I don’t mind the president taking a victory lap [about killing Osama Bin Laden] but this was, well, unpresidential. With the Dems’ recent history of being defense pushovers, the folks in the White House are acting like a geek everyone thought would never lose his virginity but unexpectedly did. And, with the hottest chick in school. “That’s right, I nailed Osama.” “Here’s the room where it happened.” “That was the chair I was sitting in.

The president must read the Puffington Host. The “analogy” is problematic, to say the least. Whereas a hostage-taker is a criminal, Republicans in Congress are acting in a perfectly lawful manner. Further, they gained their power through democracy, not coercion. Hostages do not elect their captors. And having just been elected, in a vote that was a clear (though not irrevocable) rebuff of Obama, at least for the moment they have a stronger claim than he does to be acting on behalf of the American people.

I’m tired of people saying [Palin] isn’t qualified. You can’t use that argument anymore after you elect a Community Organizer as President.

evilteabagger

Sure I can, and I will. Just because the American electorate chose a novice once doesn’t mean they should do so again. Palin is in many ways the conservative Obama: they both have dynamic personalities (or, at least, candidate Obama did), they excel at ginning up their respective bases, and they have little experience in governing—although she has more than he. They both espouse principles at the broad level (although Obama stretches the very meaning of the word to include, well, just about anything the listener impresses on them).

If Palin wants Obama to lose in 2012, the best thing she could do is provide sideline support—for a real candidate—with her winning personality that conservatives love and leaves liberals with their heads between their knees blowing into paper bags. It doesn’t matter if I sympathize with Palin’s politics more than I do Obama’s. Neither of them are qualified to be president.

(Source: antigovernmentextremist)

We know from [a recent] poll that most people think race relations aren’t getting better, but are they right? That’s a matter of opinion….

It seems to us that pessimism about race relations is based in large part on false assumptions, particularly the assumption that opposition to the president is motivated by racism. As that opposition has grown over the past 15 months, cries of racism have become louder, feeding the perception that race relations are deteriorating. Lasky writes that “liberals in the media and in politics have created a terrible dynamic in America, fraught with potential long-term problems.” But why should we assume that liberals’ false charges of racism either reflect or are affecting the actual state of race relations in America? This is nothing new; they’ve been crying racism for over 40 years. The only difference is that now they are claiming it is racist to criticize the president of the United States.

In our view, if Americans think race relations are getting worse, it is because they are slow to recognize the utter cynicism behind the politically motivated charges of “racism.” America elects a black president, and now we’re racist because we fault him for being a lousy president? That’s laughable—and laughter, not hand-wringing, is the appropriate response.

The president’s disparagement of Fox doesn’t bother us. He has a right to free speech, and we’re proud to work for News Corp., which owns the only network that consistently fulfills the press’s adversarial role.

But suppose he had ended the answer after the first sentence, simply stating that he supports Fox’s rights under the First Amendment and declining to express an opinion about how the network uses those rights? That would have matched precisely his approach to the Ground Zero mosque.

If President Obama is willing to criticize Fox for the way in which it uses its First Amendment rights, why does he refuse to urge the Ground Zero mosque people to move to a less obnoxious site? Or, to put it another way, why is the Ground Zero mosque the only case in which Obama has ever defended anyone’s First Amendment rights without qualification?

By now it should be clear that the only new idea Obama introduced into American politics was the idea of Obama: Obama the voice of a new generation, Obama the brilliant technocrat, Obama the postracial leader.

The reality of Obama has been quite the opposite. The fresh-faced young leader has governed according to stale old ideas. The dazzling intellect has proved inadequate to basic managerial challenges. We haven’t even been able to enjoy the achievement of having elected a black president, because so many of Obama’s supporters (though not Obama himself, to his credit) won’t shut up about how every criticism of the president and his policies is “racist.”

Yet in America’s current predicament, there is ample reason for optimism. We’d like to think that the failure of Obama’s policies will discredit the bad economic ideas on which they’re based, that his incompetence will discredit the notion that the cognitive elite should run the lives of everyone else, and that the phony charges of racism will discredit the long-outdated assumption of white guilt, at last bringing America close to the ideal of a colorblind society.

This is not to deny that the Obama presidency has been ruinous. But sometimes the costliest mistakes are those from which we learn the most.