The Obama administration continues to drag its feet, exposing their utter incompetence on yet another front; the war in Afghanistan – ironically the one Obama wanted.

Now he has it. Predictably, his administration is once again resorting to the tiresome practice of blaming the previous administration for their own inability to manage the war Obama campaigned on as the one we should have been fighting.

Now’s his chance…

…to blame Bush.

…again.

On October 18, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows and, in the process of answering questions about Barack Obama’s strategy on Afghanistan, accused the Bush administration of failing to ask the most basic questions about that country and our war there.

Gibbs went on…claiming that a request for troops from General David McKiernan during the final year of the Bush administration “sat on desks in this White House, including the vice president’s, for more than eight months.”

Obama lies. Emanuel lies. Gibbs lies.

In fact, the Bush administration did ask those questions. From mid-September to mid-November 2008, a National Security Council team, under the direction of General Doug Lute, conducted an exhaustive review of Afghanistan policy. The interagency group included high-ranking officials from the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, the office of the director of national intelligence, the office of the vice president, the Pentagon, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its objective was to assess U.S. -policy on Afghanistan, integrating a simultaneous military review being conducted by CENTCOM, so as to present President Bush with a series of recommendations on how best to turn around the deteriorating situation there.

…and the troop requests?

McKiernan wanted more troops–he asked for three additional brigades in the summer of 2008–but he understood that he could have them only when they became available. “McKiernan was making requests down the line,” says a Pentagon official, “and late in 2008 we did have the ability to commit more forces. So we did.” Indeed, Bush sent nearly 7,000 additional troops to Afghanistan before he left office, including one brigade that had been repurposed from Iraq.

Barack Obama is the President of Broken Promises. When he can’t or chooses not to keep his word, he waffles; he lies.

…and is so arrogant so as to think no one notices.

HT Chris F.

…how, starting with the NYTimes and the WaPo, and then filtering down through the HuffPo and the Daily Kos…

…and thence downward through MSNBC, CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC…

…and then through “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, the “Ed Schultz” and “liberal knockoff of Laura Ingraham” “Stephanie Miller” shows…

…and from there down through the morass of the leftyblogosphere, the “TBoggs” and “Think Progresses”, “PZ Meyerses” and “Minnesota Independents”…

…the meme will spread over the course of the next few days…

 …that “Republicans do as they are told”.

P.S.:  Mr. President?  Stop campaigning!  You are, ostensibly, everyone’s President.

For another three and a quarter years, anyway.

It took the GOP the better part of four years to piddle away the goodwill that it won during the early 2000s.

Congrats, Dems; between your heavy-handed antics, your amateurism, your ineptitude and your obvious hunger for absolute power, not only are the actual people realizing the Change they Hoped for is never coming, but even some of the people who were painting your toenails six months ago are having second thoughts; your ideas are turning off the people you suckered in last year.

To: President Obama

From: Mitch Berg

Re:  The War That Matters

Mr. President,

You’ve been extremely lukewarm about supporting General McChrystal’s proposal for a troop surge to support his counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq.

You basically abdicated the US policy of support for missile defense, selling out our allies in Eastern Europe in the face of Vladimir Putin.

When the Soviets Russians pounded the uppity Georgians, you sent the plucky, pro-Western, freedom-loving Georgians a ship full of Hope and Change, and nothing else.

And of course, when the Iranians were shooting protesters in the streets, you made concerned noises and went quietly away.

Little did the world’s despots and tinpots know that you were just saving your energy for the real battle:

The White House is calling on other news organizations to isolate and alienate Fox News as it sends out top advisers to rail against the cable channel as a Republican Party mouthpiece.

Attaway, Mister President.  Because even if it were true, and even if Fox were a GOP “mouthpiece” – and as far as its news-gathering goes, it’s not – well, goodness knows that our country doesn’t need at least one group of contrary journalists keeping big government accountable, do we?  Because your Administration has abolished the laws of human behavior and created a government that doesn’t need to be held accountable?

