Mort Zuckerman dismisses Obama.

Ouch.

Obama clearly wishes to do good and means well.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, that’s pretty much the worst thing that you can say about a person in English.  It’s what you fall back on when you can’t credibly claim competence or experience for somebody.

Via Riehl World View.  Read the whole thing, although with a title like “World Sees Obama as Incompetent and Amateur” you almost don’t have to.  It is… instructive… to consider that it’s hard to come up with an ally whom we haven’t insulted in the last two years.  Canada’s upset over our trade shenanigans.  Great Britain feels like it’s being repeatedly kicked because of the President’s daddy issues.  India is wondering why the heck the White House isn’t interested in building on Bush’s outreach.  Israel’s visibly deciding that the American government is more likely to condemn Holocaust II than it is to prevent it.  Western Europe’s getting exasperated with our fiscal policy, Eastern Europe’s getting nervous at our willingness to let the Russians repossess them, and we even managed to tick off Japan over the Okinawa air base thing.  And don’t get me started on South America.   About the only ally that I can come up with as being still more or less unscathed by our foreign policy is maybe Australia.

Now watch: the President will get caught on tape sneering at [ yellow tail ], or something.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Confirmed: US to sue Arizona over SB1070.

Via Hot Air, este reportaje que el gobierno de los Estados Unidos va a llevar a las cortes el estado de Arizona sobre la Ley SB1070 de imigrantes ilegales. Aparentemente la Casa Blanca decidió primero divulgar esta noticia a los ecuatorianos, como parte de la visita de la Secretaria de Estado Hillary Clinton a Ecuador; por lo tanto es adecuado reportarlo en español. Depués de todo, no es como si la administración de Obama tenga antecedente ninguno de hablar claro en inglés*.

Thanks to Fausta for the translation: also check out her conversation with IBD’s Monica Showalter on Hillary Clinton being friendly with Ecuadorean President Correa in the first place.  That the American electorate rejects the idea of a federal challenge to the law by a two-to-one ratio is irrelevant to this administration, of course; given their tendency to mistake a tin ear for principles, that’s hardly surprising.  If Rasmussen put out a poll demonstrating that most Republicans and independents oppose the practice of people hitting each other in the groin, it’s highly likely that the White House would react by endorsing it for the 2010 midterms…

Moe Lane

Continue reading Confirmed: US to sue Arizona over SB1070.

#rsrh David Brooks hates him some technocrats.

He’s very indignant about what’s happening with the Obamaspill right now.

If you talk to elected leaders from Louisiana to Florida, they fill your ears with tales of incompetence — of advice that was not heeded, of red tape stifling effective operations, of local knowledge that was cast aside and trampled.

He is so indignant about this, in fact, that if this was the only thing that David Brooks had ever wrote you would be forgiven for concluding that David Brooks did not spend the last election cycle helping to get elected President the man who is now busily mucking up coordinating the cleanup.  Which is, indeed, so mucked up that local governments are preemptively announcing that they’re not going to wait for the Feds to do to them what the Feds have done to Louisiana.

And, believe me, I can spend the next three paragraphs cataloging all the ways that the government has mucked and is mucking up up the Gulf recovery effort.  So it’d be nice if you mentioned from time to time just how big your lapse in judgment was in 2008, Brooks. Particularly since, if things had gone the other way, this crisis would have been a perfect match for THAT WOMAN’S skill set and experience.

And doesn’t experience matter, Brooks?

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh David Brooks hates him some technocrats.

Democrats, signs, and hoisting on petards.

You get the feeling that possibly Democratic politicians are starting to get nervous about November: they’re starting to advertise anywhere that they can.  Third Base Politics has the saga of Mary Jo Kilroy (D, OH-15), who put up a big honking sign at her HQ, then had to bring it back down for a zoning violation.  Kilroy, of course, is the Congresswoman currently trying to lie about being an anti-TARP warrior; I’m noting this latest mistake by her campaign for three reasons.

  1. It reminds me of the saga of Alan Grayson (D, FL-08), who has likewise gone the route of the Really, Really Visible Sign in order to hide a deep-seated insecurity about the rapidly-approaching November elections (Cook rates both seats as Toss-Ups).
  2. There’s something deeply entertaining about watching advocates of more and bigger government get caught in red tape and onerous regulations (it’s always onerous when it happens to you).
  3. Ironically, it’s not like big signs will even help.  The problem isn’t lack of name recognition; the problem is too much recognition of the ‘D’ after their names.

Continue reading Democrats, signs, and hoisting on petards.