It's "too late" for Obama to fix the damage he has caused the United States!

 

 

Article by Jonah Goldberg on the damage Barak Obama has done to the United States internationally:

This gets us to the heart of the damage Barack Obama has done. A superpower can cruise on perception for a very long time. Perception is relatively inexpensive. Sure, you gotta float some ships around. Yeah, you might have to run some military exercises. But as long as people think you're sustaining a Pax Americana you are, in fact, sustaining a Pax Americana. But once you let that perception waver, you're suddenly faced with a terrible set of choices. You can't tell the world you're still in charge, you have to show them. If you just talk about red lines and then do nothing to enforce them, further talk becomes worse than useless, it becomes provocative. If you opt to demonstrate your power, you risk failing and confirming weakness. You also risk a horrible escalation as the bad actors respond not with surrender but with even more testing. Does anyone think Putin would be the first to blink at this point if Obama sent troops to Ukraine?

Obama could do everything right starting today (Stop laughing!) and in a sense it would still be too late. It's always more expensive to put down a riot than to prevent it. And it's not entirely clear to me that the American people are willing to pay that price right now. It's much clearer that this president has no interest in asking them to.

 

Everyone mocked George W. Bush for his "I'm the decider" shtick. I never particularly liked the locution myself. But it did get to the truth of the matter. The president has to make decisions. These days, even Dianne Feinstein is willing to admit that this president has problems making decisions. That's all fine and good. But one thing bothers me. A lot of people don't seem to realize that not making a decision is, itself, a kind of decision. President Obama's passive aggression (for want of a better term) has never gotten the attention it deserves. This is, after all, the guy who voted present whenever he could in the Illinois state legislature — not exactly the most high-stakes arena in the world. He's been voting present on a global scale ever since. As John Fund wrote almost exactly a year ago:

Since then, further evidence has piled up that Obama is a dithering, indecisive leader willing to deflect making a decision because of what many see as political calculation. It's one thing when this happens domestically, like when his administration delayed meaningful action by BP and the state of Louisiana to clear up the Gulf of Mexico oilspill in 2010. It's another when it happens in foreign policy — especially in the Middle East. Obama stood aloof during the Iranian street protests of 2009. In Libya, he delayed a decision for weeks until choosing "to lead from behind," in the famous words of one adviser. In Egypt, the administration was caught flat-footed not once, but twice, by uprisings.

 I tried to make this point on Fox News yesterday. Everyone's talking about what the president should say. The assumption is that saying something will reflect a policy of doing something. But that isn't how Obama sees the situation. He wants to say something that will take the pressure off of him to do something. This has always been his M.O. When the IRS scandal looks really bad, he says it's a big problem and an outrage. That takes the pressure off the White House and frees him up from having to do or say any more about it. Now he dismisses the whole thing as a "phony scandal." Obama didn't lay out those "red lines" for Syria because he really meant it. He warned of red lines because doing so liberated him from having to act. When Assad called Obama's bluff he folded. Obama didn't order the surge in Afghanistan to win, he ordered the surge in Afghanistan to free himself from the hassle of having to talk — or think — about Afghanistan.

 

And what is amazing to me is how so many people mistake dithering, buck-passing, and political cowardice for sagacity and strategic genius. Just last week I mocked the ridiculous notion that Obama is a "chess master" always thinking ahead of his opponents. Just this week, Jonathan Alter proves this incandescent idiocy will not die. He writes: "Obama is what was once called a "long head" -- a leader who patiently tries to think a few moves past everyone else. This is a good thing. Thinking hard before reacting is usually the wiser course."

Will someone please provide some examples of where Obama has outthought America's adversaries? The man cowers behind his desk and his fans hang a sign reading "Genius at Work."

 

 

WHY THEY FIGHT by By Brit Hume

Senator Cruz and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms. They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left. Entitlement spending never stopped growing. The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded. They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew. And they see the Republican Party as having utterly failed to stop the drift toward an unfree nation supervised by an overweening and bloated
bureaucracy. They are not interested in Republican policies that merely slow the growth of this leviathan. They want to stop it and reverse it. And they want to show their supporters they'll try anything to bring that about."

http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/special-report-bret-baier/2013/10/14/what-tea-party-really-trying-get-out-slimdown

Time for Conservatives to Rally to Mitt Romney!

