How far the mighty have fallen....
Facts are stubborn things, Mr. Carney. His entire national security team, including his Secretary of State, said we want to arm and train and equip these people and he made the unilateral decision to turn them down. And the fact he didn’t leave a residual force in Iraq, overruling all of his military advisers, is the reason we’re facing ISIS today. So the facts are stubborn things in history, and people ought to know them. And now the president is saying basically that we are going to take certain actions, which I would favor. But to say that America is safer, and that the situation is very much like Yemen and Somalia shows me that the President really doesn’t have a grasp for how serious the threat of ISIS is.Carney eventually managed to respond, in true Carney fashion:
It is a mis – basically a whitewash of history to suggest that there weren’t periods of enormous chaos and fighting and bloodshed in Iraq when there were tens of thousands of Americans troops on the ground. That is a fact. And that was true in 2004, it was true in 2007. And it was true even when we had the highest number of U.S. troops on the ground. We cannot – the United States of America – ask our military to be a permanent occupying force in a country like Iraq.
Then attempted to draw a difference between the Islamic State and...Islam?Bin Laden reference within 30 seconds. Defensive move.
— Matt Mackowiak (@MattMackowiak) September 11, 2014
"No religion condones the killing of innocents,” Obama says assuring that ISIL is not Islamic
— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) September 11, 2014
Not A Natural? Obama Says Political Theater Not His Strength President Barack Obama, once mocked by his political opponents as “the biggest celebrity in the world,” told NBC’s Chuck Todd that the theater of the presidency is “not something that always comes naturally to me.” Pressed by Todd about his decision to play golf shortly after a Martha’s Vineyard press conference addressing the beheading of journalist James Foley, Obama said he “should have anticipated the optics” of hitting the links. “Part of this job is also the theater of it,” he said in the exclusive interview for NBC’s Meet the Press. “Well, it's not something that always comes naturally to me. But it matters. And I'm mindful of that.”The president's words are inspiring mockery on Twitter.
"We have a wartime vice president, and a peacetime president."...
This is up two points from the week before which tied the lowest level of confidence since last October during the temporary government shutdown. The number who say the country is heading in the right direction has been below 30% for most of this year. Early last October during the shutdown, confidence in the country’s course fell to 13%, the lowest finding in five years. Sixty-six percent (66%) of voters now think the country is headed down the wrong track. This finding is down three points from 69% a week ago, the highest negative finding since last November. Eighty percent (80%) felt the country was on the wrong track in early October 2013.Notably, 70% of likely voters not affiliated with either the Republican or Democratic Party believe that the country is on the wrong track---which exceeds the average by 4 points. This latest poll comes at a time when President Obama's approval rating is hovering above his all-time low of 38%. With just 41% of Americans willing to admit they approve of the way the President is doing his job (down 2 points since August 24,) Republicans are finding themselves with a key strategic advantage as we move into the last 60 days before the November elections.
Obama: Bush-Cheney 'Security Apparatus' Makes Us 'Pretty Safe' President Barack Obama said last night at a Democratic fundraiser in Rhode Island that the terrorism from ISIS "doesn’t immediately threaten the homeland." The reason? The security measures taken by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to Obama. First the president said the situation in the Middle East is "scary," according to a transcript of the event released by the White House. "I don’t have to tell you, anybody who has been watching TV this summer, it seems like it is just wave after wave ofupheaval, most of it surrounding the Middle East. You’re seeing a change in the order in the Middle East. But the old order is having a tough time holding together and the new order has yet to be born, and in the interim, it’s scary."
Six years ago, Obama’s massive campaign organization helped to sweep several Senate Democrats, now the most endangered, into office with his appeal to unite political factions. Now, he’s an attack line. Across the country, from Alaska and Colorado, to Louisiana and North Carolina, Republicans are citing how often the Democratic incumbent sided with the White House on votes in Congress. It’s a tactic Democrats used to great effect in 2006 when they wrestled back control of the Senate by linking every incumbent to President George W. Bush, who was even more unpopular than Obama. “He’s going to be an anchor on each one of these Democrats all the way through,” said Guy Harrison, a media consultant for the Republican Senate nominees in Arkansas, Colorado and North Carolina. “They’re trying to grasp every life preserver they can, but the anchor of Obama is still going to pull them down.”
President Obama needs to focus on how the United States can meet global challenges PRESIDENT OBAMA’S acknowledgment that “we don’t have a strategy yet” in Syria understandably attracted the most attention after his perplexing meeting with reporters Thursday. But his restatement of the obvious was not the most dismaying aspect of his remarks. The president’s goal, to the extent he had one, seemed to be to tamp down all the assessments of gathering dangers that his own team had been issuing over the previous days. This argument with his own administration is alarming on three levels. The first has to do with simple competence. One can only imagine the whiplash that foreign leaders must be suffering. They heard U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power denounce Russia as “today . . . they open a new front . . . Russia’s force along the border is the largest it has been . . . the mask is coming off.” An hour later, Mr. Obama implicitly contradicted her: “I consider the actions that we’ve seen in the last week a continuation of what’s been taking place for months now . . . it’s not really a shift.”If you read on from there, you'll notice that the editors use the word "disturbing" twice to describe Obama's response to the situation in Ukraine and the rise of ISIS. This is quite a departure from the Post's endorsement of Obama in 2012.