As visibly as you crave the approval of European elites, you do realize that most private European news outlets actually are partisan in editorial stance?  That while The Guardian and Die Zeit and Le Monde lean left, the Times and the Frankfurter Allgemeine lean overtly to the right, and are open about it?  And that each of them rides their “opposition” pretty hard, which makes the “opposition” sad, but occasionally trips up some big scandals?  Hence holding government accountable…

…Aaaaaah.  I get it now.

That is all.

P.S.:  When does the 2008 campaign end, anyway?

Does being an Ivy-Leaguer endow one with an intellectual reach that exceeds one’s grasp?

Case in point, the storied chaps at Harvard bet their billions that they were smarter than the market: Wrong

Harvard University’s failed bet that interest rates would rise cost the world’s richest school at least $500 million in payments to escape derivatives that backfired.

Further, Barack Obama bet that his Harvard-acquired education and billions in taxpayer dollars “invested” under the guise of economic stimulus would be enough to lead a nation and create millions of new jobs: Unsurprisingly, wrong.

Data published Thursday showed contracts from the $787 billion economic stimulus created or saved 30,083 jobs…

And finally the highly respected Harvard graduate Matt Birk, who many thought would finish his NFL career with the Minnesota Vikings, left in favor of a substantially similar offer from the Baltimore Ravens earlier this year. Birk ostensibly bet his chances of winning the Super Bowl would be greater in Baltimore: Surprisingly, wrong.

MINNEAPOLIS – As Steve Hauschka’s potential game-winning kick sailed wide left, nearly all of the Ravens on the sideline dropped their heads in unison, feeling another last-minute punch in the gut in a season that continues to veer off course.

It just goes to show a Harvard education is no guarantee of success. In the now legendary words of Forest Gump’s momma: “stupid is as stupid does.”

A month ago, Chris Coleman – mayor of Saint Paul – was on a roll.  He was simultaneously running his 2009 mayoral campaign and a 2010 gubernatorial bid.

And then – he stopped.  He abruptly ended his goober bid five days ago.

Why?  In the horde of candidates stampeding for the bid at present, he’s certainly not the longest shot.

And yet he became the first to bail.

Why?

Because he’s nervous?

What happened to put a stop to all the DFL schmooze parties where Coleman and his gubernatorial competitors have been lining up to schmooze all the prospective DFL delegates and voters?Could it have anything to do with the fact that the one, lone candidate forum between Coleman and his opponent, Eva Ng, took place about 48 hours before on Tuesday October 6th- and that Eva Ng mopped the floor with Chris Coleman?

Answer after answer, Eva Ng answered with specifics; I will freeze property taxes at their current level and then I will cut them, I will set up business zones downtown to spur entrepreneurial growth, I will hold weekly ward meetings where citizens can speak with me as their mayor and their concerns WILL be addressed.

Chris Coleman’s answers?

Chris Coleman has been in politics long enough (Ward 2 City Councilman for 2 terms, ’97-’03) to know you NEVER have to answer the question which you’re asked, and in his case, maybe it’s better in a way that he didn’t. Then he would have had to talk about his property tax increases over the last 3 years in office- 9% in ’07, 15.1% in 08, 8.6% in ’09 and a proposed increase of 6% for ‘10, as well as fee increases. Oy!

I’m not going to say “he’s scared of losing”.  But Ng, by all rational accounts, trussed Coleman up like a  hog at the “Forum” (not a debate) and parted out the roast, ham and bacon.  She didn’t beat him, she crushed, stomped and napalmed him.

And the DFL smear machine is out in force.  And as Mike Huckabee said, in perhaps his greatest contribution to American politics, “when you’re taking flak, you’re over the target”.

Can Eva Ng win this thing?  Maybe.  If every single Republican in Saint Paul turns out.  And if each of them convinces a not-so-political neighbor that Chris Coleman and an all-DFL City Council is a screeching disaster, and that the Saint Paul School board has been so derelict in its duties that it deserves to be perp-walked out of 360 Colborne under a hail of spitballs?

Why, yes.  Yes, she can.

And I can’t think of a better reason that a DFL gubernatorial front-runner, or at least not-back-runner, would abruptly bail out on the race.