I don't know about you but this Conservative is getting tired of these Republican intramural squabbles. For this political junkie it has been fun but now the squabbles are beginning to be so petty they are distracting us from the real contest to save America by beating Barack Obama. Rally to Mitt and demand he pick a Conservative VP for the future.

The Republican Presidential candidates need to all campaign against Obama and not each other!

National Review: No on Newt!

National Review magazine has been my political compass for all of my adult life and I consider it the flagship of the conservative intelligentsia in this country. Founded by William F Buckley it led the Draft Goldwater movement in 1964. Today,it's editors came out against nominating Newt Gingrich as the Republican Presidential Nominee. The editors write in part:

....the White House seems winnable next year, and with it a majority in both houses of Congress, so that much of this conservative consensus could actually become law. A conservative majority on the Supreme Court, a halt to the march of regulation, free-market health-care policies: All of them seem within our grasp. But none of them is assured, and the costs of failure — either a failure to win the election, or a failure to govern competently and purposefully afterward — are as large as the opportunity.

We fear that to nominate former Speaker Newt Gingrich, the frontrunner in the polls, would be to blow this opportunity. We say that mindful of his opponents’ imperfections — and of his own virtues, which have been on display during his amazing comeback. Very few people with a personal history like his — two divorces, two marriages to former mistresses — have ever tried running for president. Gingrich himself has never run for a statewide office, let alone a national one, and has not run for anything since 1998. That year he was kicked out by his colleagues, the most conservative ones especially, who had lost confidence in him. During his time as Speaker, he was one of the most unpopular figures in public life. Just a few months ago his campaign seemed dead after a series of gaffes and resignations. That Gingrich now tops the polls is a tribute to his perseverance, and to Republicans’ admiration for his intellectual fecundity.....

Gingrich’s colleagues were, however, right to bring his tenure to an end. His character flaws — his impulsiveness, his grandiosity, his weakness for half-baked (and not especially conservative) ideas — made him a poor Speaker of the House. Again and again he combined incendiary rhetoric with irresolute action, bringing Republicans all the political costs of a hardline position without actually taking one. Again and again he put his own interests above those of the causes he championed in public.

He says, and his defenders say, that time, reflection, and religious conversion have conquered his dark side. If he is the nominee, a campaign that should be about whether the country will continue on the path to social democracy would inevitably become to a large extent a referendum on Gingrich instead. And there is reason to doubt that he has changed. Each week we see the same traits that weakened Republicans from 1995 through 1998:

"I’d vote for Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform; Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform is radical right-wing social engineering; I apologize for saying that, and no one should quote what I said because I was wrong; actually, what I said was right all along but nobody understood me. I helped defeat Communism; anyone who made money in the ’80s and ’90s owes me; I’m like Reagan and Thatcher. Local community boards should decide what to do with illegal immigrants. Freddie Mac paid me all that money to tell them how stupid they were."

Enough. Gingrich has always said he wants to transform the country. He appears unable to transform, or even govern, himself. He should be an adviser to the Republican party, but not again its head.....

As Republican primary voters consider their choices, they should ask themselves several questions: Which candidate is most likely to make the race turn on the large questions before the country, and not his personal idiosyncrasies? Which candidate is most likely to defeat Obama? Who could, if elected, form an effective partnership with Republican leaders and governors to achieve the conservative agenda? We will render further judgments in the weeks to come as the candidates continue to make their cases and are, just perhaps, joined by new candidates. At the moment we think it important to urge Republicans to have the good sense to reject a hasty marriage to Gingrich, which would risk dissolving in acrimony

In the end if Newt gets the nomination he will have my undivided support. Even with all of his faults, he is vastly superior to Barack Obama. I believe the Republican Party, my party, should nominate Mitt Romney. He is not as conservative as I am but he gives us the best chance to beat Obama and be able to serve as a competent President. America can NOT take four more years of President Obama. We need competence.

To read the entire National Review editorial click on the title for a link.

Is Newt Like Churchill?

There is an interesting article today at the National Review online website comparing Winston Churchill with Newt Gingrich. I support Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination but could support Newt if he were to get the nomination. I don't view either as Conservative as I am, nor one being more conservative then the other. In fact, it could be argued that both are "Rockefeller Republicans." The difference is in their style and temperament. Mitt is the "conservative" safe choice. He is a thoughtful organized manager who would appeal to the majority of "moderate" Americans. Newt, on the other hand is exciting and dramatic. He with his oratory and ideas could inspire the country. The issue is whether he could manage the job of President. He didn't do a very good job when he was the Speaker of the House. Most of his Republican colleagues, from his time as Speaker, are not supporting him for President and don't in fact like him. He did a great job getting a Republican majority in the House but was a failure once in the majority. Yet, I have for some time, seen in Newt a Churchillian quality and parallel that is also seen by the author of this article.

In his National Review article Steven Hayward writes:

But before becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill was often dismissed in similar terms by members of his own party, who complained that “his planning is all wishing and guessing,” that he was “a genius without judgment,” and that he had been “on every side of every question.” His many non-fiction books were even characterized as “autobiographies disguised as history of the universe.”

***********

Two questions must be asked in order to judge whether Newt might have Churchillian qualities (both good and bad) once in office, or whether Romney’s predictable managerial qualities are more suited to the present moment.

The first question is whether we require someone utterly unconventional to match up to the circumstances of the moment.

***********

the second question. While Churchill never shed his weaknesses and defects, he did bring with him to office important lessons of his earlier failures in World War I, along with his serious study of history during his wilderness years. Though Newt wrote a book called “Lessons Learned the Hard Way,”

************

The next couple of months may well prove out the unplanned logic of our long campaign process. The debates, Newt’s strong suit so far, are about to give way to real voting, and to the week-by-week ground game that requires focus and consistency. Newt has a chance to prove conservative skeptics wrong about his constancy — the chance to win over skeptics in the face of so much evidence against him. The course of John Colville’s evolving assessment of Churchill in the 1940s is suggestive. Colville wrote in his diary the night Churchill became prime minister on May 10, 1940: “He may, of course, be the man of drive and energy the country believes him to be and he may be able to speed up our creaking military and industrial machinery; but it is a terrible risk, it involves the danger of rash and spectacular exploits, and I cannot help fearing that this country may be maneuvered into the most dangerous position it has ever been in.”

If you like history, Winston Churchill and politics click on the title for the complete article...... it is very good.

Will Newt Gindrich be called by to power from his "Wilderness years" ?

"The Perry Paradox"

DANIEL HENNINGER of the Wall Street Journal makes a telling point about Rick Perry when he writes today:
.....

Texas' pro-business bias goes back about 175 years—and never died. "It's just that they believe in the whole Horatio Alger myth down here," said Mr. Booth. "It's hard to understand if you haven't lived here."

And so Perry's Paradox: Rick Perry is a success because he nominally presides over an American tiger state, a genuine free-market economy that doesn't much need—or want—his tender loving care. If the job before us is unwinding an unimaginably vast, smothering national government, is Lone Star Gov. Rick Perry the man for that job?

This much is obvious: Texas, not California, better be the American future.

To read the rest of this excellent column click on the title for a link.

"Why We Can't Escape the Eurocrisis"

Gerald O'Driscoll Jr of the Wall Street Journal gives a good explanation of why what happens in Greece is important to Americans.

First to the EU. The underlying dilemma is that governments have promised their citizens more social programs than can be financed with the tax revenue generated by the private sector. High tax rates choke off the economic growth needed to finance the promises. Economic activity gets driven into the underground economy, where it often escapes taxation.
Nowhere is this truer than in Greece....

In Greece and elsewhere in the EU, the banks support the government by purchasing its bonds, and the government guarantees the banks. It is a Ponzi scheme not even Bernie Madoff could have concocted. The banks can no longer afford to fund budget deficits, yet they cannot afford to see governments default. Governments cannot make good on their guarantees of the banks......

.... U.S. banks and financial institutions are exposed to EU banks through funding operations, issuance of credit default swaps and unknown exposure in derivatives markets.

The sad fact is that there is not enough money in the EU to pay off the public debts incurred by the governments. Most countries have long since squeezed as much tax revenue from their citizens as they can........

