Enemies Foreign and Domestic

The Truth About the Anti-Trump Chicago Riot

Nature Abhors a Vacuum and Trump is Filling It

By Brian C. Joondeph

 Aristotle once postulated, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” Meaning that any empty space must be filled with something, even if that something is hot air. Donald Trump, with his pronouncements, promises, and pomp, is filling the vacuum created by the Republican Party.

Creating a vacuum requires two conditions. First is an active process of creating the vacuum and second is the lack of anything filling the empty space. Barack Obama created the vacuum and the GOP did nothing to fill it, or at least replace it with something of substance.

How did Obama create the vacuum? Easy. His left wing radicalism emptied the country of traditional American values and hope, leaving a vacuum of angst and despair. Two thirds of Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.  Obamacare with its false promises and resulting chaos and costs. Open borders bringing the third world into our world, and making the dwindling American work force pay for it all through higher taxes. The Middle East in turmoil with radical jihadists inching closer and closer to America and Iran poised to get nuclear weapons. A thriving grievance industry based on identity group politics. And a culture of political correctness shutting down any criticism or legitimate discussion of these issues.

The IRS, the most powerful and feared regulatory agency in the country, is targeting political enemies of the Obama administration, specifically the Tea Party. No one has been held to account, no one fired, no one indicted or jailed. 

Meaningless Congressional hearings with lots of huffing and puffing, but no accountability. No Congressional oversight. If the political parties were reversed, this would have been a much bigger scandal than Watergate. Instead it was a lot of nothing.

Where was the GOP during these past seven years? Two landslide midterm elections gave Republicans control of the House and the Senate. They campaigned promising to stop the Obama agenda, or at least offer substantive opposition to the Democrats. Instead we hear whining and excuses of why they couldn’t fulfill any of their campaign promises.

Obamacare is still in place, funding intact. The borders are open with refugee migration programs fully funded. Abhorrent Planned Parenthood, selling aborted fetal tissues for profit remains fully funded. Far left judges are readily confirmed by a Republican controlled Senate. Budget deals are passed further increasing the national debt. In turn, debt limits are raised to accommodate the budget deals. No Republican opposition, despite being the majority party in Congress.

Where is the GOP’s bully pulpit? No effort to rally the support of the millions of voters who gave the GOP large Congressional majorities. Instead the GOP happily signs on to the Obama agenda. The agenda of the left marches merrily along, as if Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were still running Congress.

Along comes Donald Trump, promising to close the borders, build a wall, repeal Obamacare, stop the flood of unverifiable immigrants, with a pithy but resonating promise to “Make America Great Again.”

If Republicans were doing what they promised, offering principled opposition to the Democrat agenda, there wouldn’t be a need for a Donald Trump. Or a Ted Cruz. Instead the GOP establishment is directing far more vitriol and pushback to Trump and Cruz then they ever threw at Obama, Reid, or Pelosi. Fox News, a supposed right leaning news network, is at war with Trump. Even many good conservatives at the National Review Online are piling on The Donald.

If the Republicans functioned as an opposition party rather than an enabling party, the Obama presidency would have merely nudged the country leftward, rather than turning the country in a far left direction. Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, or John Kasich would be perfectly positioned to take over and nudge the country back to the right. The establishments of both parties would be happy as the status quo would be maintained. Only a small course correction would be needed, not the total turnaround currently necessary. Much as Bill Clinton nudging the country left after George HW Bush, followed by George W Bush nudging the country right after the Clinton presidency.
This is the void that Donald Trump is filling. Opposition to the leftist agenda of Barack Obama and his allies in Congress, the judiciary, regulatory agencies, Hollywood, academia, and the media. It didn’t have to be Trump. Actually this revolt is bigger than Trump. He just happens to be well positioned and willing to fill this void.

 Which is why his supporters don’t care what he says about migrants, or John McCain, or Megyn Kelly. Or whether he was pro choice once upon a time, or invited Bill and Hillary Clinton to his wedding.

It’s about the leftist agenda driving full speed ahead, fundamentally transforming America into a country most Americans don’t recognize or want. The GOP was elected in two landslides to stop or slow the damage and the GOP did nothing. That’s the void that Donald Trump is filling. If the GOP wonders why Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are leading in the polls, all they have to do is look in the mirror.

Brian C Joondeph, MD, MPS, a Denver based retina surgeon, radio personality, and writer. Follow him on Facebook  and Twitter.

American Thinker

Why did Barack Hussein Obama make the famous ‘One-Finger ISIS’ salute at the African Leaders’ Summit in Washington D.C.?

A photo taken at last August’s U.S.-African Leaders’ Summit in Washington D.C. might shed considerable light. It shows Barack Hussein Obama flashing the one-finger affirmation of the Islamic State to dozens of African delegates.

American Thinker  The Associated Press took this astonishing photo as the African dignitaries joined Obama, who hosted the event, in a State Department auditorium for a group photograph.  It was published in an article in Britain’s Daily Mail, and it was the only use ever of the photo.