There are grounds for honest disagreement on gay marriage.  The disagreement centers around the definition of what “marriage” actually is; to most proponents of gay marriage, it’s just a contract, a legal agreement enforced by the state.  To most opponents, marriage is a religious institution; indeed, in the exceedingly unlikely event I ever get married again, I believe I’ll join the growing number of people I know who’ve eschewed getting a state marriage license, if only to tell the state “you really have nothing to do with this”.

So if I turn around and fail to support gay marriage (as opposed to civil unions, which I do support), you can accuse me of a lot of things, including of being wrong on the issue.  Wrongly, of course, but that’s your right.

One thing you can not accuse me (and by extension other opponents of gay marriage) of is cowardice and hypocrisy.

Now, the left?

I’ve never forgotten the howls of rage from my various liberal gay acquaintances when Paul Wellstone betrayed them and voted for the Defense of Marriage Act.  Now, bear in mind that in his first Senate race against Rudy Boschwitz, Wellstone got about 155% of the gay vote in Minnesota; they palpably expected big things from him.

And they got them – albeit not the “big things” they expected.  They learned the hard way; Paul Wellstone could do math.  Wellstone could see that for all the thousands of gays and gay supporters who turned out at gay marriage rallies, many many times as many people opposed changing marriage – including the imponderably vast majority of blacks and hispanics who, reliably Democrat though their votes are, broadly oppose gay marriage with a vehemence that’d make a Southern Baptist blanche, and without whom no Democrat can win a normal election.

And I, and many other conservatives, asked “so, gays?  Here’s palpable evidence; the left views you, as a group, as such a reliable bunch of votes that they can regularly betray  you (and remember, while roughly 125% of gays voted for Bill Clinton, he also backed down on gays in the military – for exactly the same reason that Wellstone did on DOMA); how long are you going to sit and take this?”

Apparently for all eternity:

Rainbow flags fluttered above the crowds near the White House as tens of thousands of gay rights supporters rallied to demand that President Barack Obama keep his promises to end discrimination against gays and also let them serve openly in the military.

“Hey, Obama, let mama marry mama” some chanted Sunday. Others cried out, “We’re out, we’re proud, we won’t back down.”

Gays:  the Democrats see you like a spousal thumper sees a spouse; as someone they say and do anything they want to, without fear of anything ever changing.
Does anyone out there, gay or straight, for or against gay marriage, doubt that Obama can do the math, too?

…and all of Obama’s voters, that it’s been nine months, and Osama Bin Laden hasn’t been taken into custody yet?

Still at large.  But why?

Wasn’t that supposed to have been dealt with by now?

(more…)

Mo Rocca again, from Twitter:

Barack Obama : Nobel :: Marisa Tomei : Oscar

Heh.

But to be fair there’s no way Obama could pull of that opening scene from Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (pbui).

“Life is full of ironies, if you’re stupid”

— P.J. O’Rourke

———-

Europe is beginning to seethe with contempt for the US – partly over the Administration’s early social gaffes, and partly because of its fecklessness.

The Administration sold the Poles and Czechs down the river, causing two nations that have risked boundlessly to express their allegiance to the US to openly wondering if the US is good for its obligations.
Israel is nervous that the US has abandoned it – or at least that it will when the chips are down, one day.

Georgia is still rebuilding from when the Soviets Russians gang-raped it.

Our president bowed to a tin-pot potentate.

Afghanistan is spiralling into the toilet.  (Thankfully, the grownups were in charge long enough to buy Iraq a decent chance).

The Administration is pushing socialism, which is inevitably disastrous for the environment, and gundecking capitalism, which is the world’s best hope for benefitting the environment.

Iran is building nukes, and there’s not a damn thing we can (or will) do about it (short of defend against them – which the Administration eschews on dogmatic grounds).

China – a nation that’s killed tens of millions of its own people –  is ascendant, while the US,which as recently as twenty years ago freed hundreds of millions, is rapidly neutering itself.

Naturally, Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize.

President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, citing his outreach to the Muslim world and attempts to curb nuclear proliferation.

Of course, after Algore, “cheapening the brand” is all very relative.

Um, “congratulations”, Mister President.

UPDATE: Or as Mo Rocca says on Twitter, “Nobel Peace Prize officially awarded to “Not George Bush.” Most passive aggressive Nobel ever?”