Comedy of Stares You know the drill if you watch The Daily Show. Host Jon Stewart plays a smashcut of television news clips, to help him destroy, eviscerate, demolish, devastate, torch, obliterate and disembowel a generally conservative straw man opinion, movement or Fox News host.
"like the Brazilians, they folded, they collapsed, they just absolutely capitulated"...
President Obama announced Thursday that U.S.-led airstrikes have broken the siege by Islamic militants against religious minorities who were trapped on a mountain in northern Iraq -- but made clear the U.S. mission in the region is not over yet. The president, in brief remarks from Martha's Vineyard where his family is on vacation, said he expects the specific operation at Mount Sinjar to wind down. He said military planners will be leaving in the coming days, aid drops will stop and a U.S.-led evacuation is likely no longer needed. "The situation on the mountain has greatly improved," Obama said. "We broke the ISIL siege of Mount Sinjar. We helped vulnerable people reach safety." But Obama said U.S. involvement will not come to an end, as militants with the Islamic State -- also known as ISIS, or ISIL -- continue to brutalize the civilian population in the region, especially minorities like Iraqi Christians and Yazidis. Obama said "we will continue airstrikes" where necessary to protect American personnel and facilities in Iraq.
Clinton critical of Obama foreign policy, says 'failure' to act in Syria created vacuum for jihad Hillary Clinton, the front-runner among potential 2016 Democratic presidential candidates, is sharply distancing herself from President Obama's foreign policy, particularly in Syria, as Americans appear to continue losing confidence in his handling of key international affairs. Clinton, who as secretary of state was Obama’s top diplomat, suggested during an in-depth interview with The Atlantic magazine that the president’s foreign-policy mantra of “don’t do stupid stuff” lacked sufficient depth. “Great nations need organizing principles,” she said in the roughly 8,000-word interview released Sunday. “And ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” The interview comes as Americans’ opinion of how Obama is handling crises in Israel, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, continues to sink. A Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll released Tuesday, three days before Obama ordered airstrikes and humanitarian airdrops in Syria, showed a record-high disapproval rating. Sixty percent of those polled disapprove of Obama’s foreign policy efforts, compared to 36 percent who approved. The interview also could help or hurt the former first lady’s effort to burnish her own foreign policy credentials ahead of an official 2016 campaign.The significance of Hillary's position wasn't lost on Maggie Haberman of Politico:
"He's not a humanitarian president."...
According to the poll, if the 2012 election were somehow held again, Romney would capture 53% of the popular vote, with the President at 44%. Obama beat Romney 51%-47% in the popular vote in the 2012 contest. And he won the all-important Electoral College by a wider margin, 332 electoral votes to Romney's 206. Last November, an ABC News/Washington Post survey indicated that if the 2012 election were held again, Romney would have had a 49%-45% edge over Obama in the popular vote.The usual suspects on the left -- like Oliver Willis at Media Matters -- were out in full force blaming Obama's current unpopularity on CNN itself or a space-time continuum breach of some sort.
.@owillis Or a lot of voters realized how stupid they were to vote for Obama.
— Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) July 27, 2014Currently, one in five Americans (20%) say the economy is excellent or good, while 33% say it is poor, resulting in a current conditions index of -13. As for the economy's future, 38% say the economy is getting better, while 56% say it is getting worse, for an economic outlook score of -18 -- the same as the previous week's score....and the world seems to be in turmoil not seen in a generation. NBC News' Chuck Todd seems to sum up Obama's dilemma quite well: America is fatigued.
“He’ll be 500 miles from Dallas and, in fact, he’ll be 242 miles from Austin, Texas, at the other fundraising he’ll be having,” Cuellar told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBCS, referring to Obama’s destinations during his two-day trip to Texas beginning Wednesday. “So, he’s so close to the border. And let me say this. When I saw — and I hate to use the word ‘bizarre,’ but under the circumstances — when he is shown playing pool in Colorado, drinking a beer, and he can’t even go 242 miles to the Texas border?” “If he had time, with all due respect, to have a beer and play pool like he did in Colorado last night, then I think after the fundraisers he should make time to go down there,” he said.Here's how The White House treated Cuellar's criticism. They told him to shut up. But Cuellar isn't backing down.
"There’s nobody to back us up if we strip our military and neuter it as we do now."...
Obama: It’s Lonely Doing All The Work “You know it is lonely, me just doing stuff. I’d love it if the Republicans did stuff too,” he said during his speech in Austin, Texas. “Sometimes I feel like saying to these guys: ‘I’m the guy doing my job. You must be the other guy’,” Obama remarked, quoting Mark Wahlberg’s character in “a great movie called ‘The Departed.’They say James Brown was the hardest working man in show business. I'm not so sure. Obama loves to claim that he'll listen to people's ideas and work together. What he always fails to mention is that Republicans offer bills and ideas all the time. He just doesn't like them. Has Obama really given up on his job as some have suggested or is he just trolling his critics at this point?
