Debacle (cont'd)

Following up on my previous post - Norman Podhoretz (WSJ) presents an excellent analysis of Barack Obama's misadventures in Syria and around the world. Mostly sincere, but with a small serving of tongue-in-cheek, he suggests that Obama's seeming incompetence on the world stage is actually a carefully planned strategy designed to diminish American power abroad.

 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323595004579062811443943666.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Well, maybe. On the other hand, Obama's national security team includes Biden, Kerry, Hagel, Rice, Rhodes, Holder and Powers. The last time we saw a lineup this awful, its names were Kanehl, Chacon, Mantilla, Throneberry, Hickman and Choo Choo Coleman.

Also, In the well-worn tradition of Democrats using children as props to promote their idiocies, Nancy Pelosi put on exhibit her 5 year old grandson, who, after doubtlessly immersing himself in the around the clock coverage of the issue on CNN, asked her whether she was for or against U.S. war with Syria. Her response, "We're not talking about war; we're talking about action." utilized another customary Democratic tactic, using euphemism to obscure distasteful party policy. One might ask the congresswoman how she would describe North Korean warships (oops, sorry, action ships), parked off the coast of California, lobbing a couple hundred Tomahawk missiles in the general direction of San Francisco.
This is the same Pelosi, remember, that visited Syria in 2007 (when that country was actively engaged in supporting the terrorists fighting American forces in Iraq) and proclaimed, "the road to Damascus is a road to peace". The visit was part of the ongoing Democratic campaign to promote Bashar Assad as our "reformer" in the Middle East (as Hillary Clinton described him).
Now, that campaign has been shelved, not because of 100,000 dead and two million refugees but because Barack Obama went (per Mark Steyn) "off prompter".

Debacle

Up to the moment of decision, and even past it, he has seemed ambivalent, confused, unaware of the implications of his words and stands. From the "red line" comment to the "shot across the bow," from the White House leaks about the nature and limits of a planned strike to the president's recent, desperate inclusion of Congress, he has seemed consistently over his head. I have been thinking of the iconic image of American military leadership, Emanuel Leutze's painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware." There Washington stands, sturdy and resolute, looking toward the enemy on the opposite shore. If you imagine Mr. Obama in that moment he is turned, gesturing toward those in the back. "It's not my fault we're in this boat!" That's what "I didn't set a red line" and "My credibility is not at stake" sounded like.

Peggy Noonan

More so than most of Barack Obama's debacles - (Guantanamo, "stimulus", "health care", the Russian "reset", the botched Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, Benghazi, IRS, sequester) - the mismanagement of the situation in Syria puts all of his inadequacies and unsavory characteristics on clear display - the sloppy, imprecise, undisciplined rhetoric ("...move a whole bunch of chemical weapons"), the lack of knowledge and insight, the absence of thoughtful reflection, the paralyzing indecisiveness, the naivete and inexperience, the shunning of responsibility, the comically unwarranted arrogance, and of course, the placing of political considerations above all else.

Here’s how deterrence works in the Middle East. Syria, long committed to the destruction of Israel, has not engaged Israel militarily in 30 years. Why? Because it recognizes Israel as a serious adversary with serious policies.
In this year alone, Israel has four times launched airstrikes within Syria. No Syrian response. How did Israel get away with it? Israel had announced that it would not tolerate Assad’s acquiring or transferring to Hezbollah advanced weaponry. No grandiloquent speeches by the Israeli foreign minister. No leaked target lists. Indeed, the Israelis didn’t acknowledge the strikes even after they had carried them out. Unlike the American president, they have no interest in basking in perceived toughness. They care only about effect. They care about just one audience — the party to be deterred, namely Assad and his allies.
Assad knows who did it. He didn’t have to see the Israeli prime minister preening about it on world television.

...There’s no strategy, no purpose here other than helping Obama escape self-inflicted humiliation.

Charles Krauthammer

Meanwhile, on the domestic front...In August, 2013, the labor force participation rate hit its lowest level, 63.2%, since 1978 when Jimmy Carter (who else?) was president, Reza Pahlavi ruled Iran, Thurman Munson and Reggie Jackson were leading the NY Yankees to their second straight championship and the cutting edge of consumer computer technology, the TI 99/4, with 16K RAM, was still a year away from release.
Under normal, or rather, better, circumstances - with a marginally less incompetent president not focused on confiscating, redistributing and thus, squandering, the nation's wealth - we would  currently be experiencing a period of prosperity rivaling those most notable in American history - the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th century, the two post World War eras and the period of development of the Internet in the late 1990s. The ongoing technological revolution in fossil fuel and natural gas procurement, hindered at every turn by Obama and his colleagues, should be providing us with the benefits of outsized GDP growth, low unemployment and concomitant debt reduction. Instead, with increasing federal spending and taxes, a rapidly growing debt (currently $17 trillion), a crushing regulatory burden and the looming shadow of Obamacare, we get this...

