We knew it was coming because the situation was so clear. Congressman Paul Ryan introduced a bold plan to deal with out of control government spending and the Democrats had no credible plan of their own. So what does one do in a case like that? Lie, smear, distort, and scare the uninformed into thinking that we should shut up and surrender our liberties to the government. But the level of the latest lies is remarkable if only because of how shameless it is.
Bias
It wasn’t long after the Paul Ryan budget was released that the disinformation Democrats began trumpeting seniors being starved, being unable to afford health care, and the usual demogogic scare tactics. But doctors are dropping coverage, the key slices of the pie above are growing much faster than inflation, and the Democrats have no plan other than the age old cut benefits (reimburse doctors less) and increase taxes, just enough to kick the can down the road for someone else to deal with. Congressman Ryan had the guts to come up with a plan to actually fix the system by giving seniors a choice and they seem to like the idea. Why?
It seemed an unlikely place. But then so was Gettysburg. If you asked anyone at about the time the Tea Party started if Wisconsin would be a major battleground, I don’t think they would have agreed. But in the last few days, a new Republican governor has taken on the public unions and they have fought back with a vengeance. It is a battle they can little afford to lose.
On October 17, 2010 members of TeaParty365 and Media Matters gathered in front of the New York Times headquarters and later in the day at the headquarters of NBC to protest the liberal distortions of those and other main stream media outlets.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fCL_o-WhFo&hd=1
It is interesting to note the tea party members who can be seen (Chinese, black, young white female) are not what the main stream media keep telling us make up the tea parties, while the liberal who stops to curse at the protest is an old white guy. The mainstream media did come to see what was going on and interviewed the organizers of the event as well as this correspondent, but seemed bored and disappointed that some self fulfillling controversy didn’t break out. Attempts to find any footage of their filming after the fact were fruitless.
In his resignation letter, Hal Lewis, writes nostalgically about his sixty-seven year association with the American Physical Society. He paints the picture of the early years as being a pure love of science and no real chance to become wealthy in the career choice of a physicist. All of that has changed and there is no more glaring example of that than the expert with no scientific training, Al Gore, leading the parade. Here is part of his letter.
When 300,000-500,000 of your closest friends, depending on who is doing the estimating, show up for a rally on the Washington Mall you would think it was somewhat newsworthy, no? Of course it is, that’s why the New York Times published the story on page fifteen. If you were walking by a newsstand and glanced at the front page, you wouldn’t have know that a half million of your fellow citizens got together with Glenn Beck to restore honor in America. The front page would entice you with:
- Graft-Fighting Prosecutor Fired in Afghanistan
- For Obama, Steep Learning Curve as Chief in Time of War
- Upstarts Chip Away at Power of Feudal Pakistani Landlords
- Years Later, No Magic Bullet Against Alzheimer’s Disease
- In Hard Times, One New Ban (Double-Wide)
I guess our friends at the times couldn’t find any fabricated stories of someone shouting the “N-word” at Dr. Martin Luther King’s niece Alveda King, who was one of the featured speakers, to elevate the story to the front page. Perhaps it would have been too embarrassing to mention on the front page that Al Sharpton’s counter-demonstration where “several hundred people packed a football field at Paul Laurance Dunbar High School to stage a rally commemorating Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” Yesterday, you would have thought both rallies were the same size with crowd estimates of several thousand for each. Perhaps this shows the true value of racial politics today. America is tired of the race baiting and the false charges. President Obama was elected with hope and change to become the post-racial leader of the country. It appears the country has moved on without his leadership.
In another piece in the Times two Progressive women pine for a “Palin of Our Own”, to win the hearts and minds of America. The problem is America doesn’t want to listen to Janeane Garofalo or Joy Behar sneeringly spouting off about Sarah Palin. As far as any women Progressive politicians, who is there other than Hillary Clinton and we’ve seen that act and passed on it.
In another piece titled “Party Down”, Marc Ambinder tells us about the anti-incumbent mood, “Unlike parties, which often recruit candidates who would appeal to the average voter in a general election, these activists care only about nominating the person who accurately represents their own views and frustrations.” Appeal to the average voter? The problem with the Republican Party in the past is that they have been listening to the main stream media reports about who the “average voter” is. So they have elected so called “moderates” who get their clocks cleaned by real Progressives in the election. The left snickered in their sleeves while growing the government into the bloated, ineffective, couch potato that it is. It alarms those on the left that the Tea Party movement has changed all this and tone deaf incumbents are getting tossed left and right. They have unmasked the average voter to be conservative and by measuring candidates against a conservative yardstick, they have struck a chord with the voters who have long felt ignored and disenfranchised. Now those voters are energized and can’t wait to get to the polls. Reason for panic on the left, indeed.