UPDATE 2: Nominations for the Peace Prize were due by the end of January.

Ten days after Obama was inaugurated.

UPDATE 3: A friend of mine wrote asking if the Onion hadn’t pulled the ultimate hoax.  He wasn’t alone.

UPDATE 4: Jeff Rosenberg from MNPublius:

Extraordinary efforts? I’m sorry, but what extraordinary efforts has he made? This prize should be given for a major lifetime achievement, and while I like Obama, this is really, really jumping the gun.

Even lefties – some of them – are astounded by this.

UPDATE 5: A prize winner who actually earned one – Lech Walesa, 1983 winner and former president of Poland:

“So soon? Too early. He has no contribution so far,” former Polish President Lech Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, said Friday. “He is still at an early stage.”

Also, his record since the nominations closed, on February 1, has been so utterly dismal…

The Dems are starting to turn the crank for another “S”-word.

Confronted with big job losses and no sign the U.S. economy is ready to stand on its own, Democrats are working on a growing list of relief efforts, leaving for later how to pay for them, or whether even to bother.Proposals include extending and perhaps expanding a popular tax credit for first-time home buyers, and creating a new credit for companies that add jobs. Taken together, the proposals look a lot like another economic stimulus package…

Wait for it…wait…for…it…

….though congressional leaders don’t want to call it that.

No.

I bet they do not.

Betty McCollum (DFL MN4) confirms it – “bipartisanship” is just for Republicans! (emphasis added):

“Now is the time to pass a public health insurance option. Now is the time to expand access to quality health care, control rising costs, keep American businesses competitive, and improve the health of the American people,” she told the crowd of assembled party activists.

“You know there is a lot of talk about how Democrats need to reach out to Republicans and work for a ‘bipartisan’ health care bill. I am sick and tired of talk of a bipartisan health care bill — that’s just a plan for less health care for people in need and more profits for corporations driven by greed,” she said.

But McCollum – famous for ducking any debates and avoiding any dissent, as befits a “representative” from a one-party city who has never needed to remember that there are at least two sides to any issue – does make one illustrative point:

“Since I’ve been in Congress there have been a number of historic bipartisan bills — historically bad!”

She’s got a point; “bipartisanship” is the plea of the weaker party, or at least of the party that doesn’t need to reach across the aisle – which, as a Saint Paul DFLer, is all McCollum knows; the “bipartisanship” of ramming our agenda down the opposition’s throat.

Of course, McCollum is in the majority now.  She can afford to talk like a petty absolutist tyrant.

That “Majority” thing’s gotta change. 

Which is why your vote matters in 2010.  When McCollum is in the minority again – then she’ll see the value of “bipartisanship”. 

Let’s hope a new Republican majority doesn’t make that mistake again.

…about Obama’s honeymoon being over and his political capital falling to mere human levels…

…might be an eventual end, sooner or later, to all those “Obama asks moms to go back to school” banner ads.

Just saying.

…is a jilted, pissed off President, with a bent for Socialism, who can now refocus on bringing our nation to the brink of insolvency.

South America gets its first games: The 2016 Olympics are going to Rio de Janeiro

Chicago was knocked out in the first round — in one of the most shocking defeats ever [emphasis happily mine-JR] in International Olympic Committee voting. Even Tokyo, which had trailed throughout the race, did better — eliminated after Chicago in the second round.

I feel bad for Chicago. Nonetheless, Mr. President, and with all due respect:  In your face!

You will have to find other less public forms of payback to your cronies in Illinois…and you would be well advised to brace for impact as more “shocking defeats” are almost certainly in the offing for you, sir.

Joe from the Como Park area writes:

Those videos of kids signing songs of praise and worship to Our Dear Leader have left a bunch of conservatives with their undies in a bundle.  Chill out, people.  Surely you remember the morning praises when you were a school child?

Right after the Pledge of Allegiance, we always sang “He Has A Secret Plan To Win The War” in honor of our President.  I especially loved the part where we shouted his name three times at the end:

Richard Milhous Nixon!
Richard Milhous Nixon!
Richard Milhous Nixon!  For the Future!  He’s the ONE!  YEAAAAAHHY!

