Tag: barack obama

Democrats stuck trying to duck Barack Obama without looking like they’re doing that.

Drink the pain. Drink:

The 2014 election is likely to give us many more moments of gut-wrenching agony and Democrats going all Apostle Peter on the president they universally supported when elected in 2008. Members of the White House political team will grit their teeth and ask low-level campaign staffers if, you know, it would be OK for the commander-in-chief to show up. They will be told to call back in a few days. Often, they will be told, “No thanks, but send money.”

This won’t console the candidates, but they are not the first to find themselves trapped between their voters and an unpopular president. In 1998 and in 2006, both the second midterm years of struggling presidents, lots of candidates agonized over whether to let the most powerful man in the world land his plane near them.

Continue reading Democrats stuck trying to duck Barack Obama without looking like they’re doing that.

Barack Obama opines on border crisis… nowhere near where the border crisis actually is.

Not that the news will mention that:

Let me give you some perspective. Eyeballing a map of Texas, the closest border from Austin looks to be Del Rio. That’s reasonable, sure?

Texas

  Continue reading Barack Obama opines on border crisis… nowhere near where the border crisis actually is.

Barack Obama is messing up by the numbers when it comes to the border crisis.

The White House is making a very bad mistake when it comes to their attitude towards the border, as witnessed by this interview snippet featuring DEMOCRATIC Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas. Background is, somebody from the White House called to complain to Cuellar about his call for the White House to do more about the current border crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhXcrkS4m98

“Who called you?” [Fox & Friends] host Brian Kilmeade asked.

“We’ll just leave it like that,” Cuellar responded.

“Did they tell you to pipe down?” Kilmeade pressed again.

“We’ll just leave it like that,” the congressman repeated. “But notice what I’m doing: I’m still talking about it.”

Continue reading Barack Obama is messing up by the numbers when it comes to the border crisis.

The Left is using racist slurs about Barack Obama again.

I wonder: don’t any of these people realize that we’ve noticed that the only time – the only time – people feel comfortable referencing Barack Obama’s race as a supposed negative is when it’s a progressive helpfully (insert air quotes here) ‘defending’ the President? White progressives, too. Usually white, male progressives, at that.

Seriously, the veneer is pretty danged thin at this point:

Continue reading The Left is using racist slurs about Barack Obama again.

No, an Obama Presidential Library/outhouse float is not racist. …*Duh*.

Sometimes, the Left’s soft bigotry of lowered expectations isn’t actually all that soft.

I’m going to change it up a little and show you this comparison picture first…

presidential-libraries

…because I want people to understand precisely how STUPID – and unfortunately revealing – this latest nonsense on stilts is: Continue reading No, an Obama Presidential Library/outhouse float is not racist. …*Duh*.

White House debating whether to ally with… God help us… Syria.

You have got to be… kidding me.

There’s a battle raging inside the Obama administration about whether the United States ought to push away from its goal of toppling Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and into a de facto alliance with the Damascus regime to fight ISIS and other Sunni extremists in the region.

As President Obama slowly but surely increases the U.S. military presence on the ground in Iraq, his administration is grappling with the immediate need to stop the ISIS advance and push for a political solution in Baghdad. The 3 1/2-year grinding civil war is Syria has been put on a back burner for now. Some officials inside the administration are proposing that the drive to remove Assad from power, which Obama announced as U.S. policy in 2012, be set aside, too. The focus, these officials argue, should instead be on the region’s security and stability. Governments fighting for survival against extremists should be shored up, not undermined.

Continue reading White House debating whether to ally with… God help us… Syria.

Why Barack Obama won’t just unilaterally fund access to abortifacients.

In the course of a not-entirely-unfair piece by Time magazine that makes it clear that the Obama administration has decided to play partisan politics with the Hobby Lobby decision*, the magazine article noted something interesting.  At issue is the centerpiece of the ruling – that companies are not actually required to violate their owners’ religious principles by paying for abortifacients – and the funny thing here is that the government never really had to seek a ruling in the first place:

Legal observers say it would not be difficult for the Obama Administration to resolve the situation unilaterally. The Department of Health and Human Services has already taken unilateral executive action to ensure that women employed by religious nonprofits get contraception coverage in cases where the employer declines to pay. “There was nothing in the statute that specifically allowed them to create the exemption for non-profit organizations so I don’t see why they couldn’t extend that to for-profit corporations,” said Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University and an expert on the Affordable Care Act’s regulations. “I don’t know why they couldn’t do it themselves.”