To say today’s “Restoring Honor” event in Washington will be historic is an understatement. Gauging by the biased reporting on the news pages of the New York Times and the seething, sputtering outrage from Bob Herbert and Charles Blow on the Op-Ed pages should give you a pretty good indication of the focus this event will garner.
Kate Zernike opens her report, titled “Where Dr. King Stood, Tea Party Claims His Mantle”, saying it is the ultimate “thumb in the eye” to stand on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” in the place he stood and talk about restoring honor. How dare he? Isn’t that what racists said of Dr. King when he stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial with these words?
“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.”
Ms. Zernike reminds us of the case of Shirley Sherrod, who was fired by the Obama administration when a videotape of her redemptive speech about how she first discriminated against a white farmer but later helped him was shown across the Internet. She writes about video tape being heavily edited by failing to show how she mended her ways and helped that farmer. But Ms. Zernike doesn’t finish the story where later in her speech Ms. Sherrod says that those who opposed Obama’s health care plan had racist motives because President Obama is black. Ms. Sherrod’s redemption is far from complete.
She then says that the Tea Party’s talk of states’ rights raises the specter of Jim Crow and George Wallace. But it was the federal government that passed and enforced the Fugitive Slave laws and it was independent states of the north, exercising their states’ rights, who supported the Underground Railroad and refused to actively assist returning slaves to the South. So states’ rights cut both ways.
She concludes that, “Even if Tea Party members are right that any racist signs are those of mischief-makers, even if Glenn Beck had chosen any other Saturday to hold his rally, it would be hard to quiet the argument about the Tea Party and race.” It’s hard to quiet the argument because those on the left keep falsely making it. They cannot prove racism so they feel that by repeating often enough, they can make it stick.
I was at a street fair manning a booth for a Tea Party organization this spring. An African-American teacher approached us tentatively to ask what we were about. I asked her if she wanted the rumors or the truth and she opted for the truth. I told her that we were a policy based organization focusing on accountable government, fiscal responsibility, limited federal government and following the Constitution. She said she didn’t know any of that, she got e-mails from Moveon.org all the time and before leaving she signed our e-mail list. When the truth reaches the ears of people over the screeching of the New York Times and the main stream media, it is generally well received. The racial of mix of the Tea Party rallies will change over time when we can speak to the folks one on one without the lies of the left.
The Opionators
Bob Herbert begins his Op-Ed piece in a very open minded fashion, “America is better than Glenn Beck. For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure.” Thank you for sharing that, Bob, but there’s no need to pull punches here.
“There is a great deal of hatred and bigotry in this country, but it does not define the country. The daily experience of most Americans is not a bitter experience and for all of our problems we are in a much better place on these matters than we were a half century ago.”
So why to you and your fellow travelers throw down the race card every time someone disagrees with a policy, if they are not of the same race? Object to ObamaCare, that’s racism. Object to the stimulus, racism. Wanting Obama to fail to turn America into a socialist states, racism straight up. Yes there is hatred and bigotry in this country, but it is primarily coming from the left.
Not to be outdone in the outrage department, Charles Blow titled his Op-Ed piece, “I Had a Nightmare.” Mr. Blow said the following, “I find it curious that many of the same people who object so strenuously to the Islamic cultural center proposed for Lower Manhattan, many on the grounds that it is inappropriate and disrespectful, are virtually silent on the impropriety and disrespect inherent in Beck’s giving a speech on the anniversary of King’s address.” This would be an excellent point, if he could point to 3,000 blacks that Glenn Beck has murdered in the name of restoring honor. But Mr. Blow can make no such connection, so his analogy to the Ground Zero mosque falls flat. Curious indeed.
After venting his spleen, Mr. Blow suggests we re-read Dr. King’s speech “and to recommit ourselves to the nobility of righteous pursuits.” Let’s do that.
“But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.” –“I Have a Dream Speech”
How do the actions of the left, throwing down the race card at every turn, accusing everyone who disagrees with Barack Obama to have racism at the core of that disagreement comport with not “drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred”? It arrogantly assumes that it is impossible not to see the glorious benefit of the government running every last aspect of our lives, therefore the only reason to disagree has to be racism. With regard to violence, where do we see the violent demonstrations on the left or the right? Breaking windows, looting, SEIU members beating down street vendors for selling anti-Obama buttons, etc. are all on the left. When the police show up at rallies organized by the left they show up in riot gear, at Tea Party rallies the mounted police have to decide whether to let people pet their horses or not.
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” –“I Have a Dream Speech”
Didn’t America elect an African American President of the United States with 53% of the vote? More than voted for Clinton either time, or Jimmy Carter? Barack Obama wasn’t elected by minority votes alone.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” –“I Have a Dream Speech”
Who more closely shares that dream, Glenn Beck, or those on the left who insist that forty years after Dr. Martin Luther King gave his speech that blacks can’t get into college or get a job without affirmative action; that black families have not been destroyed by government programs like welfare that drove fathers away; that government run schools that can’t graduate its students are far better for blacks than school vouchers that will let them escape those hellholes? Dr. King’s speech says nothing about racial preferences. Dr. King’s speech talks about color blindness. Dr. King’s speech says give us an equal chance. Glenn Beck believes that. Those on the left do not. It is those on the left who believe African Americans cannot compete without more government programs to help them. Glenn Beck believe they can succeed if government gets out of their way and if the left stops the lies of dependency that hold them back. It is the New York Times, Charles Blow, Bob Herbert who wrap themselves in racial division and then say, “Why can’t we come together?” If you want us to come together, stop standing in the way.
Republicans have to learn to stop fighting by the Marquis of Queensbury rules, while Democrats, bite, kick, pull hair, scratch and hit below the belt. Yes, Christ told us to turn the other cheek, but he also overturned tables, formed a whip out of cords and drove the money changers from the temple. In other words, sometimes you have the hit the bully hard between the eyes before he learns to stop being a bully.
So if the Republicans regain control of Congress in November, they should open the new Congress in January with detailed hearings on what happened to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and don’t pull any punches. By that I mean if they need to put Andrew Cuomo in the witness chair, even if he is the governor of New York, which he probably will be, then they should do so. It’s time to stop playing patty-cake.
For all the hoopla of the Dodd-Frank Act, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were left out of the new regulations. Oh, we’ll get to those later. Okay, let’s get to them with the Republicans in charge. Let’s expose how it was our government that got us into the housing mess and let’s do this before the Democrats re-write history and paper over their culpability in the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. It’s time to put the big lie to “it’s all Bush’s fault and Republican policies.”
The papering over has already started by none other than Franklin Raines the former head of Fannie Mae who received bonuses of over $90 million while at the helm of Fannie Mae and was also charged with cooking the books that helped him receive those bonuses. He reached a settlement with the SEC and gave back about $1.8 million from the profits in the sale of Fannie Mae stock and gave up $5.3 million in future benefits related to his pension. But he essentially kept the rest, what the Wall Street Journal called a “paltry settlement.”
Mr. Raines claims the demise of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to which taxpayers have already coughed up $145 billion, was due to bad credit decisions made after he left the firm. To put it in his own words:
“The Journal had been warning for years that the on-balance sheet portfolios of Fannie and Freddie would lead to their demise. Mr. Carney suggests that excessive leverage was the culprit. Unfortunately, neither of these were involved. Nope. Just bad credit judgments. Decisions made, by the way, while operating under close regulatory scrutiny.”
According to the Wall Street Journal “What he doesn’t say is that Fan and Fred had a political and legal mandate to support low-income housing.” To meet this mandate which had increasing goals each year, Fannie and Freddie had to cast a wider net to find these borrowers and the wider they cast the net the lower their standards had to be. Thus more creative types of mortgages were created to lower the bar such as, interest only loans. This scheme would continue to work as long as housing prices kept rising but that could not go on forever. When the music stopped a lot of people were left standing without chairs and we all lost. People’s credit ratings were destroyed, mortgage securities were worth far less than face value, people walked away from houses, and taxpayers were forced to pick up another “too big to fail” enterprise. By the way, where in the Constitution does it authorize the federal government to get involved in helping people buy houses?
The secret veil put in place by the main stream media has been lifted. With the Internet and the bloggers and cable television and talk radio, the main stream media can no longer keep information that does not comport with their agenda hidden from the American people. The American people are energized and informed but that may not last long after the election, if we don’t continue to engage them. Uncovering the true “swamp” that is our federal government and draining it should begin by letting the sun shine in. So let’s do away with the good ol’ boy politics of not rocking the boat when you gain control so that they won’t rock the boat when they get it back. If we don’t have a new class of non-incumbents who are willing to go to Washington and clean it up, really clean it up, we need to get rid of them and put new people in their place. If that means replacing Republicans with better Republicans or Democrat incumbents with better Democrats, so be it. We have to end the process of only being able to choose between two pathetic life time politicians who have never lived in the real world.
The Democrats like to point to the Clinton presidency as proof of their fiscal responsibility. It was a period of strong growth, balanced budgets, and prosperity. They then point to the Bush presidency, all eight years of it, and deride it for deficits, and ultimately a very severe financial crisis. But it is worth taking a moment to recall that the federal government is made up of three co-equal branches of government with built in checks and balances. The Congress is not subordinate to the president and it does not work for him. It is an equal branch of government that checks and balances the power of the presidency. For the purpose of this discussion, I will leave out the third branch, the judiciary.
Despite the famous 1992 Clinton campaign slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” the recession had already ended in March 1991. When Clinton took office he had a Democratic Congress and he pushed through a massive tax increase in 1993 without a single Republican vote. We know what happened to Congress in 1994, the Republicans took over for the first time in 40 years. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich tried to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution, which was included in the Republicans’ Contract with America. It passed in the House but failed by one vote in the Senate. After losing this round, Gingrich met with the Republican leadership and put forth the idea of acting as if the amendment had passed and just start submitting balanced budgets. They succeeded in the last three years of the Clinton presidency to produce budget surpluses and decrease the national debt. This included a tax cut by the Republican Congress in 1997, and the economy grew much stronger after the Republican takeover of Congress than under an all Democratic government.
In the 1996 election, the Democrats regained control of the Congress under Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Up until that point the economy had grown steadily under President Bush despite two wars. With Bush in the White House and the Republicans in control of Congress we had tax cuts and seven years of economic growth. In December of 2007 the economy went into recession, almost one year after the Democrats regained control. Now with a Democrat in the White House, and the Democrats in control of Congress we are looking at massive growth in government, a whopping tax increase bearing down on us that will hit on January 1, 2011, and a growing debt that may eventually bankrupt us.
So what is all this talk about eight years of failed Republican policy? Under Clinton and a Democrat Congress it was two years of a tax increase and modest growth. Under Clinton and a Republican Congress it was six years of tax cuts, budget surpluses and strong economic growth. Hmmm….same president, different parties controlling Congress. Under Bush we had seven years of growth and tax cuts with a Republican Congress. Under Bush and a Democratic Congress, recession, fiscal crisis. Hmmm…same president, different parties controlling Congress.
But don’t expect honesty on the campaign trail from the Democrats. It’s just not the Chicago way.
The Sherrod incident is the latest in a long line of shoot from the lip misfires from the Obama administration, from the president on down. Here is a review of some of the more egregious of them:
- President Obama, without waiting for the facts says the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department “acted stupidly,” in an incident involving African American professor Henry Louis Gates. A picture from the “beer summit” shows the president confidently striding toward the cameras while in the background Sergeant Crowley takes Professor Gates arm to help him negotiate the stairs, as Professor Gates walks with a cane. Racist?
- With 13 dead Americans at the hands of terrorist Nidal Hasan, Janet Napolitano comes out and claims, “The system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days.” A few days later she would eat those ridiculous words.
- Not to be outdone by herself, after another terrorist attempt on our soil in Times Square, Secretary Napolitano quickly came out to label the attempt a “one-off” and the suspect a lone wolf. As the investigation picked up steam there were all sorts links to terror groups in the Middle East.
- When the president of Honduras tried to override term limits and become the next Hugo Chavez, the Honduran government enforced its laws against the changes that its president was trying to illegally implement. The Obama administration immediately labeled the legitimate actions of the democratically elected Honduran government a coup. Hillary Clinton’s State department cancelled the visas of all members of the Honduran Supreme Court. Not to be intimidated by Chavez, Castro, or Obama, Honduras stood its ground. The Congressional Research Service looked at the Honduran Constitution and the actions of its government and found that the government acted properly and within the law.
- When Arizona reached the end of its rope and could not get the Obama administration to enforce the law on the border, they passed a law to give their police greater flexibility to determine the legal status of people stopped for another police matter. The Obama administration immediately called the law unconstitutional. When asked if they read the massive 10 page law, that’s right 10 pages, both Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary Janet Napolitano (yes, her again) both said they hadn’t read it before declaring it unconstitutional. This administration pushes through legislation running thousands of pages each and they can’t find time to read a ten page law before condemning it.
- Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod gave a speech to the NAACP where she spoke about her transformation from having a racial bias in a decision she made 24 years ago, to today where she tries to treat all individuals regardless of race. Only the first part of the story was headed toward the airwaves, the part about her past discrimination, and before the news hit the air she was fired by the Obama administration. Had they watched the whole tape before acting, they wouldn’t be swimming in apologies right now.
Is this just the lack of experience or does the Obama administration need adult supervision? They jump to these wild conclusions and then end up backtracking days later. After eighteen months in office you would think they would have learned by now how to govern.
Another case without as quick a trigger is the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. After taking office President Obama appointed a commission, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to investigate the root causes of the crisis. A prudent person might say, let’s hear what the commission finds out and then write legislation to address those root causes. With months more to go before that commission’s work will be done, we have another 2,000+ page bill coming out of Congress and signed by the president to put new regulations in place on the financial services industry. Why the rush? Wouldn’t it be better to fix the real problems rather than what Chris Dodd and Barney Frank think are the problems and let them paper over their own culpability in the creating the crisis? Why were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac excluded? In one of the hearings before the commission an argument was made that AIG did not have to be bailed out, that there were measures in place to ride out the crisis and that in the long run their policies would be fine. Whether that is true or not, will have to wait for the final report, but the “just don’t stand there, do something,” mentality is disconcerting. I certainly hope we are never faced with another Cuban Missile Crisis with this team in place.
