"The Audacity of Oops"

Satirist and former Republican Christopher Buckley voted for Obama. I don't think he'll do that again. Read Buckley's preview of the State of the Union speech tomorrow night. Its funny.

The Day ObamaCare Died

(We can only hope).

Lyrics by Rush Limbaugh's house satirist Paul Shanklin

War on the Left: Aftermath of Massachusetts

Even before all the votes were counted in Scott Brown's special election victory over the Democrat machine's Senate candidate in Massachusetts, some Senate Democrats who value their political survival more than Barack Obama's ideological agenda ran for the middle. Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania signaled a desire to turn away from the toxic issue of healthcare and towards jobs creation in order to appeal to independents like those who voted heavily for Scott Brown. Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland expressed similar sentiments, suggesting that Congress should move on to more do-able issues with clearly defined "finish lines."

Indiana Senator Evan Bayh was blunter than most. He famously said that "if you lose Massachusetts and that’s not a wake-up call, there’s no hope of waking up.” Bayh also worried some in his party would be in denial about the results, which would "lead to even further catastrophe" for the Democrats.

For a minue and a half I worried that the Obama Administration, Democrat strategists and Congressional leaders might heed the warnings of Bayh, et al. and plot a "course correction," as the pundits call it. I knew that in the run up to the Massachusetts election administration insiders promised that whatever the results Obama would "double down" and move his agenda forward. But I figured that was political posturing designed to buck up their voter base, and that in the cold light of day Obama's advisers would be channeling Dick Morris, the godfather of Bill Clinton's "triangulation" strategy of 1995-96.

I needn't have worried. Even as the squishy moderate Democrats headed for the hills, other voices called for a "damn the torpedoes" strategy. South Carolina Democrat Party Chair Carol Fowler called for a greater effort to"hold Republicans accountable for objecting to the Democrats plans." The Democrat governor of Delaware cited a failure on the Democrat's part to "be responsive," and called for the party to "do something." Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell--typecast by the media as a pragmatist--called those claiming that the loss of the Ted Kennedy seat was a defeat for the President's agenda as "just wrong." Oh happy day, I thought, they are this stupid.

The piece de resistance was President Obama himself telling ABC's George Stephanopolous the night after the election that what swept Scott Brown into office was the same populist anger that swept him--Obama--into office a year earlier. According to the president, anger at what has been happening to the country the past eight years--that would be the Bush years--accounted for the Republican victory in Massachusetts. Get it?

Within days a meme developed among the liberal chattering classes. The problem isn't Obama's policies, they said, it's his style and demeanor. Words like "narrative" and "messaging" began to appear with remarkable frequency and consistency. John Heilemann in New York magazine suggested that Obama failed to "provide a compelling explanatory framework" for his ambitious policy agenda. If only the White House had produced an "overarching argument at once coherent and compelling" to the American public, all would be coming up roses today.

Columnist E.J. Dionne asserted that by failing to offer a "coherent Democrat narrative" independents were "confused" by Republican mischaracterizations of Obama's goals. Obama's "soothing pragmatism" is in direct contradiction to his desire for sweeping political change. Dionne's prescription for undoing the damage is for Obama to resolve his inner contradictions and "come out fighting."

Other liberals took up the populist "fight" cudgel. William Greider of the leftist magazine "The Nation," advised Obama, among other things to "clear out the cobwebs" of his policy aspirations and take on the establishment. Go toe-to-toe with the political forces opposing you, lectured Greider, and urge the people to join you in "the fight."

By Friday of last week, Obama had swallowed this line of reasoning whole. In Ohio, striking a defiant "no retreat, no surrender" tone, according to the Seattle Times, he promised to "never stop fighting" for his domestic agenda of jobs, homes, education, and banking overhaul. He acknowledged the "fear and anxiety" that his healthcare legislation had created, but insisted that it has to pass nonetheless.

