Guilani went from bad to worse. According to Huffingtonpost.com:
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) defended his accusation that Obama doesn’t love America by arguing that Obama’s upbringing by a white mother and attendance of a white school made his statement not racist.
“Some people thought it was racist — I thought that was a joke, since he was brought up by a white mother, a white grandfather, went to white schools, and most of this he learned from white people,” Giuliani said in an interview with The New York Times on Thursday.
All the GOP candidates now will be asked if they agree or disagree. They need to throw Rude Rudy under the bus. He was always too big for his britches anyway. How can anyone assess how much someone else loves their country? Political tomfoolery.
His 9-11 big-shotting would gag a maggot. He can’t claim to be more deeply affected than everyone else.
Giuliani keeps digging himself in deeper and deeper. Let the comedy begin.
No problem, happy to help. I love language and am a major fan of simile and metaphor.
Yet, when a conservative speaks metaphorically and use terms like target and bulls eye, they have gotten excoriated by the libs and the lib media. They have even been known to be accused of fomenting violence because of metaphors, e.g. Palin and Giffords. Looks to me like a one-way street.
I think political people just need to watch what kinds of words they use. Let’s face it, there are nuts out there in TV land. If I say I have drawn a bulls eye on my opponent and I plan on targeting his seat and taking him out, some unbalanced person might decide to help me out and blast away. It’s just good to choose more neutral words.
Palin was her own worst enemy on that one. She gave some horrible speech after that that compounded whatever it was in the first place. Palin is very careless with inflammatory rhetoric.
Scout —- Completely understand about that billions vs trillions. I have a heck of a lot of trouble just wrapping my mind around the those trillion numbers. Hard to even imagine it. When I was a young whippersnapper, the figure WAS in the billions.
But you haven’t answered yet: 9 trillion to 17.8 trillion. In less than two terms. Shall we accuse the current POTUS of being “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic”?
The NLRB case. Of course, of course, Scout. But was that really just a constitutional misunderstanding to be clarified by SCOTUS as often happens , or did POTUS deliberately set out to get his own way politically by ignoring the powers of the Senate in the hope that he might get away with it? After the “pen and phone” comment and after his shenanigans with immigration, I posit that the NLRB case was just a preliminary bout before the main event. Unfortunately, some of the Repubs in Congress appear to be inclined to play the patsy.
Wolverine – can you identify the new spending that was responsible for this increase in the debt?
hmmmmmm….let’s see here……
@Scout
You are far too well-read to not know the incidents to which I refer. Your statement above that Obama endorsed a “kind” of American exceptionalism indicates that you know exactly what I am talking about. Nevertheless, I will play along for a minute.
Let’s discuss the National Prayer Breakfast, since you brought it up. I saw excerpts of the president’s speech and found his tone to be mocking and condescending. His statements about the Crusades were factually incorrect and irrelevant. If the Crusades had been unsuccessful, we would likely all be Muslims, Christianity might be a dead religion, and freedom of religion would be an unfamiliar concept. The Crusades were defensive in nature–jihad is, and always was, about conquest.
Let’s discuss your statement about Obamacare. It is true that Obamacare was found to be constitutional. However, four conservative justices disagreed with your view that there are no constitutional issues with it. It was saved only because the fifth did not want to go down in history as the deciding vote to overturn it. So yeah …. Obamacare was found to be constitutional in the sense that the constitution is a living document, but that is decidedly not a conservative view of the constitution.
Even if it was the perfect healthcare law, I would still be against Obamacare, because it gives the federal government too much power. It allows the Feds to control 1/6 of the economy, to dictate exactly what coverage Americans must have, and to have a rationale for legislating personal lifestyle to reduce healthcare costs. You seem to imply that you would be okay with Obamacare if it were more effective. Yet limited government is a core conservative principle that would not appear to be very compatible with a national healthcare system dictated by the Feds ….
You do seem to have mastered the art of being a devil’s advocate. In the case of Obama, you are very good at it. But I can tell you that my view of limited government and citizen’s rights seem to be very different from yours.
On the national prayer breakfast…I came away with a completely different take than many conservatives. the Prez’s words didn’t offend me at all.
As for the crusades, I thought the objective was to rescue the Holy Land from the infidels…err…Muslims? I think we are still fighting that one…or if not “WE” then someone. I am trying to figure out how Western Europeans marching thousands of miles was defensive.
I think too many people have sanitized the Crusades into being a traveling bunch of religious people on a pilgrimage. It overlooks the murder of thousands of Jews along the way. Then there were the children’s crusades. 🙄
I am addressing Scout, but you seem to be champing at the bit to defend this guy. Give it a go. Don’t leave anything out.
