If you want to start a fight with a room full of liberals, insist that Barack Obama is the worst president in recent history. The blowback about George W. Bush and Iraq will drown you out, but here’s a way to quiet the crowd: Insist that Obama’s second term is the worst term in recent presidential history.
There can be no argument there.
Each week hits a new low point, and the only debate is about which moment was the worst. Last week featured the massive security breach by Edward Snowden and Obama’s pathetic Hamlet act over Syria.
We don’t yet know which caused more harm to American interests and eroded more trust in government. Either way, the president is lost in a fog of his own making.
Snowden, on a private contractor’s payroll for only a few months, was able to download a mountain of classified material and flee the country. After news accounts revealed the surveillance programs, he popped up in Hong Kong to out himself as the source and praise China. Washington gumshoes don’t have a clue about where he is or how he got access to so much data.
On Syria, Obama moved to help the rebels only after Bill Clinton embarrassed him into action. Clinton warned that Obama would be remembered as a “wuss” and accused him of following polls instead of leading.
Obama’s instant stirring — he suddenly remembered that Syria had crossed his “red line” by using chemical weapons — amounted to an admission of guilt. Stories about the scramble to put together a quickie plan, which was released by aides, not the president, recounted Obama’s “agonizing” deliberations during a two-year civil war that claimed nearly 100,000 lives. “Leading from behind” is now standard operating procedure.
The growing image of Professor Obama paralyzed by indecision as the world unravels is accurate — up to a point. The full picture is far more troubling.
It includes a frightening indifference to the scandals swallowing his White House and the continuing jobs crisis in much of America. His level of engagement and passion on issues appears to be in reverse order to the nation’s. The more the public cares about something, the less he does.
Except for a few scripted remarks about the targeting of conservatives by the Internal Revenue Service, the president has been silent.
He also has been silent on Snowden, and defended the surveillance programs only in general terms. With polls showing growing alarm about government snooping, Congress, not the administration, is leading the debate.
About Benghazi, Obama has said nothing lately, even though four Americans were killed and not a single terrorist has been captured.
There is one clear exception to the apathy — the president is very animated about next year’s elections. His schedule includes a steady stream of fund-raisers, 18 this year and eight in the last two weeks.
Last Wednesday, he flew on Air Force One to Boston to help a Democratic candidate, then to Miami, where he spoke to two audiences that totaled no more than 225 donors who paid up to $32,400 each.
Even his decision to hold his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in California appears to have been based on his political schedule. The Hill newspaper reported that press secretary Jay Carney defended the unusual choice of venue in late May by saying Obama “had domestic travel planned for the West Coast” in June. Later it became clear that Obama’s “domestic travel” involved two California fund-raisers that took place before the meeting with the Chinese leader.
He aims to help Dems retain Senate control and pick up 17 House seats to reinstall Nancy Pelosi as speaker. “It’d be a lot easier if I had a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate,” the president told one of the Miami audiences.
He didn’t specify what would be “easier” but did remind the other Miami crowd that he would never be on a ballot again, saying, “What that means is I think you can have confidence that all I care about right now is governing.”
No word on whether the audience broke out laughing.
Who frisked Holder?
This is a New York whodunit.
Somebody with a warped agenda persuaded Attorney General Eric Holder to support the legal attack on the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program. Never mind that Mayor Bloomberg and top cop Ray Kelly say the tactic has saved thousands of lives, most of them young minorities, and warn that more murder will be the result if the city is forced to eliminate it.
So-called civil-rights activists want the program deemed unconstitutional, and Holder put his thumb on the court’s scale to make it happen.
He sat silent for more than five years while a federal lawsuit against the NYPD percolated, but with Judge Shira Scheindlin set to rule, Holder filed a surprising last-minute brief endorsing an outside monitor.
There’s no question Scheindlin was headed in that direction, and Holder gives her a green light. The only question is who lobbied him to get involved.
It could have been Scheindlin herself, since Holder gives cover to her shameful prejudice against the police.
It could have been any of the anti-cop congressmen supposedly representing New York.
It could have been Al Sharpton, the White House’s go-to guy when it wants to play the race card. Sharpton hailed Holder’s move. Or maybe Holder came up with the idea himself. Recall that he accused America of being a “nation of cowards” on race.
He’s the one who can’t handle the truth. Non-whites are disproportionately the victims and perpetrators of violent crime. Stop-and-frisk did more to sever those links than any other police or social program known to man.
Ending it will cost lives. Everyone responsible will have blood on their hands.
Mayor’s race a ‘mad’ dash
Give The New York Times credit — twice. It has published investigative-style articles showing that neither Anthony Weiner nor Christine Quinn is fit to be mayor.
The March article on Quinn depicted her as a rage-aholic who engages in eye-bulging screaming fits, and included this sentence: “She has threatened, repeatedly, to slice off the private parts of those who cross her.”
On Weiner, the Times last week painted him as abusive to his staff and a dishonest glory hound with no patience for actual work. It suggested legislation he authored was a payoff to a donor and family friend.
As for the sexting scandal that forced him to resign two years ago, let’s just say he better not rile up Quinn.
Talk about information overload!
Here’s a mind-boggling fact from government snooping stories: IBM says digital gadgets generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, and that 90 percent of the world’s data was created in the last two years.
What is a quintillion? That’s a “1” followed by 18 zeros. The next big stop on the byte meter is a sextillion, which has 21 zeros.
Remember when 1 million (six zeros) was a big number?