Americans must not be smug about the suffering of Europeans—our financial system is thoroughly integrated with theirs.....

To read the rest click on the title for a link.


Mr. O'Driscoll, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is a former vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and later Citibank.

The Divider vs. the Thinker

"While Obama readies an ugly campaign, Paul Ryan gives a serious account of what ails America." by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal.

A few quotes:

People are increasingly fearing the divisions within, even the potential coming apart of, our country. Rich/poor, black/white, young/old, red/blue:.......

*******
What was the glue? A love of country based on a shared knowledge of how and why it began; a broad feeling among our citizens that there was something providential in our beginnings;

*******

"To whom much is given much is expected"; a general understanding that we were something new in history, a nation founded on ideals and aspirations—liberty, equality—and not mere grunting tribal wants. We were from Europe but would not be European: No formal class structure here, no limits, from the time you touched ground all roads would lead forward. You would be treated not as your father was but as you deserved. That's from "The Killer Angels," a historical novel about the civil war fought to right a wrong the Founders didn't right. We did in time, and at great cost. What a country.

*******

But there is a broad fear out there that we are coming apart,.....

**********

Where is the president in all this? ......
he feels free to exploit divisions. It's all the rich versus the rest, and there are a lot more of the latter.

*********

Which gets us to Rep. Paul Ryan. Mr. Ryan receives much praise, but I don't think his role in the current moment has been fully recognized. He is doing something unique in national politics. He thinks. He studies. He reads. Then he comes forward to speak, calmly and at some length, about what he believes to be true. He defines a problem and offers solutions

To read the rest click on the title for a link.

I love the quote above from the historical novel "The Killer Angles" which was made into the movie "Gettysburg." In the movie Jeff Danial's, as Union Colonel Joshua Chamberlain a collage professor from Maine, turned solder, speaks the words to a group of Maine deserters just before the battle of Gettysburg. One of the most powerful moments in the movie and in movie history.

Here is the complete quote from the movie:

This is a different kind of army. If you look at history you'll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we're here for something new. This has not happened much, in the history of the world: We are an army out to set other men free. America should be free ground, all of it, from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow, no man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was. Here you can be something. Here is the place to build a home. But it's not the land. There's always more land. It's the idea that we all have value, you and me. What we're fighting for, in the end... we're fighting for each other. Sorry. Didn't mean to preach.

Later that day he wins the Congressional Medal of Honor for holding the end of the left flank of the entire Union Army on the "Little Round Top" at Gettysburg. When his men run out of ammunition he orders a bayonet charge that breaks the Rebel attack.

Who will hold the line in 2012 ?

"Panic ?"

Stocks collapsed roughly 700 points over two days .... this is the backdrop to tonight's Republican Debate...... as the world's economy is on the edge !

Rich Lowry at National Review Online posted this quote from
From Walter Russell Mead on "The Corner":

This is not just about how big the deficit should be; it is about whether the international financial system will survive the next six months in the form we now know it. It is about whether the foundations of the postwar order are cracking in Europe. It is about whether a global financial crash will further destabilize the Middle East and, if so, what we and the Europeans are going to do about it. It is about whether the incipient signs of a bubble burst in China signal the start of an extended economic and perhaps even political crisis there. It is about whether the American middle class is about to be knocked off its feet once again and indeed whether the middle class as we’ve known it will survive. It is about whether sovereign governments can still underwrite economic performance and financial stability in the leading economies of the world.

Click on the title for a link.


"signs of a bubble burst in China" ??????

Thanks Obama (sarcasm)

Standard & Poor's revised its outlook Monday on the U.S. Treasury bond rating of AAA from "stable" to "negative," meaning there is a one-in-three chance the rating will be downgraded in the next two years.

"Obama Sinks to the Occasion" by Fred Barnes

President Obama always lets you down. Just when you think he’s ready to deliver a lofty speech chocked with specifics on handling the spending and debt emergency, he offers up a hyper-partisan attack on the leading Republican proposal, gives practically no details of his own plan, and then sanctimoniously puts himself on the side of preserving “the American dream for future generations.”......

Let me list the lowlights of the president’s speech this afternoon at George Washington University:

To read the rest click on the title for a link.

Hint:

1. It's George Bush's fault !,

2. It was "Class Warfare" and,

3. It was very vague.

4. It put Vice President Biden to sleep ! Fred Barnes didn't say that but the video that has gone viral on the Internet shows it !

Mike Huckabee came to Biden's defense and said: "He was praying that nobody will find out just how disingenuous they are about actually cutting the expenses and hoping and praying that the American people don’t catch on to the games that they’re trying to hoist upon us,”


Update:

Clive Crook is a senior editor of The Atlantic, a columnist for National Journal, and a commentator for the Financial Times writes this about the speech:

.....My instant unguarded reaction, in fact, was to find it not just weak but pitiful. I honestly wondered why he bothered.......

Far from seeking compromise on tax policy, the whole speech was yet again organised around an attack on the evil Bush tax cuts, and a promise to reverse them in part. We would not be in this mess, he said, but for the Bush tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit. I wondered, as he said that, is he therefore going to call for the drug benefit to be halted and all the Bush tax cuts to be reversed? Stupid question. Of course not. Just the tax cuts for the rich, leaving the much larger part of the Bush tax policy in place. Even now, he is deploring the Bush tax cuts as the cause of all the country's problems while actually proposing to leave most of them alone......

The speech was more notable for its militant--though ineffectual--hostility to Republican proposals than for any fresh thinking of its own. It was a waste of breath

Now Charles Krauthamer has his say:

"I rarely heard a speech by a president so shallow, so hyper-partisan and so intellectually dishonest, ...

"How Democrats View the World" by George Weigel

George Weigel a distinguished senior fellow at Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center has an interesting column on National Review online about the Democratic Party's foreign policy views since the Vietnam War. He writes:

Those ideas have a precise and definable origin: They first emerged when the New Left challenged the Truman/Acheson/Kennedy/(Scoop) Jackson Democratic consensus during the Vietnam War. In softer forms, they then became the new orthodoxy among Democratic foreign-policy mandarins like Cyrus Vance and Warren Christopher. Despite the fiascos to which these ideas led during the Carter and Clinton administrations (cf. the Iran hostage crisis and the American inability to prevent genocide in the Balkans), and despite the efforts of some in the old Democratic Leadership Council to change the intellectual template of Democratic foreign-policy thinking, these bad ideas have shown a remarkable resilience. They remain operative at all levels of the Obama foreign-policy team

He then articulates eight characteristics of this Democratic view of the world:

1. Conflict is not the normal political phenomenon that it was assumed to be for millennia....

2. Peace is not a matter of a rightly ordered and law-governed political community; rather, “peace” is a state of mind that can be willed into being.....

3. The notion that the United States should actively seek to shape world politics is pernicious, not for the old isolationist reason that it’s bad for us, but because we tend to be bad for the world......

4. The use of armed force is almost always a bad idea and reflects, not the intractability of certain situations to other forms of conflict-resolution, but a failure of imagination and will on the part of U.S. policymakers.....

5. The present state system should be replaced by some form of international governance, in which multilateral and international bodies play the leading role.....

6. The primary responsibility of U.S. policymakers is to advance the construction of a multilaterally organized and run international order, not to defend and advance the interests of the United States.......

7. With the Cold War (which was in no small part Harry Truman’s fault) now over, there is no power, group of powers, or ideology that poses any grave threat to the United States.....

8. We are not the indispensable nation. There is nothing morally or politically distinctive, much less special, about the American democratic experiment in ordered liberty. So there is no distinctively American approach to world politics, and the United States ought not seek any distinctive role in 21st-century world affairs.....

That is the skeleton of his column. Read the column by clicking on the title for a link to get the real meat of it.

Hard Truths on Libya

By Victor Davis Hanson of National Review

A ruler like Qaddafi is part Milosevic, part Saddam, part Noriega, and part Kim Jong Il. They stay in power for years through killing and more killing (to paraphrase Dirty Harry, “They like it”), and they do not leave, ever, unless the U.S. military either bombs them to smithereens or physically goes into their countries and yanks them out of their palaces. Period. They most certainly do not care much for the concern of the Arab League, the U.N., or a contingent from Europe, or a grand verbal televised threat from a U.S. president — again, even if his name is Barack Hussein Obama and he is not George Bush.