I’m too busy right now laughing at how Marie Harf had the gall to suggest that we balance our focus on Islamist terrorism by suggesting that we pay more attention to “Christian militant groups” like nutcake John Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa. And grinding my teeth at the report by Bob Woodward that his DOD sources are complaining about the White House micromanaging the war against ISIS. My, my…… Major General Rice and Field Marshall Jarrett.
Where are Gilbert and Sullivan when you need them?
“….Marie Harf had the gall to suggest that we balance our focus on Islamist terrorism by paying more attention to……”
Sometimes when I laugh and grind my teeth at the same time, I forget to edit.
Kelly – until your comment I had labored under the impression that the Crusades were an utter disaster that set the stage for a series of disasters that beset Western Europe for centuries to come. You’ve offered a new revisionist view that the Crusades successfully prevented Muslim domination of Europe. We conservatives are always a little uneasy around revisionist historians, but I think, if you’ve got the goods on this, you should write a book. It will hit the academic and publishing world like a bombshell. I sense at least a Pulitzer for History coming on, not to mention the sales potential in the current zeitgeist. IN any event, Obama said very little about the Crusades at the Prayer Breakfast other than to point out that they were an example of how religious justifications, through history, are often used by adherents of different sects to justify unspeakable barbarity and that this is a bad thing. I’m sure that you don’t disagree with that general concept (unless your history view is much more revisionist than I imagine it to be). I did not detect the “mocking” that you picked up on. Objectively I don’t think it was there, and that perhaps you are projecting some insecurities or predispositions of your own. It (Obama’s presentation) seemed very serious and dry, frankly. I saw no sneers, giggles, eye-rolling, jokes about Crusaders, or any other common indicia of mockery.
My problem with Obamacare and the system which preceded it (which wasn’t that different) is that it gives the insurers way too much power and makes the cost/benefit profile of American healthcare one that is no better than mediocre when compared to other developed nations. I suppose we could disagree, but our employer-provided health system, before or after Obamacare, is atrocious for a country of this size and capability and arbitrarily hangs the primary responsibility for providing health care on employers (Obamacare ameliorated this to some extent, but that still is the dominant model). It stinks, it could be worlds better, and it ought to be fixed, but I see absolutely no possibility that there is competent political leadership in either major party to get anything done on that. It may be that the best hope is that some of the giant hospital chains will evolve into more efficient providers despite the current (or past) structure and that in 20 or 30 years something better will have shown up. BTW, your “living document” explanation of the health care decision by the SCt is mistaken. The decision had more to do with the taxing power of the federal government.
When Obama says things like “my story is part of the larger american story, . . .I owe a debt to to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible”, or “The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known”, I take that to be an acknowledgement of unique and praiseworthy attributes of this Nation. I share his views on this, and if those views indicate a lack of love of country, I find it very confusing to speakers of standard English. “Mockery”, “apology”, “Scoffing” about American values is, to my view, a symptom of a kind of miasmic mind-fog. If something like this settled over Democrats (and it does from time to time), it wouldn’t annoy me so much. But when it happens within what I think should be a Party of reason and constructive policy evolution, it is very depressing. We should disenthrall ourselves from this kind of Limbaughian dementia and speak calmly, precisely, and with sound factual backup to the large issues of the day. Making Obama some kind of a devil is manipulated mass hysteria. Shake it off. Get serious. You can’t really be taken seriously until you and others get out of this.
Standing ovation, Scout.
You hung in there. I left because of the hysteria of many years ago. I guess I was truly gone after Daddy Bush. Yes, I voted for him. He tricked me. I had neighbors who knew him personally through the CIA and spoke so highly of him. He did way too much catering to his new found “base.”
@Wolve
Address away.
Ha! Standing Bronx cheer for Scout. It suddenly got very thick on this blog. Woof. The oxygen masks just fell from the ceiling.
All this on a day when McConnell in the Senate appears to have waved the white flag and dropped his pants. Requiem for the Republican Party is coming.
I’ll bite. What happened? I have had gkids out the ying yang today. No time to even think.
I’ll wager that Obama himself knows zilch about the Crusades. I mean, if a Columbia and Harvard Law grad didn’t know that they speak German, not “Austrian,” in Austria…………….
Heh, heh….and Obama doesn’t do “way too much catering to his new found ‘base'”? Ole!!!!
Who was Obama’s new found base?
Ole!!! Isn’t that a clue?
Yea, I wasn’t focused. I would say that George W. Bush, to his credit, was just as concerned over immigration reform as Obama.
@Scout
You need to catch up on current understanding of the Crusades.