Ah, good times.

Amazing, isn’t it?

Because I’d probably be pretty dangerous in the White House…to our most conspicuous enemies.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s continued overt threats to wipe Israel (or any other country for that matter) off the planet coupled with recent intelligence revealing a new nuclear facility would be met with a different tact than our Hippy-Wimp-in-Chief has chosen.

President Barack Obama is offering Iran “a serious, meaningful dialogue” over its disputed nuclear program, while warning Tehran of grave consequences from a united global front.

“Iran’s leaders must now choose – they can live up to their responsibilities and achieve integration with the community of nations. Or they will face increased pressure and isolation, and deny opportunity to their own people,” Obama said in his radio and Internet address Saturday.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is like a young unmedicated schoolchild.

Continued rhetoric without consequences, without punishment, has emboldened him. Just like a young child, repeatedly told “No” but without limits and punishment will turn into a spoiled maladjusted kid, Iran has given the rest of the world the bird.

The fact that the same party that let Osama Bin Laden slip through their fingers occupies Congress and the White House no doubt further stokes the fires of insanity; an opportunity to bully the other school kids while the Principal is on sabbatical.

Jimmy II recently informed Ahmadinejad he’s “breaking the rules” and later this week ratcheted up his teleprompter which in turn threatened Iran’s President with the dark storm clouds of “serious dialogue.”

Chilling.

Does that mean Michelle’s husband will have his publicist produce words with more syllables? That he’ll enlist multiple teleprompters? Employ a laser pointer or a PowerPoint presentation?

Iran’s current leadership has been directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of many of our young men and women in Iraq, extending already excruciatingly long tours of duty for our brave young soldiers. Ahmadinejad represents a faction that resents Western freedoms and prosperity and will stop at nothing to destroy us to level the playing field and will not be bargained with or swayed by chit chat.

They have threatened peaceful nations and have shown time and again that they are not to be trusted and at the same time hold their ostensibly peaceful citizens hostage while exposing them to future military retaliation. Every week that goes by they grow in their ability to wreak havoc across much of Europe – and that’s based on what we know.

If I were President, that nuclear facility would be gone today. By lunch. On a Saturday. I’d make a call on the Batline and warn the weekend Janitor. The smoke would be clear by Monday morning.

It’s called a cruise missile, Mr. President, and his ass, up put, should be one.

So it’s a good thing, for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that I’m not President, and am armed only with a laptop whose battery has 19% charge left.

Walter Mondale, who spent four years as background scenery in the worst entire Presidential administration of my life so far, barks on command and echoes his worthless former boss:

Former Vice President Walter Mondale joined his old boss Jimmy Carter Wednesday, arguing that some of the opposition to President Obama’s agenda is fueled by racial animus.

Asked at an event in Washington whether he agreed with former President Carter that racism was behind some criticism of Obama, Mondale took a long pause before answering: “Yeah.”

“I don’t like saying it,” Mondale continued. “Having lived through those years, when civil rights was such a bitter issue, and when we argued those things for years … I know that some of that must still be around.”

“I know it must be there.  Somewhere.  Maybe next to my keys?”

“I don’t want to pick a person, say, he’s a racist, but I do think the way they’re piling on Obama, the harshness, you kind of feel it,” he said. “I think I see an edge in them that’s a little bit different and a little harsher than I’ve seen in other times.”

Riiiight, Fritz.  Eight years of “Smirking Chimp” and Stewart and Colbert (comedy is borne of anger, as is whatever it is that Colbert does) and Randy Rhodes (among many others) openly joking about killing the President – with not a whiff of pique, much less self-righteous outrage from irrelevant lefties like Mondale – but now the climate is bothering you?

At a screening of a new documentary on his life, “Fritz,” at the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, the 1984 Democratic nominee for president lamented what he called a coarse tone in political life today, telling the audience: “It’s been discouraging to watch this health care debate.”

Patricians like Mondale pine for the days when starchambers of DFL powerbrokers (and a few pseudo-Republican castrati who’d been selected for their mute compliance) made all those calls for all the dumb peasants.

So Walter – when a lot of people, myself included, voted emphatically against your nannystatism and tax mania and America-last-ism 25 years ago, in history’s biggest landslide, were we just a bunch of anti-Norwegian bigots?

Did someone say the President is just a tad overexposed?

He’s turning the presidency into an infomercial,” warned former White House speechwriter Matt Latimer. “It’s not just damaging to the White House. It will also ultimately hurt President Obama’s image as a fresh, non-Washington leader.”

The media blitz has won Obama unprecedented wall-to-wall coverage in the mainstream media.

The factoid?  Obama has had three times the TV appearances of Bush and Clinton combined.

Fawning?  They got it!

In the New York Times alone, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, 405 stories on the Obama administration have appeared on the front page through mid-August of this year totaling 119,678 column inches. That’s 9,973 column feet of Obama coverage on the Times front page alone.

Endless This Campaign!

“…they are workin’ the umps all the time, I think it works with the [other media outlets], it doesn’t work with me.”

Edward Lucas Obama has big plans…:

But none of them are working.

Regimes in Moscow, Pyongyang and Tehran simply pocket his concessions and carry on as before. The picture emerging from the White House is a disturbing one, of timidity, clumsiness and short-term calculation. Some say he is the weakest president since Jimmy Carter.

He left out “micromanager”!

Even good moves are ruined by bad presentation. Changing Mr Bush’s costly and untried missile-defence scheme for something workable was sensible. But offensively casual treatment of east European allies such as Poland made it easy for his critics to portray it as naïve appeasement of the regime in Moscow.

Many lefties don’t see the real problem; it’s not the missile system itself.  Lefties treat missile defense the same way they treat economic recoveries (when Republicans are in control, anyway); just as every recovery is a “jobless” one until employment skyrockets to unignorably record levels, missile defense will be a “boondoggle” until it becomes airtight (which it’s not yet – but then, no engineering achievement ever succeeds until it does).

No – even thoughtful Obama partisans seem to be unable to get it, but it’s the betrayal.  Just as Chamberlain and Daladier casually decided the fate of Czechoslovakia in a summit with Hitler without bothering to invite the Czechs, and as the UK and France abrogated their treaty obligation to rescue Poland without telling the Poles about it, Obama went behind Donald Tusk’s back, directly to Putin.

Mr Obama’s public image rests increasingly heavily on his extraordinary speechifying abilities. His call in Cairo for a new start in relations with the Muslim world was pitch-perfect. So was his speech in Ghana, decrying Africa’s culture of bad government. His appeal to both houses of Congress to support health care was masterly – though the oratory was far more impressive than the mish-mash plan behind it…

But for what? Mr Obama has tactics a plenty – calm and patient engagement with unpleasant regimes, finding common interests, appealing to shared values – but where is the strategy? What, exactly, did “Change you can believe in” – the hallmark slogan of his campaign – actually mean?

Silly Mr. Lucas.  It means “the people can believe in the Change and the Hope”.  Or something like that.

The President’s domestic critics who accuse him of being the sinister wielder of a socialist master-plan are wide of the mark. The man who has run nothing more demanding than the Harvard Law Review is beginning to look out of his depth in the world’s top job. His credibility is seeping away, and it will require concrete achievements rather than more soaring oratory to recover it.

And Obama’s problem is that his Administration is basically a factory that builds rhetoric.  Like any factory, changing the product – from rhetoric to achievement – is a costly re-tooling operation.

Earlier this week, on the seventieth anniversary of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland at the beginning of World War II, President Obama announced that the United States is reneging on a promise to build a missile defense shield against future, likely Iranian nuclear missiles. This program was started under Bush, enacted in Poland and the Czech Republican at the cost of immense political capital to the Polish and Czech governments.

The date, of course, was Vladimir Putin’s way of telling the recalcitrant, west-leaning, NATO-joining Poles that he’s watching them.

But the reverse on the missile program?  That was all Obama.   The President seems to think, as Jimmy Carter did, that if he just gives a few more concessions to Putin, to the Mullahs, to the world’s thugs and gangsters, that eventually even they’ll start believing in all the Hope and Change.

Of course, as we saw earlier this summer, earnest promises of Hope and Change didn’t stop the mullahs from gunning down protesters in the streets of Teheran.
What a contrast with thirty years ago, as Jeffrey Lord noted earlier this summer in American Spectator:

One need look no further than President Obama’s cautiously timid response to the demands of freedom from Iranians. Contrast this with Reagan’s response to similar demands from Poles in the 1980s and the miserable inadequacy of the Obama foreign policy is thrust into a stark and shameful relief.

Finding historical parallels is a slippery slope that leads to madness.  But sometimes they’re illustrative:

When Reagan took office in January of 1981, Poland had been a Soviet satellite for almost four decades. The American foreign policy establishment had long since settled into an acceptance of moral equivalency between the United States and the Communists. The policy was acted out in a thousand different ways ranging from so-called “détente” (a relaxing of tensions) to a vast, arcane arms control process which over time had substituted the process itself instead of the unconditional victory of freedom as America’s chief foreign policy goal.

Sound familiar?

As opposed to the example from the last time we had a thug-ocracy beating freedom-loving demonstrators in the streets, I mean?…:

Reagan had campaigned on a completely different idea, a very old principle when dealing with an adversary. He phrased it this way to his first national security advisor, Richard Allen: “We win, they lose.” It was this goal that Reagan sought, and thus caused him to speak bluntly about America’s adversary in the Cold War. An “Evil Empire” is how he early-on famously described the Soviet Union, completely horrifying the Obama-like striped-pants set in the State Department and Establishment foreign policy circles…

Joe Biden said during the campaign that Obama would face a foreign policy “test”.  Well, Ronald Reagan certainly did:

One of the very first items that arose on Reagan’s watch was the rising demand for freedom from the Polish people. On January 21, his first full day in the Oval Office, word reached the White House that a young shipyard worker and union leader named Lech Walesa had informed the Communist government of Poland he had called a series of strikes in four Polish cities, beginning the next day. Within 24 hours hundreds of thousands of Poles in ten cities — not four — were publicly defying the Polish Communist dictator, General Wojciech Jaruzelski.

A fight for freedom was on — and Ronald Reagan had zero intention of standing on the sidelines…Liberals all over Washington paled. This, they insisted, was no way to conduct diplomacy. One just does not say these things in public. But Reagan had only just begun.

And we all know how that ended – in this case, with a free Poland; a nation that reveres the Reagan legacy; a place that is probably the best place in Europe to be an American; a place that has repaid Reagan’s efforts many-fold, by becoming not just a leading voice for freedom, but a leading supplier of muscle to defend it; Polish troops were among the largest allied contingents in Iraq.

Iran today and Poland in 1980 aren’t perfect analogues – but the similarities are strong enough to help us gauge the character of our nation’s leadership.

Which is bad news for Obama:

As Walesa and his fellow Poles demanded the most basic of human liberties, Moscow responded by sending troops on maneuvers along the Polish border, then installing a military government with instructions to stop Walesa in his tracks.

Distinctly unlike Obama’s reaction to the demonstrators filling the streets of Iran, Reagan looked at similar crowds in Poland and said the sight was “thrilling.” Said Reagan: “I wanted to be sure we did nothing to impede this process and everything we could to spur it along.”

And so he did. In a stiff note to Soviet boss Leonid Brezhnev, Reagan said that if the Russians kept up their thuggish response to Poland they “could forget any new nuclear arms agreement.” Gone too would be better trade relations, and in their place would be the “harshest possible economic sanctions” if they even thought of invading Poland as they had done with Czechoslovakia in 1968 or Hungary in 1956.

Of couse, Reagan did much more; he formed an unlikely alliance (according to Dinesh D’Souza) with Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and AFL-CIO president Layne Kirkland to send financial as well as moral aid to Solidarity.

Hope and change didn’t come for free in 1980, either; as tensions ratcheted up, Reagan took the occasion of the normally-pacific Christmas speech to stump for the Poles…:

… “We can’t let this revolution against Communism fail without offering a hand,” he wrote that day in his diary. “We may never have an opportunity like this in our lifetime.”