And on Sunday, Obama sent three of his top officials to the Sunday talk shows to demonstrate to the American people just how out of touch the president is. Robert Gibbs, the press spokesman, insisted that we ignore the outcome of the Massachusetts Senate race and instead look at exit polls that suggest Obama's agenda is still popular. David Axelrod, the strategist, asserted that the voters of Massachusetts "don't want us to walk away from health care" and want Scott Brown to not be obstructionist." Valerie Jarrett, the president's close pal from Chicago, said that the Massachusetts results show not that the president needs to change his priorities but that people are "sick and tired of Washington not delivering for them."

Its not yet been a week since the political earthquake in Massachusetts rocked the nation's entire political calculus. It is possible that Team Obama's new faux populism will soon fade to conciliation and compromise once the political fallout settles. But all signs suggest that the Obama administration will only increase the pressure on Congress to pass his radical agenda, even if this means turning his guns on members of his own party.

If Obama pursues this course he will become increasingly isolated from the rank and file of his own party, who will pay for his hubris at the ballot box this November. As even Nancy Pelosi is signaling, Members don't have the stomach for more death-defying feats of sausage-making after Massachusetts. The question is how Obama will react when he cannot persuade a recalcitrant Congress to pass any significant items of his agenda.

Some predict he will finally capitulate and adopt a more centrist governing strategy to save his party from ruin in November, but I am not convinced. Barack Obama is petulant, arrogant and shallow, and I think he will lash out at those--especially fellow Democrats- who stand in the way of progress, as he understands it. He will attempt to obtain by fiat what he cannot achieve through consensus, testing the limits of executive power.

This will throw Democrats into an even deeper crisis than they are in now, which is obviously good news for Republican electoral prospects. But it may also do real damage to the country in the process, which is not good news for the country.

Abe Foxman Doesn't Speak for ME.

On last Wednesday's Rush Limbaugh program--which I heard in its entirety as I was driving home from Tennessee--Rush touted Norman Podhoretz's excellent new book Why Jews are Liberals. As the title suggests, Podhoretz's book attempts to answer a question that is often asked of Jewish conservatives by non-Jewish ones. Rush--an admirer of the estimable Mr. Podhoretz--distills his analysis down to its essentials: Liberal Jews are liberals first, last and always, and their political liberalism trumps all their other "isms," including Judaism.

(I would add that liberal Jews, being in the main irreligious, have filled the void left by lack of religious belief with a secular catechism: the belief in man's ability, through the force of government, to solve the ills of mankind. Many of these Jews are woefully mis-educated in normative Judaism, and have been taught that "social justice" is the primary avenue for fulfilling the Jewish ideal of "tikkun olam"--repairing the world. No one doubts the purity of motive of these Jews; but the result has been--in my view--a self-destructive allegiance to liberalism (and the Democrat Party) that has become synonymous with Judaism since the days of FDR's New deal.)

Rush wondered whether Jews--often self-labeling as "independents"--had been a factor in Scott Brown's decisive win over Martha Coakley for the "Ted Kennedy" Senate seat in Massachusetts. Independents broke for Brown almost three-to-one, and Rush opined that if Jewish independents had voted in the same proportion as independents as a whole, that would be an astonishing political sea change. Rush suggested that Jews--who are well represented in the worlds of finance and banking--might have been antagonized into voting for Brown by Obama's new War on Wall Street.

Apparently this was a bridge too far for Abe Foxman, the long-time national director of the Anti-Defamation League, one of the nation's oldest Jewish activists groups. Foxman issued a press release accusing Rush of anti-semitism, or something close to it. Foxman seems to think that Rush was playing to his audience of bigots and Jew-haters who buy into the ancient and persistent stereotypes that Jewish bankers control not just the money but even much of the U.S. and global government. Foxman then demanded an apology from Rush.

Foxman is either an idiot or a liar. Anyone who has listened to Rush knows that he is a faithful and passionate friend of Israel and the Jewish people. He has often taken on the Left for their growing intolerance of Israel and their blind acceptance of the Palestinian anti-Jewish narrative. Foxman no doubt knows this, and intentionally took Rush out of context to gin up his own base of Rush-haters.