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_new_concise_history_of_the_Crusades.html?id=fKYxKsgVpmMC
I think we will just have to agree to disagree about Obamacare. The taxing power as justification for Obamacare was put forth by Roberts despite the fact that Congress, the president, and the arguments made during the case claimed that it was not a tax. That makes his argument invalid in my view. The opinions issued by the four other concurring justices was not based on taxation.
I do not doubt that Obama has said positive things about the country. I have not argued one way or another about whether he “loves” his country, but I do know that he also says negative, scornful things too.
Well, put out some negative, scornful things, Kelly, that Obama has said and we’ll take a look at them. I just have never heard them. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist – I don’t read everything. However, my suspicion is that the idea that this is a President who “mocks”, “scoffs”, “insults” etc. is largely a figment of manipulated imaginations.
Wolve, what was your question? If it was the one up the thread about the deficit, my response is that the deficit is too high for prudent fiscal management. Governments tend to run very large deficits in times of economic collapse, which is where we were when this President came into office. Deficits in that context are less avoidable than elective deficits like than undertaken by Bush II to finance an ill-advised, security-damaging, military-degrading, anti-American-inspiring, terrorist-spawning, eyes-off-the-Afghanistan-real-problem, totally avoidable elective war. But if your question is whether I’m comfortable with current deficit levels, the answer is no. Do I consider the increase in debt in the post 2008 period to be of a kind with the increase in the pre-2008 period, no. Do I consider the increases in either period to have been “unpatriotic”, no. Do I consider the increase in debt in the Bush Administration to have been “irresponsible”, yes. I also consider it to have been far more avoidable than the post-2008 deficits.
If that wasn’t your question, my apologies.
@ Moon (re #79) – I am a huge fan of Bush I. I think he was an excellent President. Absolutely top-flight. If Romney could have run without the silly Hallowe’en costume he forced himself to wear, I think he could have been every bit as good a President as the first Bush. He had many similar life experience attributes (although no military service and less government service – but having doors in France slammed in your face as you try to convert French souls to Mormonism probably has some of the stiffening discipline that being in a real shooting war has).
I counted on Daddy Bush to be a country club republican with a down home touch. He got too involved in social issues to play to a newly acquired base. You know me and those reproductive rights, Scout. That was important to me and caused me to not vote for him a second time. Now we are past that, I think he is a really neat former president statesman and I love Barbara Bush. (but she was always pro-choice)
On the subject of Obama, I have never heard him mock or disparage the country, I am not starry eyed about my country. It’s the best but it ain’t perfect. I except that. While giving a nod to American exceptionalism, that exceptionalism isn’t without some serious mistakes, gaffes and blights. If I am to accept exceptionalism it has to be accompanied with a whole lot of acceptances of having feet of clay and humility. I don’t think that exceptionalism happened in a vacuum. I think it was the perfect storm of those who had the DNA, true grit and courage and the strength to survive in a totally inhospitable world. Throw in a sprinkling of aristocracy, brains, and people with enough idle time to be free, independent thinkers. That was important also to get people like Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Monroe, Franklin, etc. Brains, brawn, grit…..
But, my dear Scout, this administration has bragged for some years now about bringing our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to an end; and, accordingly, the troops have been withdrawn or were being withdrawn. Conclusion of war means a lessening of war expenditures. But our debt keeps rising and rising, even at a time when the army and navy themselves have been shrunk to a point where the two-war concept may no longer be possible. The Libyan adventure is over — with terrible consequences for our foreign policy. The ISIS problem is still largely an air war with a relatively small number of troops on the ground for training and pilot rescue.
So, where did all the rest of the debt money come from? I thought the administration had announced the end to the recession several years ago. You mean they lied?!!! Oh, no. How could they?
Bush One did an excellent job of putting together the international coalition which liberated Kuwait. But, what I saw after that, in the counter-terrorism arena at least, was interest and support far less that that experienced during the Reagan years. Even though Bush One had headed the CIA for awhile and even asked Jimmy Carter unsuccessfully if he could stay on in that job, I personally felt like a distance had opened up between the warriors and their former chief. It wasn’t a negative distance that involved intrusive micro-managing of the place from afar but more like…well, to sort of quote Gertrude Stein: “There was no there there.” It was more like the air had been sucked out of what was once an intensely driven enthusiasm beefed up by the feeling that the big boss was watching and cheering. To me at least, Bush had become much more distant as a C-in-C than Reagan, even though I never met either of them in person.