According to the Sentier research, households headed by single women, with and without children present, saw their incomes fall by roughly 7%. Those under age 25 experienced an income decline of 9.6%. Black heads of households saw their income tumble by 10.9%, while Hispanic heads-of-households' income fell 4.5%, slightly more than the national average. The incomes of workers with a high-school diploma or less fell by about 8% (-6.9% for those with less than a high-school diploma and -9.3% for those with only a high-school diploma). 
To put that into dollar terms, in the four years between the time the Obama recovery began in June 2009 and June of this year, median black household income fell by just over $4,000, Hispanic households lost $2,000 and female-headed households lost $2,300.
The unemployment numbers show pretty much the same pattern. July's Bureau of Labor Statistics data (the most recent available) show a national unemployment rate of 7.4%. The highest jobless rates by far are for key components of the Obama voter bloc: blacks (12.6%), Hispanics (9.4%), those with less than a high-school diploma (11%) and teens (23.7%).

Stephen Moore

Moore notes that the groups he cited were those most likely to vote for Barack Obama. Call it social justice.

It's distressing but not surprising. In its search for a new CEO, Microsoft would never consider a candidate who was a technological novice philosophically opposed to its corporate mission. Yet, this is closely similar to what we have done by choosing Barack Obama (twice!) as our CEO. A novice at governance, Obama was an academic theoretician, a "community organizer", ideologically antagonistic to the nation's historical values and ignorant of the source of its greatness. He buys into the ludicrous Zinnian caricature of America as a racist, colonialist, imperialist bully. Never having produced a good or a service of any value to anybody, (some Chicago Law School educated radicals excepted), never having held a position of responsibility (until assuming the presidency!), he was and is clueless about the workings of the private sector. He expresses disdain for the one actual job he ever held, (“Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal.”), for the work that millions of Americans dutifully perform daily, (“You didn't build that.”). Such a person is manifestly unqualified for his job. Only hard leftists, myopic sycophants, or the politically indifferent could fail to know this.

Noonan

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324577304579057420154706690.html? mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

Krauthammer
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/357745/unserious-commander-chief-charles-krauthammer

Moore
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323324904579042830303535934.html?mod=trending_now_3

Mark Steyn's (essential) reading of the Syria situation is linked in my previous post.

Senator Steyn!

Then amend Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution.

http://steynforsenate.com/

His latest.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/357287/accidental-war-mark-steyn

How "That" Gets Built

As one of the left's hated one-percenters, T.J. Rodgers, the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, is one of those primarily responsible for the high standard of living we enjoy. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal he educates those ignorant of the mechanics of wealth and job creation.

Since its 1982 founding, Cypress Semiconductor has been a net creator of jobs and wealth. We have returned $2.2 billion more to the economy through stock buybacks, share dividends and spinouts than we have taken out in total lifetime investments. That figure doesn't count the $4 billion in wages the company has paid or the taxes paid on those wages. Currently, my investment helps maintain 3,479 permanent, high-paying jobs with good health-care benefits that are now threatened by more taxes.
A couple of years ago, I decided to invest in my hometown of Oshkosh, Wis., by building a $1.2 million lakefront restaurant. That restaurant now permanently employs 65 people at an investment of $18,000 per job, a figure consistent with U.S. small businesses. If progressive taxation in the name of "fairness" had taken my "extra" $1.2 million and spent it on a government stimulus program, would 65 jobs have been created?
According to recent Congressional Budget Office statistics on the Obama administration's 2009 stimulus program, each job created has cost between $500,000 and $4 million. Thus, my $1.2 million, taxed and respent on a government project of uncertain duration, would have created about one job, possibly two, and not the 65 sustainable jobs that my private investment did.

...Yet the politics of envy, promoted most notably by President Obama himself, continuously stokes the idea that the wealthy are not paying their "fair share." This injured sense of unjust rewards was summed up on a radio show I heard the other day, when a caller said of the rich: "How much more do they need?"
How much more do I need? How many more jobs do you want?

...Silicon Valley is today's brightest example of the traditional American dream still at work. The investments for most startup companies must come from individuals who can wait 10 years to get a return on investment. Only very wealthy Americans can afford that.