As Norman Podhoretz points out in a post at Contentions, Commentary Magazine's main blog, Rush was suggesting that Obama--by attacking Wall Street--might be the one playing on the fears of anti-Jewish bigots for whom "banker" is code for 'Jewish.' Podhoretz says Foxman "has a long history of seeing an anti-semite under every conservative bed." Foxman has "blinded himself to the fact that anti-Semitism has largely been banished from the Right in the past 40 years, and that it has found a hospitable new home on the Left, especially where Israel is concerned." Podhoretz says Mr. Foxman's charge of anti-semitism against so openly loyal a friend of the Jews as Rush is "chutzpah," and states that it is Foxman who owes Limbaugh an apology.

I must disagree with Podhoretz. It doesn't take "chutzpah" for Foxman to ingratiate himself with his elite supporters and contributors by calling a conservative a Jew hater. It just takes a willingness to foment hatred against conservatives, which the ADL under Foxman has often shown. Late last year the ADL published an outrageous report entitled "Rage Grows in America: Anti-Government Conspiracies," which essentially casts the Tea Party movement and populist anger at government spending and meddling in the free market as a dangerous lurch into right-wing anti-government extremism and violence akin to the white supremacists of the militia movement.

I would link to the "Rage" report here, if I could find it. Both that report and the diatribe against Rush have mysteriously vanished from the ADL's website, although the front page of the website refers to both. Excerpts from the report have found their way onto various "Tea Party" websites, including this one. Foxman lays the blame for the "dangerous" new political environment squarely at the feet of talk radio hosts like Rush and Glenn Beck, who broadcast "extreme sentiments, including Nazi imagery, racist imagery, and imagery that implicitly or explicitly promotes violence." Foxman's report seems almost as if it were ghost written by the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress, which is at the forefront of the campaign to rid the country of the scourge of talk radio under the banner of...wait for it...free speech.

As a Jew, a conservative, and a fan of both Limbaugh and Beck, I am appalled--though not surprised--at the venomous charge by ADL that these great and good Americans are fomenting hatred and violence, when the opposite is surely true. Both Beck and Limbaugh have cautioned against violence or civil disobedience of any kind, calling instead for Americans to engage in politics as the preferred vehicle for reigning in government excess.

Any attempt to marginalize Rush and Glenn Beck and their colleagues on talk radio is nothing short of an attempt to marginalize you and me. It is unseemly in the extreme for a Jewish organization that purports to stand against bigotry to wantonly accuse their political opponents of same through innuendo and lies. It is disheartening that an organization that regards free speech as a religious value would vilify those who are among its greatest champions.

I don't know who Abe Foxman speaks for, but he does not speak for me.

Sick of the Mass. Senate Race?

Not me...I can't get enough of this:

Massachusetts: Reagan Country.

How's that Reset Button Working So far?

Remember how Barack Obama was going to rebuild the reputation of the U.S. in the eyes of the world, so badly damaged by the "Cowboy" diplomacy of President George W. Bush? Within a year after his inauguration, Obama has managed to antagonize almost every foreign ally worth having. Oh sure, the elites in European intellectual circles still adore him, but policymakers and power brokers inside the European Union undoubtedly view Obama with scorn and suspicion.

Consider France. President Sarkozy may have harbored doubts about Obama for months, but those doubts turned to contempt in late September when Obama addressed the U.N. General Assembly and then went on to chair the U.N. Security Council. Obama lectured the world body about the urgency of removing nuclear weapons from the globe, even while possessed with the knowledge, yet to be made public, that Iran had a second secret weapons development site. Instead of using his platform to call out the mullahs, he instead acted like a dreamy adolescent prattling about a world without nukes.

"President Obama dreams of a world without weapons...but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite," Mr. Sarkozy said, referring to Iran and North Korea.

A few days later at the G20 summit, with Sarkozy and British P.M. Gordon Brown flanking him, Obama announced the new secret Iranian facility. Sarkozy was reportedly furious that Obama had been acting as if the mullahs could be trusted when he knew the extent of their deception.

