FRIDAY,  SEPTEMBER 11,  2009

FASCINATING - AT 6:39 P.M. ET:  Well, a little serene amusement, for a change.  Rasmussen has done a survey on how people react to certain political labels.  The results are pleasing:

"Progressive” is becoming more of a dirty word, but all political labels – except “being like Ronald Reagan” - are falling into disfavor with many U.S. voters, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

“Liberal” is still the worst and remains the only political description that is viewed more negatively than positively. Being like Reagan is still the most positive thing you can say about a candidate.

Just 15% of voters say they view the description of a candidate as politically liberal as positive, down four points from last November. Forty-one percent (41%) see it as a negative description, up five points form the earlier survey, while 42% say it’s somewhere in between.

Aware of their low ideological ratings, political liberals have shifted in recent times to calling themselves progressives, but that name, too, has begun to lose its luster. Thirty-two percent (32%) now consider it a positive to describe a candidate as politically progressive, but that’s down from 40% just after the last election. Twenty-seven percent (27%) see it as negative label, up from 16%, and 36% put it somewhere in between the two.

COMMENT:  Amazing how the truth gets out, isn't it?  We look forward to "progressive" moving even further south.  Deep south.

September 11, 2009   Permalink

A PROBLEM AMONG FRIENDS - AT 5:58 P.M. ET:  While not as deep in the tank as MSNBC, which now functions as a branch of the White House, CNN has been an Obama-friendly zone.  So we are mildly gratified that the White House actually criticized CNN today over its wild reporting of a non-incident:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs today criticized CNN — not the Coast Guard — over the panic caused by the agency’s training exercise on the Sept. 11 anniversary, saying that the alarm could have been avoided if the network had checked its facts.

Gibbs said he wouldn’t second-guess Coast Guard leadership for holding a Potomac River exercise on the morning of the 9/11 commemoration. But he took a shot at CNN, which initially didn’t know the maneuvers in the Potomac were an exercise and erroneously reported that gunshots were fired — something the homeland security department said didn’t occur.

“Let’s understand that best I can tell there was reporting based on listening to a police scanner that was not verified, and then it was on television and now we’ve raced back to find out that it’s a training exercise. So I think it appears as if a lot of this might have been avoided,” Gibbs said.

COMMENT:  I monitored that coverage.  It would have gotten an F in any journalism school - unless the multicultural aspects of the non-event were mentioned, in which case an A would have been given.

They used a scanner and didn't check?  This is not good.  It makes us wonder about the rest of CNN's "reporting," but we've been wondering for years anyway.

I'm sure that CNN will now upgrade its practices and start listening to guys with cigarette holders standing under lampposts in Georgetown.  Hey, you never know.  They see stuff.

September 11, 2009   Permalink

UTTERLY PATHETIC - AT 5:19 P.M. ET:  The United States has chosen to commemorate September 11, 2001, in the way that the Obama administration knows best - by capitulation and appeasement. 

Earlier this week the Iranian government "responded" to Obama's calls for engagement on its nuclear program by saying it was prepared to discuss a host of international issues...but not that.

And the American response?  We accept.  We accept, of course, along with other nations for whom appeasement is, hey, no problem.  The AP reports.  Airsickness pills required:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States and five partner countries have accepted Iran's new offer to hold talks, even though Iran insists it will not negotiate over its disputed nuclear program, the State Department said Friday.

Even the AP seems a bit embarrassed, and that takes real doing.

Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters that although Iran's proposal for international talks -- presented to the six powers on Wednesday -- was disappointing for sidestepping the nuclear issue, it represented a chance to begin a direct dialogue.

Oh please.  We're absolutely crawling to these thugs.  A chance to begin a dialogue?  The Europeans have been "dialoguing" with Tehran for six years, without any progress.  Will there be any different result because The One is in the White House?

''We are seeking a meeting now based on the Iranian paper to see what Iran is prepared to do,'' Crowley said. ''And then, as the president has said, you know, if Iran responds to our interest in a meeting, we'll see when that can occur. We hope that will occur as soon as possible.''

Talk to us, Ahmadinejad.  Don't take time out to kill more of your own citizens.  Just talk to us.  There could be a set of DVDs in it for you.  Pretty please?

Crowley said Iran's lack of interest in addressing its nuclear program is not a reason to refuse to talk.

''If we have talks, we will plan to bring up the nuclear issue,'' he said.

Well don't bring it up too early in the day and ruin the atmosphere, okay? 

Are all you readers taking those airsickness pills?