Sorry, but that is where we are and where we’ve always been, so we can either quit, as in Lebanon and Somalia; send in the Marines to take charge of postwar stabilization, as in Afghanistan and Iraq; target Qaddafi and bomb him incessantly until he is broken, as in Clinton’s Balkan air campaign; or schedule a multiyear, Iraq-style no-fly zone, with ample latitude to bomb now and then to carve out sanctuaries within Libya. Those are the options, and one will be chosen one way or another, even if the president thinks he can once again vote present on all of them.

(Click on the title for a link to his entire column)


This is like the movie "The Wind & the Lion"(1975) directed by John Milius, but Barack Obama is no Teddy Roosevelt.

Poor Peggy Noonan

Former Reagan speech writer and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan made a big deal of endorsing Barack Obama after John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his VP pick. Now,she is disappointed in her choice.In her column today she writes:

no one, really, sees President Obama as the kind of leader you'd follow over the top. "This way, men!" "No, I think I'll stay in my trench." People didn't hire him to start battles but to end them. They didn't expect him to open new fronts. Did he not know this?......... he seems incompetent and out of his depth in foreign and military affairs......... I cannot for the life of me see how an American president can launch a serious military action without a full and formal national address in which he explains to the American people why he is doing what he is doing, why it is right, and why it is very much in the national interest.

To read the rest of her column click on the title for a link.

She is right, but why didn't she see this coming? She like many American were fooled by his smooth talk. Now, we know it was on the teleprompter and not in his mind. And she thought Sarah Palin was not ready for "Prime Time"!

"The Whiniest President Ever"

Rich Lowry of National Review has an excellent column today about the presidency.He writes:

It was fashionable at the end of the 1970s, after a dreary parade of presidential failures punctuated by Jimmy Carter, to say the presidency had grown too unwieldy.

Then, Ronald Reagan proved them wrong. Today, people, including President Obama, have been making making the same mistake. Lowry ends his column with the following:

Today, as in the late 1970s, the job isn’t too big, nor is the country too powerful: The man is too small.

You got that right !

(To read the rest of Rich Lowry's column click on the title for a link)

How to deal with North Korea

North Korea sinks a South Koran naval ship in international waters with the death a large number of South Korean Sailors and the Free World does nothing. North Korea fires an artillery barge at a South Korean island killing civilians and South Korean Marines and the Free World does nothing. The Free World has grown anemic in their love of creature comforts and no longer has the will to defend itself. The answerer on what should be done can be found in the 1987 movie the "Untouchables" staring Keven Costner as Elliott Ness and Sean Connery has his police assistant. The movie is about the fight against Al Capone who was an evil criminal much like North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

Sean Connery to Elliott Ness:

You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That's* the *Chicago* way! And that's how you get Capone. Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that? I'm offering you a deal. Do you want this deal?

LET'S ROLL

This is the day we have been waiting two years for. In the wilderness no more !
VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE !!

Nancy, it's Time to Give it Back !

It will not be long now !

We call them patriots Mr President !

John Boehner, soon to be new Speaker of the House of Representatives:

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a president in the White House who referred to Americans who disagree with him as ‘our enemies.’ Think about that. He actually used that word. When Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush used the word ‘enemy,’ they reserved it for global terrorists and foreign dictators — enemies of the United States. Enemies of freedom. Enemies of our country.

“Today, sadly, we have president who uses the word ‘enemy’ for fellow Americans — fellow citizens. He uses it for people who disagree with his agenda of bigger government — people speaking out for a smaller, more accountable government that respects freedom and allows small businesses to create jobs. Mr. President, there's a word for people who have the audacity to speak up in defense of freedom, the Constitution, and the values of limited government that made our country great. We don't call them ‘enemies.’ We call them ‘patriots.’”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44476.html?#ixzz143H6XQvN

The Fall of the American Empire ?

Cutting through all the garbage this is what this election and the election in 2012 is all about.

We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall of Philadelphia. In the days following World War II, when the economic strength and power of America was all that stood between the world and the return to the dark ages, Pope Pius XII said, "The American people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish actions. Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind."

We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.

Ronald Reagan