Sarkozy has since referred to Obama and/or his foreign policies as "arrogant," "immature," and "empty." He may as well have called Barack Obama the Chauncey Gardner of statecraft.

Now comes word, courtesy of the foreign press (which seems to be the only media source for news critical of our Dear Leader), that France is accusing the U.S. of fumbling the Haiti rescue operation. According the the Financial Times, France complained about the U.S. military tying up resources at the airport in Haiti and waving off French aid flights trying to land with supplies. According to FT.com., "the French news agency AFP also quoted people trying to leave Haiti as complaining that the US was giving priority to its own citizens."

Granted, earthquake-ravaged Haiti is not going to yield operational perfection or perfect cooperation between competing players. With one airport runway, lack of fuel and anarchy on the ground, the tension between military and security considerations on one hand and rescue and aid concerns on the other are bound to result in chaos and confusion. Still, the extent to which the Europeans are already pointing the finger at the U.S. is remarkable.

I suppose this explains Obama's appointment of George Bush--of Hurricane Katrina fame-- as special envoy to the Haiti relief effort, along with Bill Clinton. If the U.S. shines in its response to the Haiti disaster, Obama and Clinton will share the credit.

And if all goes awry, who better to blame than the Cowboy diplomat himself.

Obama: Is the Magic Gone for Democrats?

Could you have imagined a year ago that Barack Obama would have trouble filling a room with Democrats? In Massachusetts?

"Massachusetts Miracle"

The music and images alone will give you chills.

Mass. Senate Seat: Scott Brown Wins.

Tomorrow's headlines today? Hardly. No one really knows whether the Republican challenger for "Ted Kennedy's Seat" in the U.S. Senate can really upset the "favorite," Democrat Mass. Attorney General Martha Coakley next Tuesday. The conservative blogs, FoxNews and talk radio all tout polls showing a Brown "surge," but Scott Rasmussen, the most accurate pollster around, still shows Brown behind.

And yet. In a sure sign of growing panic among Dems, the White House has decided to send President Obama in to Massachusetts to make a last- minute appeal to the faithful. This is a high-risk and dubious decision, as it is designed to rally the already committed base voters who might otherwise sit home. The desperate tactic (for it is just that) will have no effect on independents for whom the Obama magic has long ago worn off, and will only energize those independents and Republicans who see a Brown victory as the death knell for the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda.

Whether it works or not remains to be seen. Obama has so far failed to positively influence the outcome of elections in which he was a factor, including the New Jersey and Virginia governor's races. And he will have to share the spotlight with another Coakley stand-in, one Wm. Jefferson Clinton, who also has a less than stellar record when it comes to endorsements and appearances on behalf of his fellow Democrat office-seekers.

Whatever the outcome of the Tuesday election, Scott Brown has already won. He has forced the hand of the Democrats by exposing them to ridicule for risking the political capital of the President on a race that should have been a no-brainer. (We're talking Massachusetts for crying out loud). He has shown that the Democrat's drive to push health care "deform" onto an unwilling public is deeply unpopular. And he has revealed the arrogance and sense of entitlement of the Democrat elite who believed the "Ted Kennedy seat" was bequeathed to them in perpetuity.

Most important of all, Scott Brown has shown that the center-right is alive and well, and that

whenever conservative principles of limited government, lower taxes and a strong national defense are articulated they resonate with American voters. Even in deep-blue Massachusetts.

Win or lose, Scott Brown has given millions of conservative and independent voters a reason to believe that 2010 can be avery good year for the American republic.

Haiti Relief

As you know by now a massive earthquake has devastated Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital,

and has killed, injured or left homeless untold hundreds of thousands.

You can help by donating to:

Red Cross's International Response Fund

Save the Children's Haiti Relief Fund

Food for the Poor's Relief efforts

B'Nai Brith International's Haiti Earthquake Fund

Catholic Relief Service's Haiti

Relief fund.

Or, click on the website of your favorite charity--they are bound to have a "Haiti Relief"

fund.

Picture of the Day

Picture of the Day.

