Daily Archives: 8 February 2012

Full Credit

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In MSNBC’s pre-Super Bowl interview with President Obama, Matt Lauer had this exchange with him.

Lauer: Three years ago we sat for this interview on Super Bowl Sunday; you had been President for just 10 days, and we talked about the state of the economy, which was in dire straits, and you said this to me, quote, If I don’t have this done in three years, then it’s going to be a one-term proposition.  You got good news on Friday in terms of jobs, the unemployment rate went down to 8.3%.  But I think if you go out on the street, you ask Americans “is the recovery done?” Overwhelmingly they will tell you it is not.  So do you deserve a second term?

Obama: I deserve a second term, but we’re not done.

There’s also this from Obama’s State Department concerning the nearly year-long situation in Syria [emphasis added]:

“We’re going to work with countries around the world to call out those who are still sending him weapons, and expose that,” [State Department spokeswoman Victoria] Nuland said. The [contact group of countries] will look at helping Syria “plot a way forward and also to do what we can about the humanitarian situation.”

Still, she recognized the limitations of that strategy.

“It’s frankly not clear how much we’re going to be able to do, but we want to help.“

And that makes it all better.  We’re just trying to help.  We deserve a prize for effort.

Here are a couple of results from this Progressive focus on credit for “trying really hard” as opposed to actual results.  The outcomes indicate both their out of touch-ness and their lack of understanding of what’s important and where true value lies.  Obama speaking, again:

I think what Americans want to hear more than anything else is, “How are you going to help me right now.  If they’re hearing a persuasive argument about how we’re gonna recreate a solid path for middle-class success in this country then I think I’ll win….”

and

What’s frustrated people is that I have not been able to force Congress to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008.

The fact is, we aren’t asking, “How are you going to help me right now?”  We don’t want to hear “how you’re going to create anything for a particular class;” though we do notice that you’re only concerned about the middle class, to the exclusion of Lauer’s “underclass.”

We are asking, “When are you going to get out of our way so we can go back to helping ourselves and helping each other?”  We are asking, “How is your government going to get out of our way so all Americans can be successful–middle class, poor, and rich alike?”  We don’t care—in fact, we’re overjoyed—that you “haven’t been able to force the people’s representatives to roll over and be your lapdog.”

But Progressive self-esteem is so important.

Hypocrisy, Part II

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Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has an opinion piece in USA Today.

In her apologia for an Obamacare regulation that requires health insurance programs provided by a vast range of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and so on institutions to provide contraception, sterilization and abortifacients in direct, open contravention of the teachings and beliefs of those institutions (and that requires those institutions to offer those insurance plans exclusively), she writes

One of the key benefits of the 2010 health care law is that many preventive services are now free for most Americans with insurance. … So is the full range of preventive health services recommended for women by the highly respected Institute of Medicine, including contraception.

So, no one is paying any taxes, or being forced to change their existing health insurance policies, to pay for this.

Nor is there any cancellation of religious teachings or thought or fundamental tenets by this Federal government, which used to be on the other side of a “wall of separation between Church & State.”  There’s an interesting view of “free.”

That’s why in the rule we put forward, we specifically carved out from the policy religious organizations that primarily employ people of their own faith. This exemption includes churches and other houses of worship, and could also include other church-affiliated organizations.

Umm, no.  Not hospitals, not doctors’ offices, not clinics.  These employ (quite properly) far too broad a range of employees to be able to fit within the carefully and deliberately narrowly drawn limits of this rule.

In choosing this [extremely narrow religious] exemption, we looked first at state laws already in place across the country. Of the 28 states that currently require contraception to be covered by insurance, eight have no religious exemption at all.

The religious exemption in the administration’s rule is the same as the exemption in Oregon, New York and California.

Of course, far be it from the Federal government to set an example.  Oh, wait….

Hypocrisy

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Fox News is reporting that the People’s Republic of China is claiming that

it was forced to veto a United Nations vote on Syria because it was called before differences in the proposal were bridged, but denied playing spoiler and said it wants to see an end to violence there.

Forced.  Poor babies.  The resolution that the PRC (and Russia) chose to veto would have been a move toward ending nearly a year of Bashar Assad’s killing—to the tune of 5,400—of his own people since last March.

The PRC justifies itself by insisting that the resolution, as written, unduly pressured…the Syrian government.  This is a strange, but strangely consistent, objection coming from a country with similar problems in Tibet, and in its Xinjiang province (which is populated with all those uppity Uighurs.  Oh, yeah, and that also is the PRC’s largest natural gas-producing region).  This also comes from a country that still maintains it has a right to conquer the Republic of China.

Liu Weimin, a spokesman for the PRC’s Foreign Ministry, insisted that that too-early Security Council vote was forced before suitable (Chinese diluting) amendments had been agreed.   This, though, ignores the fact that the PRC never would have accepted a resolution that had actual teeth for ending the Syrian government’s butcherybloodshed.  Just as it had consistently demanded watering down earlier versions of the resolution.

Liu also denied that the PRC was favoring Assad, in particular.  Yet this is exactly the outcome of the Chinese veto.

The People’s Daily  opined

The present situation in Syria is extremely complicated.  To naively back one side, while attacking the other side, might look like bringing about a favorable turn, but is actually just laying up trouble ahead.

No.  It’s not complicated at all.  Either the PRC supports Assad and his behavior, or it does not.  In the meantime, people are dying today.  But that’s no trouble at all.

We don’t need to keep taking the PRC seriously on the political stage; we can ignore and bypass them—and we should ignore and bypass them, so long as they continue to side with bloody despotism.

These Chinese are not just on the wrong side of history—they’re on the wrong side of morality.