'If Iran dissembles in the future, as it has in the past, then we will draw conclusions from that,'' he said.

And we will send an angry letter!

Crowley said the administration will, between now and December, assess where it's diplomatic approach stands. Iran's willingness to deal with the nuclear issues in the proposed new talks will be part of that assessment, he said.

Utterly pathetic.  In December the Iranians will do something to cause us to "review" our position and extend the talks.  Meanwhile, the centrifuges are spinning in Iran.

This makes Jimmah Carter look like a hawk.

Our policy is coming from the White House.  The president of the United States is an embarrassment.  The sad fact is, though, that this policy will get plenty of support in the foreign-policy establishment and the in-the-tank media. 

September 11, 2009   Permalink

DESPICABLE, OF COURSE - AT 10:37 A.M. ET:

OWOSSO, Michigan -- State police at the Corunna post have confirmed a well-known anti-abortion activist was shot multiple times and killed this morning in front of Owosso High School.

The victim's identity has not yet been released but the shooting occurred around 7:30 a.m., after most students were off the buses and safely inside the building, said Owosso schools transportation supervisor Jayne Campbell.

State police also confirmed that a suspect was taken into custody about 8:15 a.m. at the suspect's home.

Owosso High School secretary Wendy Smith said the students remain in lockdown this morning and confirmed that no students were involved and all are safe with classes going on as normal. The shooting did not occur on school property, Smith said.

COMMENT:  Obviously an outrage.  However, we'll see how much attention this gets in comparison to the shooting death - also outrageous - of the abortion-providing doctor, George Tiller, in Kansas several months ago.  It will be a test of whether the mainstream media can cover both sides equally.  Place your bets.

September 11, 2009   Permalink

BIT OF A BOUNCE - AT 9:34 A.M. ET:  Polls taken in whole or in part after the president's speech are trickling in, and they show a slight bounce, maybe, for Mr. Obama.  Rasmussen:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 34% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-nine percent (39%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -5. That’s the highest level of Strong Approval and the best Approval Index rating for the President in a month (see trends).

Data for this daily update is collected via nightly telephone surveys and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. As a result, nearly two-thirds of interviews for today's update were completed before the President’s speech to Congress Wednesday night. Sunday morning’s update will be the first based entirely upon interviews conducted following the speech. The President has typically enjoyed a bounce in the polls following his national prime time television appearances.

And...

The President’s speech also provided a modest bounce in support for his health care plans. Polling conducted over the past two nights shows that 46% of voters now support the reform proposed by the President and Congressional Democrats. Opposition is down to 51%. However, it’s a partisan bounce as the increase in support comes entirely from within the President’s own party.

COMMENT:  Washington hands are now talking about having a completed health-care "reform" bill by Thanksgiving.  That's more than two months from now.  Mr. Obama's speech will be a vague memory by then, and any bounce will depend on how well he does between today and Turkey time, not on the speech.

September 11, 2009   Permalink

QUOTE OF THE DAY, THUS FAR - AT 8:51 A.M. ET:   If I had to name the top five commentators in this country since the 9-11 attacks, I would certainly include Fouad Ajami, who has constantly reminded us of the true nature of those we are opposing, and of our own need to oppose them, and oppose them intelligently.  Here, in the Wall Street Journal, Ajami reflects on 9-11 and its legacy:

Eight years ago, we were visited by the furies of Arab lands. We were rudely awakened from a decade whose gurus and pundits had announced the end of ideology, of politics itself, and the triumph of the world-wide Web and the "electronic herd." We had discovered that on the other side of the world masterminds of terror, and preachers, and their foot-soldiers were telling of America the most sordid of tales. We had become, without knowing it, a party to a civil war in the Arab-Islamic world between the autocrats and their disaffected children, between those who wanted to live a normal life and warriors of the faith bent on imposing their will on that troubled arc of geography.

Our country answered that call, not always brilliantly, for we are fated to be strangers in that world and thus fated to improvise and make our way through unfamiliar alleyways. We met chameleons and hustlers of every shade and had to learn, in a hurry, incomprehensible atavisms and pathologies. We fared best when we trusted our sense of things. We certainly haven't been kept safe by the crowds in Paris and Berlin, or by those in Ankara and Cairo who feign desire for our friendship while they yearn for our undoing.

COMMENT:  Every journalist in America should have that quote posted above his or her desk - especially the part about our not being kept safe by the crowds in Paris and Berlin. 

One of the great myths about 9-11 is that we were flooded with sympathy after the attacks, sympathy that George Bush then trashed.  Wrong.  Whatever sympathy there was lasted a day or two.  Some 48 hours after the attacks, the BBC went on the air with vicious anti-American programming. 

I believe that the anti-Americanism that followed 9-11 stemmed not from George Bush and his policies, but from the fact that we were successfully attacked.  The world loves a winner and despises a loser.  If you're successfully attacked, you get ten minutes of sympathy and ten years of contempt.  Look at our attitude toward the French and how it was formed by their failure to defend themselves successfully against the Nazis in 1940.

We know what keeps us safe.  But a president who chokes on the word "victory" can't tell us.

September 11, 2009    Permalink

SANE DEMS UNMOVED BY OBAMA HEALTH SPEECH.  INSANE DEMS PERMANENTLY MOVED - AT 8:19 A.M. ET:  From The Washington Times:

President Obama's address to Congress Wednesday night did little to immediately convert factions in the Democratic party to unify behind a health care overhaul plan Thursday, and his call for an end to "bickering" was met by Republican carping that he failed to "reset" the debate.

Liberal House lawmakers said they still want to see the president embrace a government-sponsored public insurance option as part of any bill, and centrist Democrats said they remain worried about the price tag.

"I believe a costly government-run public option is the wrong direction for reform and I will not support it," Rep. Mike Ross, a moderate Blue Dog Democrat from Arkansas who has come out in opposition of the plan that he helped shepherd through committee, said in the aftermath of Mr. Obama's speech.

COMMENT:  They are waiting for the polls.  If the polls swing heavily in the president's direction, many Blue Dogs will stop barking and start licking.  If they don't, conflict will continue, even within the Democratic Party.

September 11, 2009     Permalink

THE ANNIVERSARY - AT 7:58 A.M. ET:  It is September 11th, the eighth anniversary of the day of terror.  This is a unique observance of that day, though.  It is the first time we mark it without George Bush in the White House.

What a difference a year makes.

We have gone from a deeply American president who kept the nation safe, and who understood what that meant, to a president who doesn't seem to like his country very much, and spends much of his time overseas apologizing for it.

Feel safer already?

Eight years ago we knew immediately that the threat was centered in Afghanistan.  Today The New York Times leads with this:  Obama Facing Doubts Within His Own Party on Afghanistan.  One of our two major parties, which spent years heaping abuse on George Bush for his action in Iraq, and accusing him of ignoring "the good war" in Afghanistan, now turns against the "good war" as well.

WASHINGTON — The leading Senate Democrat on military matters said Thursday that he was against sending more American combat troops to Afghanistan until the United States speeded up the training and equipping of more Afghan security forces.

The comments by the senator, Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, illustrate the growing skepticism President Obama is facing in his own party as the White House decides whether to commit more deeply to a war that has begun losing public support, even as American commanders acknowledge that the situation on the ground has deteriorated.

Of course, we know that, had Bush not gone into Iraq, the Democratic Party's left would have turned against Afghanistan even earlier.  It's in their DNA.

Who would have thought that, eight years after the real 9-11, we would be investigating the CIA agents who did so much to keep us safe? 

Who would have thought that there'd be a powerful faction of the majority party, and its allies in the media, who would love to prosecute a vice president of the United States, and to disbar lawyers who gave honest advice in those opening months of the war on terror?

Who would have thought that, after years of being falsely accused of being anti-Muslim, the United States would have a president whose middle name is Hussein, although we weren't allowed to mention it while he was running for office?

The attacks of 9-11 are a distant memory now.  Today is to the day of those attacks what December 7, 1949, was to Pearl Harbor, which had been attacked eight years earlier. 

The difference is that we always remembered Pearl Harbor, even after the Japanese were defeated.  Are most Americans, today, remembering 2001?  The intensity seems to be gone, and with it the focus on crushing our enemies.  A veritable fifth column in our universities, recalling their "triumph" over their own country in Vietnam, has been teaching for eight years that 9-11 was all our fault.  Indeed, it took only days after the attacks themselves for college professors and college presidents to start lecturing their own country.  And the campuses that refused to have ROTC then continued to refuse.  For those elements, 9-11 really never happened.

Our current president wants us to observe September 11th now with a day of volunteering.  Well, there's nothing wrong with volunteering, but we have a right to suspect, based on everything else he's said and done, that Mr. Obama would like to take the emphasis off those who attacked us, and their beliefs, and off the American military.  He is a fruit of the sixties generation, far more than Bill Clinton ever was. 

We could have had John McCain making the important speech today.  We don't have to agree with McCain on everything to realize that his ideas about 9-11 are very different from the man who defeated him.

We'll fight harder next time.

September 11, 2009    Permalink

THURSDAY,  SEPTEMBER 10,  2009

MORE SPEECH REACTION - AT 8:46 P.M. ET:  I've not seen any credible polls yet on the president's speech performance last night.  A CNN poll reported largely favorable reactions, but the poll reflected the viewership breakdown for the speech, which was heavily Democratic.  Tracking polls should start picking up the scent in a day or two.  I would expect a brief bounce for the president, and then a return to Earth.

But some of the more extreme members of the in-the-tank media are reacting with their usual fire.  The Mother Party is in trouble, after all, and must be saved from the barbarians, who are inside the gate with their low-gas-mileage tanks.  NewsBusters reports on one particularly obnoxious example:

During the 4PM ET hour of live coverage on MSNBC Thursday, co-host David Shuster denounced the behavior of Republicans at President Obama’s address to Congress, declaring: “You look at the image of the Republican Party, all white males with short haircuts. They look sort of angry. No women, no minorities, and it looks like they’ve sort of become unhinged.”

Hmm.  No women?  Does Sarah Palin qualify?  How about Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas?  And those two female senators from Maine - Snowe and Collins?  In fact, the Bush administration had more women in high places than any administration in history.

Minorities?  The head of the Republican Party is an African-American.  I think Condi Rice is as well.  Eric Cantor, the Republican whip in the House, is a Jewish guy from Virginia. 

Does David Shuster know his subject?  Doesn't he remember how the teacher told us to read, underline key phrases, and take notes on 3x5 cards?  Has he had his vision checked?  You know, you can do it online.  There's a Snellen chart available for computers.  It's here.  Please forward to Shuster if you know his e-mail address.

September 10, 2009   Permalink

THIS SHOW MAY BE CANCELLED - AT 8:12 P.M. ET:  If President Obama had to live or die by TV ratings, he'd be facing cancellation.  Nielsen, who knows what all of us are watching, has published the following, and sent a copy to the president's agent:

As the debate on health care in the U.S. continues, President Obama detailed his vision for health insurance reform in his second address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday September 9, 2009. The address was carried live from 8:00PM to approximately 9:06PM on 10 television networks. The sum of average audience for those networks was 32,111,596 viewers.

And now the bad news:

Viewership to last night’s address was down 38.6% from President Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress on February 24, which aired from approximately 9:00PM to 10:30PM.

COMMENT:  I've known network executives.  I've worked with network executives.  Network executives are friends (?) of mine.  And if Obama had to present those numbers, on behalf of his production company, to network executives, he'd be history by tomorrow morning, replaced by "Algerian Idol."

Come to think of it, I'd like to see "Algerian Idol."

Oh, by the way, remember when President Bush made speeches?  They would rarely be carried on TV, except on some cable channels.  The Big Three normally stayed away.

But there's no bias. 

September 10, 2009   Permalink

ANOTHER ONE GONE - AT 7:56 P.M. ET:  Another Obaman has been thrown under the bus, joining Van Jones, who was just getting comfy after his resignation late Saturday night.  The Politico reports:

The communications director for the National Endowment for the Arts is no longer in his job amid a flap over suggestions he suggested artists work to further President Obama's legislative agenda.

A conservative artist writing on the site Big Hollywood first complained that the official, later identified as Yosi Sargent, had been on a conference call with artists aimed at furthering President Obama's legislative agenda -- a bit of a no-no for the agency, which does its best to stay apolitical.

The agency, for now, is keeping it utterly cryptic: Sargent is "currently an employee," said spokeswoman Sally Gifford, who said she couldn't comment on whether he is communications director.

But...

Huffington Post's Ryan Grim reported that Sargent had been "asked to resign," and played it as another scalp -- like Van Jones' -- for Glenn Beck.

COMMENT:  You see, it's all Glenn Beck's fault. Glenn Beck and Bush and Cheney and...we're on the brink of FASCISM, don't you see?

No I don't.

Well, at least this one didn't twist slowly in the wind, so maybe the Obamans are showing some end-of-career compassion for the terminally incompetent.  We're sure, though, that Mr. Sargent's devotion will be well remembered and rewarded by his comrades.  Maybe we shouldn't say comrades.

September 10, 2009   Permalink

RUSSIA ENDS OBAMA'S IRAN ILLUSIONS - AT 7:15 P.M. ET:  The level of contempt that other nations are expressing for President Obama grows by the day.  It's pretty clear that tough-minded foreign ministries, especially in the shadier nations, cannot take this man seriously and are certainly not afraid of him. 

Now Russia is making it clear that it has no intention of going along with Obama's "plan" to impose tougher sanctions on Iran if Iran fails to negotiate seriously over nuclear weapons.  From The New York Times:

MOSCOW — The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, on Thursday all but ruled out imposing new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, brushing aside growing Western concerns that Iran had made significant progress in recent months in a bid for nuclear weapons.

Mr. Lavrov said he believed that a new set of proposals that Iran gave to European nations on Wednesday offered a viable basis for negotiations to end the dispute. He said he did not believe that the United Nations Security Council would approve new sanctions against Iran, which could ban Iran from exporting oil or importing gasoline.

COMMENT:  Will this make any difference to Obama?  Probably not.  He knows that the in-the-tank media will support him, and compare anyone asking for real toughness toward Tehran to Dick Cheney.  If Russia vetoes tougher sanctions in the UN, Obama will probably say he's engaged in "ongoing consultations," or some such phrase, with friendly nations on the "next step." 

He will, of course, rap BUSH (!!) for unilateralism, and make it appear that his multilateral approach will be far more successful.  It won't be, of course, but the parlor goers in Georgetown and Cambridge, Massachusetts, will applaud politely.

We are heading for international trouble, and so few people seem to care.  There was no attention paid to Iran by the TV outlets today, but plenty of time was devoted to that congressman who engaged in an improper outburst during Obama's speech last night.  After all, we must maintain decent priorities.

September 10, 2009   Permalink 

CLOAK AND DAGGER ALL THE WAY - AT 9:37 A.M. ET:  There is an absolutely intriguing story out of Israel.  The prime minister was "missing" for about 12 hours on Monday.  Rumors have circulated that he made a secret trip somewhere, possibly Moscow.  Now the confirmation, from the Jerusalem Post:

A senior Kremlin official confirmed Wednesday to the Russian paper Kommersant that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu did make a clandestine trip to Russia on Monday.

The Russian newspaper quoted experts speculating that such a trip would only be justified under extraordinary circumstances, "for example, in the case of Israel planning to attack Iran."

The report comes despite a statement Wednesday from the Kremlin press service that "nothing is known" about reports of the visit. Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, also said he had no information, the Interfax news agency reported.

Nevertheless, there was never any official denial of the report from Moscow.

COMMENT:  We will not speculate, we will not ruminate, we will not make shallow.  We don't know what this was about.  However, the trip was conducted in complete secrecy (which lasted only a while), with the PM flying aboard a leased civilian aircraft. 

Something is up.  Maybe we'll soon find out, with a bang.

September 10, 2009   Permalink

GETTING TO THE TRUTH - AT 9:22 A.M. ET:  A story that caused a seething anger among those devoted to equal justice is back in the news, and we have some hope now that justice will indeed be done.  A Washington Times exclusive:

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility has begun an official inquiry into the dismissal in May of a civil complaint against the New Black Panther Party and two of its members who disrupted a Philadelphia polling place during the November general elections.

The inquiry is disclosed in an Aug. 28 letter to Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee who first raised questions about the dismissal in May and asked unsuccessfully that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. make available the head of the department's Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division for a closed-door briefing on the decision.

In the letter, Mary Patrice Brown, acting OPR counsel, told the veteran congressman from Texas that the office had "initiated an inquiry into the matter" and that it would "contact you with the results of our inquiry once it is completed." A copy of the letter was obtained by The Washington Times.

COMMENT:  The dismissal was an outrage.  The Black Panthers clearly intimidated people at the polls, much as white supremacists used to do in the pre-Civil Rights South.  The dismissal stunned even allies of the Obama administraiton, although, with characters like Van Jones running around Washington, it shouldn't have been surprising.

Now let's see if the Office of Professional Responsibility will do the right thing, or continue the cover-up.

September 10, 2009   Permalink

QUOTE OF THE DAY - SO FAR - AT 8:44 A.M. ET:  Also on Iran, from David Ignatius in today's Washington Post:

One Iranian political figure has told a Western intermediary that the Obama administration may have unwittingly encouraged the regime's power grab by sending two letters to Khamenei before the June election. The first, delivered through Iran's mission to the United Nations, was a general invitation to dialogue. Khamenei is said to have taken a month to answer, and then only in vague terms. A second Obama administration letter reiterated U.S. interest in engagement. According to the Iranian political figure, this may have emboldened Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to think they had a free hand on June 12.