...Does anybody really believe that moving investment decisions from Silicon Valley to Washington by raising taxes on venture capitalists and their investors would make Silicon Valley more productive? Consider the Solyndra debacle: It was obvious to most of us here that the solar-energy company had zero chance of survival. That's why the company had to be government-funded near the end; no real investors were willing to step up.
During the 2012 presidential campaign, President Obama insulted America's entrepreneurs by telling them: "You didn't build that." Progressive taxation is just another tool used by government to take over an ever-larger part of the U.S. economy. The horrible irony is that the government keeps telling the very people whose jobs it destroys that if we only tax the rich more, everything will be better.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324110404578630461045403872.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Obamadespair

On the Hot Air website, Mary Katherine Ham provides a series of graphs revealing the sorry state of the economy. The 2nd and 3rd reflect the destructive impact that the employer mandate - the cornerstone of the "Affordable" "Care" Act - has had.

Ham points out that of the 953,000 jobs "created" in 2013 so far, only 222,000 (23%) were full time. In the graph below, red is part time, blue is full time.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/02/five-scary-charts-and-facts-about-whos-working-and-not-working-in-this-economy/

No Free Lunch

Many thanks to a WSJ letter writer for supplying insight into why we get the political leaders we do.

One aspect of the pension problems in Detroit and elsewhere that I never see addressed is the loss of spendable income by those whose pensions will be affected. We can probably assume that the majority of pension income is spent, thus creating jobs, creating more spending, more taxes coming in, etc. As we were all told by the wise Nancy Pelosi: "Unemployment benefits are creating jobs faster than practically any other program." Wouldn't reducing pensions and thus spendable income take away jobs and hinder our recovery even more?
We need more people getting pension payments, not fewer.
Harold Stoetzer
Glendale, Ariz.

Ah yes. The wisdom of Nancy (we've got to pass it to see what's in it) Pelosi.

Transferring wealth to retired pensioners from working taxpayers will allow the former to spend and grow the economy while having no impact on the latter's spending habits, their depleted incomes notwithstanding. I see.

Meanwhile some good sense still exists back on planet Earth.

The problem with Detroit pensions is obvious. You quote a police officer who retired in 1998 at about the age of 50 after working for 26 years, as well as a 50-year-old man who spent 25 years repairing potholes and who plans to retire in October.
How can someone expect to retire in their early 50s after working 25 years and expect to collect a pension for 35 years or more, much longer than the years worked? That's what happened in Greece.
Those of us in the private sector realize retirement isn't possible unless we work 35 to 40 years or more, or well into our mid-to-late '60s. Do the math. The expectation needs to be changed.
Bessie Montesano            
New Fairfield, Conn.

Detroit and Greece have much in common. The governments of each spend more than they take in. Both governments have accumulated years of increasing debt they can't repay. Neither government can print money to cover its spending habits. Both governments have antagonized private capital markets by forcing haircuts on bondholders. Where does the new money come from to finance their deficit spending? Not from me.
John McDonald
LaQuinta, Calif.

Unfortunately Mr. McDonald (and the rest of us) may not have a choice. King Barack may decide to support the reckless and immoral profligacy of his political allies with a bailout. Guess who pays?

Misdirected Outrage

Shelby Steele on the Zimmerman/Martin case.

The verdict that declared George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin was a traumatic event for America's civil-rights establishment, and for many black elites across the media, government and academia. When you have grown used to American institutions being so intimidated by the prospect of black wrath that they invent mushy ideas like "diversity" and "inclusiveness" simply to escape that wrath, then the crisp reading of the law that the Zimmerman jury displayed comes as a shock.
On television in recent weeks you could see black leaders from every background congealing into a chorus of umbrage and complaint. But they weren't so much outraged at a horrible injustice as they were affronted by the disregard of their own authority. The jury effectively said to them, "You won't call the tune here. We will work within the law."

This would not be the first time that a movement begun in profound moral clarity, and that achieved greatness, waned away into a parody of itself—not because it was wrong but because it was successful. Today's civil-rights leaders have missed the obvious: The success of their forbearers in achieving social transformation denied to them the heroism that was inescapable for a Martin Luther King Jr. or a James Farmer or a Nelson Mandela. Jesse Jackson and  Al Sharpton cannot write a timeless letter to us from a Birmingham jail or walk, as John Lewis did in 1965, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a maelstrom of police dogs and billy clubs. That America is no longer here (which is not to say that every trace of it is gone).
The Revs. Jackson and Sharpton have been consigned to a hard fate: They can never be more than redundancies, echoes of the great men they emulate because America has changed. Hard to be a King or Mandela today when your monstrous enemy is no more than the cherubic George Zimmerman.

One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today's civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324448104578618681599902640.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop