Strange Monkey Doll

Barack’s in the basement – Washington Times:

According to Gallup’s April survey, Americans have a lower approval of Mr. Obama at this point than all but one president since Gallup began tracking this in 1969….  Ronald Reagan topped the charts in April 1981 with 67 percent approval. Following the Gipper, in order of popularity, were: Jimmy Carter with 63 percent in 1977; George W. Bush with 62 percent in 2001; Richard Nixon with 61 percent in 1969; and George H.W. Bush with 58 percent in 1989.

It’s probably more important where you finish that where you start. Bill Clinton had a rough start but ended high; GWB started high but ended low. So did Carter.

Overall though it seems that Americans are happy for the moment with President Obama. I’m torn as to whether this is a good thing. America certainly could use something to lift their spirits, and to the extent that the President has done that just by being elected, it’s a good thing.

The troubling part for me is that much of his popularity depends on an image that is in direct conflict with his behaviors and policies. In time the public will come to understand this, and then a more realistic assessment can be made.

I am not at all certain that knowing more will cause his popularity to fall. As Ross Douthat explains in today’s NYT, the idea that conservative ideas are popular and a more Cheneyesque approach would have saved us in the election is closer to fantasy than reality.

Dick Morris:

President Obama showed his hand this week when The New York Times wrote that he is considering converting the stock the government owns in our country’s banks from preferred stock, which it now holds, to common stock.

This seemingly insignificant change is momentous. It means that the federal government will control all of the major banks and financial institutions in the nation. It means socialism.

It’s not socialism though- he just wants the federal government to be able to control company management and policy of the banks. For their own good you know.

When Barack Obama was elected President, I was obviously no fan. Yet a majority of Americans- not to mention nearly all my friends and co-workers- enthusiastically supported the man they thought would wisely lead us to a new era of politics beyond pointless political bickering. I thought they were wrong, but I hoped that I was instead wrong, and that my observations in the year preceding the 2008 election were perhaps nothing more than ungracious partisan swipes.

From my point of view then, the developments of the last week in particular come as no surprise, but I have to admit I have feelings of betrayal and outrage regarding the release of these torture memos and the threat to prosecute certain officials – Republican officials only- for their role in morally difficult circumstances.

The man promised to get the country beyond the disputes of the Bush era. And he has betrayed that promise, and put the security of this country irresponsibly, irrevocably at risk. It’s a disaster, all the more so because so many Americans- well meaning, good intentioned people- will be utterly unaware of it, praising this decision even, until it’s too late. Even then, with an American city smoking in ruins, they will still try to blame Bush and the Republicans for inflaming the anger of those who seek to do us harm. Peter Hoekstra puts it well:

Last week, Mr. Obama argued that those who implemented this program should not be prosecuted — even though the release of the memos still places many individuals at other forms of unfair legal risk. It appeared that Mr. Obama understood it would be unfair to prosecute U.S. government employees for carrying out a policy that had been fully vetted and approved by the executive branch and Congress. The president explained this decision with these gracious words: “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

Then, in what is becoming a pattern for this administration, he changed his mind and decided that prosecuting Bush- era lawyers might be a good idea. I’m lucky that the rest of my life is busy and good because to contemplate the wrongness and hypocrisy of this approach could occupy me for months and months. It will no doubt occupy the attention of our media and nation no matter what my schedule, and I guarantee you that getting past politics is not going to be on anybody’s agenda. This is war, and as much as the Democrats might relish the idea of winning it, I wonder if they have really contemplated the results of what they have done.

George Tenet, who served as CIA director under Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, believes the enhanced interrogations program saved lives. He told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in April 2007: “I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us.“

To cast that aside at this time… words fail. It’s the triumph of the “weak, foolish and dangerously naive”.

Says this other WSJ editorial – study it carefully:

Mark down the date. Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is the moment that any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington ended. By inviting the prosecution of Bush officials for their antiterror legal advice, President Obama has injected a poison into our politics that he and the country will live to regret.

Policy disputes, often bitter, are the stuff of democratic politics. Elections settle those battles, at least for a time, and Mr. Obama’s victory in November has given him the right to change policies on interrogations, Guantanamo, or anything on which he can muster enough support. But at least until now, the U.S. political system has avoided the spectacle of a new Administration prosecuting its predecessor for policy disagreements. This is what happens in Argentina, Malaysia or Peru, countries where the law is treated merely as an extension of political power.

The criminalization of policy differences: the Democrats dream come true. It’s almost like decreasing our security is part of the plan. Even I am surprised by the depths of the irresponsibility on display.

UPDATE: That said, I’m not at all sure that actual trials will in fact take place, partially because of the logic outlined in this piece: 

The Left won sweeping control of the federal government in 1976, in the wake of Watergate, so a naive observer who believed in leftist sincerity would assume that they would move aggressively to root out the evil that had spread throughout the American military, intelligence services and government in general. It would be insane to leave lieutenants who started their careers committing war crimes on a “day-to-day basis” in the military so that 30 years later they could rise into the ranks of top generals. 

Instead, they dropped the war crimes allegations as quickly as they could and moved to protect people like John Kerry from prosecution from the many laws he’d broken. (Kerry was a naval reserve officer at the time he made his slanders. If he actually had evidence of crimes he had a legal duty to report the specifics to national and international authorities. If he didn’t actually have evidence then he was responsible for acts against the good order of the military. Either way, he was headed for prison.)  In the process they oh-so magnanimously included an open ended pardon for just about any war crime anyone may have committed in Indochina. How big of them!

Magnanimity had nothing to do with the pardons. The leftists knew that following through on prosecutions for war crimes would have revealed virtually all of the charges to be false. The American public would have seen the leftists as the cynical hypocrites they were, and people like John Kerry could have never become senators or run for the presidency. 

Obama was mentored by these same leftists. From the beginning, he cynically exploited slanders against the current generation of Americans fighting the War on Terror to whip up support for him on the far Left. Now that he has power and following through on his slanders would cost some or all of that power, he will betray the far Left just as his mentors did. 

Mercifully, this kind of rhetoric didn’t last long. But I know they’re still thinking it.

Watch the video. How can you not be outraged? Then again, in 10% of people pay 75% of the taxes- that means 90% are happy right! Welcome to Democracy in crisis! Democracy + Decadence = Disaster.

Here’s how: After years of borrowing too much money for houses and other things we can’t afford, we decide to demonstrate our “hope and change” as a nation by electing a man dedicated to “making hard choices”…. who promptly decides to borrow even more money- more money than has ever been borrowed in the history of this nation- to continue paying for all the houses AND the social programs we can’t afford on top of it, in perpetuity. We haven’t changed anything as a nation. We are on the same course as before, only this time we expect the government to bail us all out. God have mercy on us all.

We are as a nation, facing backwards towards the Clinton era, and back towards all the fantasies of the 1960’s that never really worked out, ignoring a great deal of the complexities of the world before us. All the liberal orthodoxies, all of the politically correct thinking that has been concocted in the Universities, propagated in the mass news media and entertainment industry and enforced in the Democratic party  in law where ever possible – all of this boiler plate liberal thinking is being trumpeted from every orifice of the Obama administration and being heralded as brave innovative thinking. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It’s just the same slogans and thought processes that have been in vogue since I was born, only now it’s running the entire country.

And there’s not a thing I can do about it. Luckily my life is great, or I’d really be having a hard time of it!