To My Friend, Jim, Who Worries Obama Will Destroy Us

I'm in RI right now, and I called my good friend, Jim, down in Punta Gorda, to see how he was doing. I found him still in a state of despair over Obama and his cabal of radicals who have taken over our government. I hope I cheered him somewhat when I asked him if he ever thought, last November, that things would be in the state that they are right now. I asked him if he would ever have thought that they would have imploded as fast as this - with the whole country turning conservative and with even independents getting fed up with Obama and his programs. There is general recognition that the stimulus is a total failure, that government healthcare is a fiasco and that the ridiculous Cap & Trade bill seems dead on arrival in the Senate.

Not only have 60,000 members cancelled their memberships in AARP (I cancelled mine years ago), but Gallup reports that in all 50 states majorities are calling themselves conservatives, and Republicans have gained the position of being trusted more than Democrats on most major issues. See End Note Below

All this has happened in only seven months; the last few times this happened to a liberal administration (Clinton), it took two years - and with Carter, it took three (the undermining of the Shah and the fall of Iran in 1979).

Conservatives Now Outnumber Liberals in All 50 States, Says Gallup Poll

By Terence P. Jeffrey August 17, 2009 CBSNews.com (Excerpt)

(CNSNews.com) - "Self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states of the union, according to the Gallup Poll.

At the same time, more Americans nationwide are saying this year that they are conservative than have made that claim in any of the last four years.

In 2009, 40% percent of respondents in Gallup surveys that have interviewed more than 160,000 Americans have said that they are either “conservative” (31%) or “very conservative” (9%). That is the highest percentage in any year since 2004.

Only 21% have told Gallup they are liberal, including 16% who say they are “liberal” and 5% who say they are “very liberal.”" CBSNews

Everything's Just Fine

By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. August 13, 2009 American Spectator (Excerpt)

WASHINGTON -- "Allow me a word of encouragement to our president. Mr. Obama, you are doing just fine. You wanted to set a new tone in Washington, and you have. You wanted an open debate on healthcare, and you have it. Admittedly, the tone is astoundingly rancorous, and not incidentally your approval ratings continue to decline. Then too, support for your healthcare reform is dropping, especially among independents. Yet I believe you can take heart. You have roused the interest of the American people in you, the Democratic Party, the Congress, and healthcare. That is good news, at least for us conservatives. Again, you are doing fine. Ever larger numbers of Americans are alarmed by you, your party, the Congress, and your healthcare monstrosity. Mr. President, you are doing fine. Keep it up. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help.

Truth be known, what else were we to expect from the new administration? In the Senate our president was the most left-wing member by a lot. That is a fact, clearly visible to those who followed his voting record. He is also the least experienced major-party presidential candidate in over a century. As for his experience before he entered upon his brief political career, he has never been in the private sector where he might have gained knowledge about profit margins, the difficulty of maintaining a workforce, or the burden of even a slight tax increase. His sole experience has been a fleeting period teaching law and the anomalous experience of being a community organizer, that is to say, a rabble-rouser who organizes needy people to pester governments and corporations for cash or services.

This campaign for healthcare reform has been an ongoing chaos. From all I have been able to tell, the Obama White House is a chaos too. The other day I heard of a highly placed White House staffer, with glittering credentials, who sits in a cubicle answering 300-400 urgent e-mails a day. That only reinforces the reports that this White House is nearing a state of "burn out." The word circulating about the Democrats is that they are "desperate" over the state of the Obama healthcare plan. They have reason to be and my guess is that things will get much worse. Democrats, what were you thinking of when you nominated the most left-wing and inexperienced candidate in the 2008 Democratic field?

Out on the campaign trail where the Prophet Obama is thumping for healthcare reform, he should be very much at ease. Campaigning is the one aspect of politics he does well. But here too we see desperation. The other day he accused his critics of engaging in "scare tactics." He objects to their claim that the bill is exorbitant, though that claim is reinforced by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that puts the price tag at over a trillion dollars. He says he will shave off $500 billion from that sum by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, though the CBO estimates the savings at only 1% of the trillion dollar cost increase. He says his reforms will not fall heavily on the elderly or the disabled, though his own healthcare advisors have written that reforms should fall heavily on these groups. We can quote them. Call it smear tactics if you will.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who is health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research as well as being White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's brother, propounds discrimination against the elderly and other less than robust patients. In the medical journal Lancet he wrote in January, "Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious [an irrelevancy] discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years." As for the less than robust, in a Hastings Center Report he has written, that medical care be withheld from those "who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens….An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia." Thus the state should decide when and if you get treatment. Does that not have a grisly ring to it?" American Spectator

End Note: The AARP thing is really interesting as it shows how perceptive seniors are on the healthcare issue. Obama mistakenly claimed that the AARP supported his healthcare plan. The AARP denied that they supported Obamacare while AARP spokesmen were quoted saying they would "probably" support whichever plan passed. Seniors saw through this doublespeak. AARP does NOT represent the interests of seniors, it is a profitable insurance company.