Caption : Its So Cold...I saw a Democrat with their hands in their own pockets.

Happy New Year. Lets Get Busy.

After two weeks focusing on my wife, my kids and other diversions I am back to work with a heart full of thanks to my Creator for the blessings of a wonderful spouse, a great family and good friends. I am also filled with a renewed purpose: to make a contribution, however small, to the fight to take back our country from the professional politicians.

I will explain how I intend to do my part. But first, I have been remiss in taking care of some important housekeeping matters. Specifically, I want to do two things:

1. Remove from my email list any recipient who is not interested in reading my posts.

2. Add to my email list as many recipients as possible who would likely read, enjoy and benefit from my posts.

Here's how you can help:

1. If you do not want to read my emails, for any reason or no reason, I will be happy to take you off my list. No explanation necessary. Please email me at scottitaliaander@gmail.com and I will be happy to remove your name.

2. If you like what you read and want to keep receiving my posts, thats great. But if you also agree with me that our freedom and our liberty are endangered by the policies and politics and corruption of the governing elite--of both parties, and all branches--then I urge you to send me the names of at least five other friends, acquaintances or family members who can either be influenced or encouraged to engage in the struggle ahead.

I do not seek to gain from any contacts you send me. I would love to get paid for my writing some day, but in 2010 my mission is simply to do what I can to restore our country to its political, cultural and fiscal senses. Everyone who is so inclined has something to contribute to the effort. Some people can organize people and events; others can fundraise; and still others can run for office. Me, I write, in the hopes of informing and inspiring others. And I'd like to reach as wide an audience as possible.

I intend to devote a substantial amount of my free time reading, researching and writing about the issues that affect our nation and world in ways, hopefully, that will be useful to you, my reader. I will try to give information and ideas that will inspire you to action if you are so motivated. I will endeavor to put the events of the day in the context of our country's founding values and ideals as I understand them. I confess I know far too little about our nation's unique and mostly noble past, and am hurriedly trying to make up for years of lassitude and laziness in this regard.

Last year I spent a lot of time trying to keep up with the arcana of this or that legislative process or Administration proposal in order to give myself and my readers insight into the governing philosophy of our self-appointed betters. I have concluded that sometimes the devil is not just in the details, the devil is the details. We don't have to read subparagraph 12001B(a)(1)C of Senate Bill XXX to get a sense of where things are headed. After a year of Barack Obama and a hard-left Democrat congressional majority, I think we all know.

Less attention will be given in this space to the sordid and soul-deadening minutiae of the news, and more to a discussion of what the news means for those of us who want to change the future. 2009 saw unbelievable strides towards European-style Statism in America, but it also saw the first stirrings of a people's movement determined to thwart it. Tens of thousands of Americans showed up at hundreds of town hall meetings last summer and dozens of rallies at state capitols and in our nation’s capitol to express their frustration with the new regime's contempt for them.

Time magazine named Ben Bernanke as Man of the Year, but a more apt selection would have been Rick Santelli of CNBC who first called for a modern-day "Tea Party" to get the attention of the bunkered political class. The Tea Partiers are only vaguely organized, yet I expect that the Tea Party movement, whatever it ends up looking like, will be a permanent force in American politics for the foreseeable future. The movement may be in its winter dormancy, but undoubtedly it will sprout new “green shoots” come spring.

Americans might indeed be wedded to their comforts, but millions of us will not go gently into the black night of a social welfare state. We are not Europeans. Many of us will gladly risk being mocked by Nancy Pelosi and her media enablers--and worse-- if that's the price to be paid for regaining our liberty.

The movement doesn't require that a majority of Americans take part in order to prevail. Far from it. Most American adults rejected the drive for “independency” in the 1760s and 70s, and yet a motivated and passionate minority ultimately achieved a great victory. You and I and our fellow citizens can achieve a victory no less great.

If you want to join me in my efforts to help redeem America from the creeping tyranny of a professional and corrupt governing class-- then please stay on board.

And please send five or more names and email addresses, to scottitaliaander@gmail.com.

Lets get busy. Our country needs us.