As conservatives size up their new foe, they ought to remember: It’s not about liberalism. It’s about power. Obama will jettison anything that costs him power, and do anything that enhances it — including invite Rick Warren to give the benediction at his inauguration, dine with conservative columnists, and dismiss an appointee at the White House Military Office to ensure the perception of accountability.
Alinsky’s influence goes well beyond Obama, obviously. There are many wonderful Democrats in this world, but evidence suggests that rising in that party’s political hierarchy requires some adoption of a variation of the Alinsky philosophy: Power comes first. Few Democrats are expressing outrage over Nancy Pelosi’s ever-shifting explanation of what she knew about waterboarding. Those who screamed bloody murder about Jack Abramoff’s crimes avert their eyes from John Murtha. The anti-war movement that opposed the surge in Iraq remains silent about sending additional troops to Afghanistan. Obama will never get as much grief for his gay-marriage views as Miss California.
Remember this next time there's an outrage or they tell you to trust them with your money or with any power.
Richard Fernandez has more.
The reason why Nancy Pelosi and now Barack Obama are caught up in having to both simultaneously denounce coercive interrogation and yet continue it in whatever way they can hide it — by rendition, denial, classification, legal parsing; by hearing things they didn’t hear and winking when there was a mote their eye — is that there is often a choice “between our safety and ideals”. Cheney knows it and wants the documents declassified to show it. The right approach would have been to make the choice. In many cases the public should have chosen, through their officials, to have given up some degree of public safety to preserve the national ideals and paid the price that upholding morals has always exacted. At other times, the public may have elected to do what it felt was necessary and taken the responsibility for it; to be praised or condemned as posterity judged, just as Sherman, Truman, Curtis Le May and Franklin Roosevelt are now weighed in the balance.
But they wanted to have it both ways. Now both Pelosi and Obama are caught between the political necessity of preventing another 9/11 and losing their jobs or explaining what might have to be done and risk losing their jobs. Kerry was right: “torture elicits lies”. But not in the way he meant.
There's no principles at work here. Simply a lust for power and control.
At some point a liar begins to believe the falsehoods himself. Self-deception is the most dangerous phase of deceit. At this point you truly believe that you are above the requirements of reality. That at your word the oceans will fall and the world will begin to heal. But it won’t last. Reality eventually taps you on the shoulder and whether you wake to a pleasance or a challenge, you will awake.
Whiskey comments
Geraghty at NRO has a “Alinsky Presidency” column, but the danger from operating on Alinksy rules is that no one trusts your word.
The CIA and Military do not trust Barack Hussein Obama. He and Pelosi (his creature) have made war upon both, promising investigations, hearings, prosecutions, for things they agreed upon earlier.
Pelosi broke her word, and Obama broke his (implicit) word to the CIA and the Pentagon. Both know certainly from Pelosi’s press conference that she plans political show trials for them both, to eradicate them from political influence and indeed their jobs and lives. Obama has done nothing to stop this and no one trusts him.
Darkly amusing but expected. As Obama erodes the trust in the rule of law so goes any trust in his word.
Victor Davis Hanson shows some.... good? news.
In just three months Obama has caused more disunity than most presidents in recent memory. Why and how? He has chosen to demonize as greedy (cf. the Super bowl quips, the “speculators” jab, the “fair share” and “spread the wealth” slips, etc.) capitalists en masse. Why laugh as Ms. Sykes wished for Limbaugh to die of kidney failure, which set a new low for presidential uncouthness. He treats the media with contempt as all earls do to obsequious court jesters. There is a mood of ‘them/us’ and ‘time is running out’, as the Obama administration used the panic over the autumn 2008 financial meltdown to steamroll through a statist, postmodern economic and social agenda before the people woke up. They embrace the term “100 days”; do they realize its genesis is 1815 and Napoleon’s return from Elba? (they should: it ended at Waterloo). The cynicism is now such that anytime Obama offers a grand assurance (most ethical administration, no interest in government take-overs of autos and finance, unwavering support of Israel, no desire to look backward at the Bush administration, etc.) in Pavlovian fashion we expect the very opposite to follow.
HopeChange! Emphasis added.
We are on dangerous ground here with the reordering of the bankruptcy statutes with Chrysler and the UAW; with the strong-arming of stimulus money for California predicated on the protection of unions; with the serial disdain for paying taxes on the part of Geithner, Solis, Daschle and others; and with the selective release of CIA memos, to denigrate those out of office as veritable torturers (they should reread the transcript of Eric Holder’s 2002 CNN interview with Pauli Zahn in which he grandly denies that the Gitmo detainees have any recourse to the Geneva Convention accords and can be held there for as long as we think the war lasts). What separates the US from Mexico, Cuba, or Haiti is the rule of law, the protection of capital and property, the evenhanded treatment of investment, and the faith in a fair media to uncover abuse. I think that is now all in question, as the utopian ends justify the tawdry means.
Ah yes, it's okay for Obama to break the rule of law and go for a naked power grab, because -well- he's such a great guy.
Well at least Obama is going about this power grab in a mature and measured way...
Obama: Hey, How Come I Get No Credit for "Cutting" 1% of the Budget?
Obama seems to want an awful lot of credit for things he hasn't actually done yet.
...
How callow and juvenile is this "man"? He wants credit for things he hasn't done yet. He doesn't get why he gets less credit for stuff he hasn't done (and won't do) than he gets blame for stuff he already actually did (namely, signing into law a budget loaded with pork).
It's like the US elected a thin-skinned needy man-child with a major inferiority complex.
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