift their vote to support the Republican, while only 5 percent move to the Democrats. We lose ground. These messages are helping the Republicans.

That’s because Democrat Socialist “support” for jobs, small businesses, and all the rest is a politically-expedient lie, a pose. Their commitment to American principles is thimble deep, gossamer thin, and as solid as Jell-O. They’re rigidly locked into a hard-Left ideology that kills jobs, destroys prosperity, and is not only unworkable but downright nonsensical. It has failed everywhere and every time it’s been tried.

Most people have seen plenty enough evidence by now of what they really stand for: more government, more spending, more bureaucracy, more regulation, more taxes, less freedom, and ever-shrinking horizons and possibilities. They see themselves not as protectors of America’s greatness but as managers of America’s decline. The nation has gotten a good, costly look at where the Tyranny Party’s ass-backwards policies inevitably lead…and it’s a nightmare. Carville and his comrades are trying to polish a turd.

(Via Ace)