Christmas or not, Reagan proceeded to write Brezhnev about the “recent events in Poland.” Warned the President: “Attempts to suppress the Polish people-either by the Polish army or police acting under Soviet pressure, or through even more direct use of the Soviet military force — certainly will not bring about long term stability in Poland and could unleash a process neither you nor we could fully control.” Reagan said the Soviets were encouraging “political terror, mass arrests and bloodshed” and they must either halt this behavior or “we will travel a different path.”

On Christmas morning, Reagan had a heated, angry reply from Brezhnev. Furious, he accused the President of “defaming our social and state system, our internal order.” It was a charge, Reagan said, “to which I pleaded guilty.”

Words were followed by actions – sanctions against Poland and the USSR – and then by years of committed agitation to bring down, not Poland, but the USSR itself.  These efforts paid off almost twenty years ago, as first the Poles, and then the rest Eastern Europe, and finally the Russians themselves cast off the Communists.  History’s bloodthirstiest regime fell without a shot in less than ten years, because of a show of backbone and resolve.
And some people know it:

Lech Walesa went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize and later become the freely elected President of a democratic Poland. In 2007, Walesa’s successor as President of Poland traveled to the Reagan Library to present Nancy Reagan, who accepted on behalf of her late husband, The Order of the White Eagle, the oldest and highest honor within the gift of the Polish people. Today one can visit Ronald Reagan Square in Krakow, a Reagan statue is planned for Warsaw and Reagan streets and parks dot the country. He is considered, in the words of the Polish president, the “architect of democracy.”

Compare and contrast:

This is a lesson that one realizes the Obama White House simply doesn’t have the courage to embrace. As over a million Iranians fill[ed] the streets of Tehran, the message from this President of the United States is that he is afraid to be seen as “meddling” — precisely the charge Reagan faced down from Brezhnev. Instead Obama backs away from standing up for freedom, saying (as if Iran were a free country): “It is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be. We respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran.” He does say he is “deeply troubled.”

As those Iranians who seek freedom are literally shot dead in the streets, Obama observes cautiously that “the democratic process, free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent — all those are universal values and need to be respected.” Instead of dealing with the mullahs of Iran in the fashion Reagan dealt with Brezhnev and the Polish Communist puppets, Obama refers deferentially to Ayatollah ali Khamenei, as the “Supreme Leader.”

And so inside a generation, American leadership has gone from embracing and pressing for freedom, to equivocating and waffling – and, worse, betraying it, allowing Vladimir Putin not only to use the symbol of Poland’s subjugation before the Soviets to deliver his message, but carrying Putin’s water for him.  Obama’s selling-out of Poland in the face of Putin’s pressure was the sort of thing that might make pragmatic sense to those diplomats more allied to “process” than to the goal of liberty…

…and it’s the sort of thing that wouldn’t have gotten on Ronald Reagan’s short list.

Um, No. He’ll fit right in.

Obama’s first dance at the U.N.

Gosh, my Democrat friends.  I apologize.

You were right.  Joe Wilson was wrong when he called the President a “liar” during his health-care pep rally two weeks ago.

Obama wasn’t lying.  He was pelting us with weasel words:

“Even though I do not believe we can extend coverage to those who are here illegally, I also don’t simply believe we can simply ignore the fact that our immigration system is broken,” Mr. Obama said Wednesday evening in a speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. “That’s why I strongly support making sure folks who are here legally have access to affordable, quality health insurance under this plan, just like everybody else.

Mr. Obama added, “If anything, this debate underscores the necessity of passing comprehensive immigration reform and resolving the issue of 12 million undocumented people living and working in this country once and for all.”

In other words; he won’t be giving healthcare to “illegals”, because anyone who can get across the Rio Grande or the St. Lawrence will be legal.

Republicans said that amounts to an amnesty, calling it a backdoor effort to make sure current illegal immigrants get health care.

“It is ironic that the president told the American people that illegal immigrants should not be covered by the health care bill, but now just days later he’s talking about letting them in the back door,” said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee.

So on behalf of all Republicans, I apologize.

The President isn’t a “liar”.  He’s a word-game-playing weasel.