Of course, the common wisdom is that Bush One did not learn from the Reagan lesson on illegal immigration and fell prey to Democrat dishonesty on taxes and budget cutting. Perhaps he thought we had all fallen asleep and forgotten: “Read my lips. No new taxes.” Political naivete? Bad advisers? And then the Dems had success in turning a minor economic downturn into practically another Great Depression, as in “It’s the economy, stupid!”, with Bush seemingly incapable of fighting back. Whatever the case, the guy managed to go from a huge level of popularity because of the First Gulf War to losing his second term to the Clinton crowd. In my opinion, that’s like Notre Dame having a five touchdown lead at the half and then losing to Slippery Rock in the 4th Quarter.
McConnell said he had talked to Harry Reid and was going to submit a “clean bill” on the DHS to the Senate for a vote. Then he tried to act like he had some cute tricks up his sleeve for after that. I think the only thing McConnell has ever had up his sleeve was a hankie. Now Reid is making even more demands. By gosh, less than two months into the new Congress, and you can’t tell if the Senate is being run by McConnell or Reid.
ISIS has raided several small villages in northeast Syria and has reportedly hauled off about 90 Assyrian Christians — to what fate no one knows yet. The rest of the Assyrian Christian villagers have fled to find refuge elsewhere. That follows the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya and the general mistreatment of Syrian Christians in the captured ISIS territories.
That does sound a lot like the rationale for the medieval Crusades. As I understand it, what finally convinced Christendom to get off its collective duff and go on the First Crusade was an event much larger than our own 9/11. It was the massacre of Good Friday 1065. About 12,000 devout religious pilgrims — rich, poor, clergy, layman — led by the German Bishop of Bamberg had left Ceasarea and were about two days out from reaching Jerusalem, then under Muslim control, when they were attacked by Muslims and murdered or sold into slavery, with very few escaping. This followed years of persecution of the Christians and Jews who lived in the Holy Land.
History repeating?
Wolve (#92) – my point about elective versus structural deficits was that during economic collapses, government revenues decrease while there is heightened necessity to increase public spending to offset recessionary pressures. I wasn’t talking about some kind of “peace dividend” from winding down militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan. My larger point was that the prior Administration chose to spend the money on what I regard as a Nation-damaging frolic in Iraq. The current Administration came into office just after the Q3-Q4 2008 financial collapse.
By the way – perhaps you or someone else knows – it might be interesting to compare defense spending now to some point during the active military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m not sure what’s reasonable to expect. I don’t think I’d be surprised to find either that spending is considerably lower, or that it is more or less the same (given the kind of lower level background noise of conflict around the world and the tremendous amount of repair and replacement that has to be done to the defense inventory after 15 years of war).
Well, Scout, I will go so far as to say that both Bush II and Obama let spending get out of control, whatever the combo of war and domestic. Both were “irresponsible” at the least, and Obama still likes tossing cash about wherever he wants to pursue his own agenda, stopped marginally only by sequester, which he has used to screw the military instead of pursuing economy in domestic spending. The whole era has been a fiscal mess, in my opinion; and when the bill comes due at some future time, both of them may well get called “unpatriotic” by those who are suffering the aftermath.
Obama has reduced the deficit by about 50%. The debt will continue to rise due mostly to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security expenditures for the huge Baby-Boomer retirement bubble.
Removing the Medicare payment salary cap, means-testing Social Security benefits and getting “illegals” paying into Social Security would have a big effect on long term debt, but good luck getting buy- in from the GOP on any of that!
I would still like to know what massive spending program Obama has signed into law that has contributed to the debt….
Hard to shoulder the blame when Congress meddles into daily operations and prevents reform.
Again, Wolve – I think one has to distinguish between elective spending on disastrous elective foreign adventurism (Iraq) and public spending forced by economic collapses. There’s plenty of room for discussion on which stimulative policies and programs work best, but it is pretty clear that if the government radically reduces public spending (indeed, if it does not increase public spending) at a time when the economy is in free-fall, it is acting irresponsibly.
TARP paid for itself and more with interest. Auto bailouts were paid back 80% and saved an industry. The stimulus was about half tax cuts but still created millions of jobs and arguably helped prevent a depression.
None of the above added even half a trillion to the debt. Lost tax revenue due to the recession added a LOT more.
I don’t think you can say the military is being “screwed” when we still spend 40% of the world total on defense. The military doesn’t even want some of the equipment that congress forces on it due to lobbyist/political pressure.
You gotta cut where the money is- and that’s the big three- Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
You sound like Frank Underwood. re the big three.
/For the record, everyone had better believe I feel entitled to that money after paying in all those years.
Speaking of Frank Underwood, how appropriate that we discussed whizzing on the dead…..must be a male thing.
Break over. I hope everyone has enjoyed Mama Cat being away for the day. I just came on to approve an new commenter.