Two answers to that: first, then the Democrats couldn’t fundraise on the issue. Second, if the administration decided to fund procedures that an extremely large swath of the population considers to be abortifacients then they’d be in for several more exquisitely painful months in the public disapproval barrel.  Better by far to send it to Congress, let it die there, then blame it all on the Republicans.  And, of course, fundraise on the issue. Continue reading Why Barack Obama won’t just unilaterally fund access to abortifacients.

Sure, Hillary Clinton should promise to fulfill Barack Obama’s legacy!

I don’t really want* to fisk this article on how Hillary Clinton should run on a platform of being Barack Obama’s third term – she totally should, by the way – but it’s hard not to fisk when somebody leads off with a sentence this interruptible.  So let me just interject, the one time:

Conventional wisdom has it that President Obama’s middling poll numbers will be a drag on Hillary Clinton’s presumed march toward the presidency.

…Actually, conventional wisdom has it that President Obama’s second term poll numbers are awful, are likely to continue to be so, and are already notably below average for Presidents halfway through their second term. That’s because conventional wisdom knows that Gallup has a website where it keeps track of such things. Continue reading Sure, Hillary Clinton should promise to fulfill Barack Obama’s legacy!

So Eisenhower- sorry, Obama – is going to send advisors to South Vietnam – sorry, Iraq.

Temporarily, to be sure.

The White House is considering sending a small number of American special forces soldiers to Iraq in an urgent attempt to help the government in Baghdad slow the nation’s rampant Sunni insurgency, U.S. officials said Monday.

While President Barack Obama has explicitly ruled out putting U.S. troops into direct combat in Iraq, the plan under consideration suggests he would be willing to send Americans into a collapsing security situation for training and other purposes.

Mind you, sending advisers and trainers is not something that I am against doing.  Then again, I was against pulling out our troops in Iraq in the first place, largely because it was far too early to leave and I figured that we’d just have to go back.  Which is what is appearing to be happening, here.  And if you think that I’m going to pass up this opportunity to remind the least-historically ignorant of the Left about their own misty-hued past via noting the parallels between this situation and the one in South Vietnam… well, I’m not. This is how it starts, ye Democrats.  Have fun kicking yet another one of your principles in the testicles a few times.

Via

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: You can, I suppose, make the argument that the Democrats will actually fight tooth and nail any reintroduction of American troops in Iraq. That argument reminds me of a Dorothy Parker poem:

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.

The real question is, are Democratic politicians done with Barack Obama?

I don’t often do this, but I feel that this Hill article about how much Barack Obama hates Washington, wants to leave it, and doesn’t like hanging out with all the other Democrats is missing a couple of key paragraphs at the end.  I intend to now provide them.

Barack Obama’s detachment from, and disdain of, Washington DC reportedly concerns many Democrats, particularly those running for re-election this year.  While the President continues to raise funds for the Democratic party, it is unclear how much campaigning he plans to do for at-risk candidates – or, indeed, how much campaigning those candidates want him to do.  As former Democrat (and current online Republican contributor to a major conservative website) remarked, “Going into 2010 Barry’s best assurance to candidates was that they had him in their corner.  So they [Democratic Members of Congress] trusted him.  And they got clubbed like baby harp seals for it.  Now the President’s best assurance will be, what? That he’ll stay holed up in Washington?”

Polling suggests that this may be a smart strategy.  Today’s RCP average shows that President Obama has a favorable/unfavorable rating of 42/54.  By comparison, former President George W. Bush’s comparable daily numbers in 2006 were 38/57: while President Obama enjoys a slightly higher amount of regard, many question whether his presence on the campaign trail in battleground states would be more welcomed by Democrats, or Republicans.  This may add some poignancy to the President’s choice to stay out of the limelight: it may be the best chance the Democratic party has to retain control of the Senate.

…or something like that.

Via Instapundit.

Moe Lane (crosspost)