And this:

Tehran's analysis, according to this second Iranian, is that America has three options for Iran: engage, contain or attack. "The perception in Tehran is that America hasn't made up its mind what it wants," this prominent politician confided. That's probably the right assessment. And on this issue, as with so many others, the administration is nearing decision time.

COMMENT:  Decision time for an administration that took months to define what it wanted in a health-insurance plan, a subject that's been studied for years. 

A recent poll showed that 80% of Europeans are opposed to military action against Iran, even if diplomacy fails, which means that Iran has every reason to make diplomacy fail.  While Americans would undoubtedly be more supportive of a military strike, that support would not extend to the San Francisco Democrats, as Jeane Kirkpatrick called them, who are dominant in the party.  And the president's aversion to real confrontation is well known.  He is running the biggest appeasement operation since Jimmy Carter chewed on peanuts in the Oval Office.

September 10, 2009   Permalink

BACK TO REALITY - AT 8:22 A.M. ET:  This is "deadline" month for Iran, or so we're told by an administration for which vagueness is a national ideal.  An American diplomat has outlined the stakes.  We hope he has his job tomorrow:

Sept. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Iran’s nuclear work is approaching a “dangerous and destabilizing” point at which the Persian Gulf country could build a bomb, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency said.

“Iran is now either very near or in possession already of sufficient low-enriched uranium to produce one nuclear weapon, if the decision were made to further enrich it to weapons grade,” Ambassador Glyn Davies said today in a statement prepared for the IAEA’s 35-member board of governors, which is meeting for a third day in Vienna.

This “moves Iran closer to a dangerous and destabilizing possible breakout capacity,” Davies added, in some of the strongest comments yet used by a U.S. official about the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program. He repeated President Barack Obama’s overtures to Iran for direct negotiations and said the administration in Washington is committed to a negotiated resolution to the international dispute over Iran’s work.

COMMENT:  He had to put in the boilerplate about negotiations, but the first part of his statement was telling.  What will Iran do?  What will Obama do?  Iran has handed Western nations a set of proposals.  We don't know what's in them, but, since the Iranian government has already rejected any serious negotiations over its nuclear program, the content of its proposals is probably irrelevant - unless the Obama crowd wants to use that content just to stall and do nothing.

September is the deadline.  September is a third gone.

September 10, 2009   Permalink

THE SPEECH - AT 7:52 A.M. ET:  In journalism they call this the second-day angle.  What more is there to say about the president's speech?

I don't think there'll be too many second thoughts about the speech.  Obama is not a subtle speaker, nor a particularly provocative one.  You don't feel the urge to re-read his speeches for some hidden meaning or brilliant point that you may have missed.  It's all up front, usually, and last night was no exception, in two to three times the number of words that were necessary.

On balance, it was a generally good speech, as far as it went.  Mr. Obama described problems in the health-care system that most Americans, including conservatives agree on.  His villain was the insurance companies, and, yes, some of the practices he described must be reformed - like canceling coverage for people who get sick, or denying claims because of minor errors on insurance applications.

And I suspect that a bill will emerge that will be aimed at some of the more sordid practices we see today.

But details were missing, as they usually are.  Paying for the president's program remained a vague mystery.  Tort reform, which the president mentioned, was dismissed with a promise of some experimental programs.  (In other words, the trial lawyers can rest easy for a time.)  The guiding principles were fine, the mechanism was only a sketch on an architect's bench, without the plumbing or power put in.

How will the American people react?  I suspect the president will get a bump in the polls that will last for a week.  Then we'll be back to zero.  The doubters were given no reason last night not to doubt further.  There was no clear breakthrough, no moment of clarity where the picture of the president's program was defined with precision. 

Let me also point out one outrage:  As usual, Mr. Obama could not avoid his awful tendency to slap his predecessor.  (He would have been wiser to quote some of President Bush's better lines on compassionate conservatism.  He should certainly have quoted President Reagan on health care.  Reagan also believed that no one should be denied health care because they cannot pay for it.  But invoking the Gipper might have been too much for the Democratic Party's little-red-book wing.) 

In criticizing President Bush, Mr. Obama made an ugly comparison between the projected cost of his health plan and the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  It was tasteless and sends the worst possible message to our enemies - that some struggles are too expensive.  We don't put a dollar figure on keeping the nation safe, and the president may soon find that out, painfully, as he faces critical foreign-policy decisions in the months ahead.

September 10,  2009   Permalink