The one-finger display is the distinctive Muslim gang sign (most notably the sign of ISIS): The index finger points straight up while the thumb wraps underneath and presses against the digital phalange of the middle finger.  The remaining fingers are squeezed against the palm in order to highlight the extended forefinger.  

ISIS jihadist with ISIS flag and one-finger ISIS salute

The extended finger is symbolic of the one-God concept of Muhammad and is understood by all believers to be a symbolic shahada, the Muslim affirmation of faith: There is but one God and Muhammad is his messenger.

Thus when believers stick their index finger in the air, they demonstrate they are partisans of Muhammad’s God concept.  And they also affirm their belief in Muhammad’s claim he was the interface between God and man. They also demonstrate they are part of the umma, the exclusive transtribal supertribe of believers that Muhammad started 1,400 years ago.

With his forefinger in the air, Obama affirmed his membership in this tribe.

African dignitaries understood, and a range of reactions can be detected among the ones who observed the gesture: amusement, surprise, curiosity, disapproval, contempt.  

Note the reactions of Abdelilah Berkirane, the prime minister of Morroco pictured just behind Obama’s left shoulder, and Ibrahim Boubacas Keita, the president of Mali in white garb and hat. They are Muslims through and through, and they are all smiles. They knew what Obama’s upright forefinger meant.

The reaction of Togo president Faure Gnassingbe, at the top row second to the left, is less approving.  Through his face you can read the mind of this Sorbonne- and George Washington University educated leader. His mind is screaming, “You gotta be kidding!”

Faure Gnassingbe

Gnassingbe’s country is squeezed between Benin and the Ivory Coast and is not far from Nigeria and its Boko Haram plague — perhaps a two-hour flight in a slow Cessna from Togo’s capital to the Nigerian capital, less than an hour in something faster.  

At the time of the Washington conference, Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau had just declared Borno State in northeastern Nigeria as the seat of his caliphate.  Massacres of entire villages were taking place; only a few months earlier nearly three hundred girls were abducted from a Borno secondary school.

 

Togo has seven million people, 50 percent animists, 30 percent Christian.  The remainder are Muslims, part of the umma. Gnassingbe and all other non-Muslims of Togo have reason to worry about radicalization of some of these members of the transtribal supertribe of Muhammad who reside among them. And so his look of disdain. “You gotta be kidding.”

Maybe it was Obama’s idea of a joke, but that is unlikely.  The finger in the air was a position statement brazenly stated.  His entire administration has been a promotion of Islam at home and abroad, and just cataloging the evidence would fill a book.  He has made this country cozy for Islam, from ordering NASA to make Muslims feel good about themselves to calling ISIS beheading victim Peter Kassig by the Muslim name that he had adopted in the vain hope of saving his life.

If only Obama’s coziness were limited to such gestures, but from the very beginning of his administration, he labored to topple the strongman governments that had kept a lid on Islamic extremism:  Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen.  Overthrowing the Syrian government was also part the program, not yet achieved but still possible.

The methodology of each was a tactic from old-school radicalism: stir up domestic trouble that triggers a crackdown, then use the reaction to discredit the government and as a pretext for stirring up greater cycles of trouble until the targeted regime is replaced.

Obama is comfortable with Islam’s extreme.  He arms such people throughout the Middle East.  He has let them into our government.  He supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi as the replacement for Hosni Mubarak, a staunch US ally and enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood, and threatened and bullied Egypt when a massive revolt replaced Morsi with a religious moderate.

The thread of all of these efforts was the reestablishment of the Islamic caliphate, the line of successors of Muhammad that ended nearly a century ago with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.  This has always been a Muslim Brotherhood objective.  In their grandiose plans, the reestablished caliphate would stretch across the Middle East with Jerusalem as its capital.  

The glory of Islam resurrected!  These people aspire to world domination, and the caliphate would serve as the base for an ever-expanding war on the world until domination is achieved.  That was always the goal of their role model.  Muhammad ordered his followers to make Islam the only religion — to create a universal umma.  As with Obama, they are just following orders.

There is nothing in Obama’s head that is American.  He is an antithetical American, a polar opposite of its values that he is routinely undermining.  He is an unabashed member of the transtribal supertribe that Muhammad created 1,400 years ago; he is of the umma, not of America.  His finger in the air at the African Leaders’ Conference is unambiguous evidence.

 

 

Barenakedislam

Obama Wants to Defeat America, Not ISIS

By Daniel Greenfield

Last year at a NATO summit, Obama explicitly disavowed the idea of containing ISIS. "You can't contain an organization that is running roughshod through that much territory, causing that much havoc, displacing that many people, killing that many innocents, enslaving that many women," he said.

Instead he argued, "The goal has to be to dismantle them."

Just before the Paris massacre, Obama shifted back to containment. “From the start, our goal has been first to contain them, and we have contained them,” he said.

Pay no attention to what he said last year. There’s a new message now. Last year Obama was vowing to destroy ISIS. Now he had settled for containing them. And he couldn’t even manage that.

ISIS has expanded into Libya and Yemen. It struck deep into the heart of Europe as one of its refugee suicide bombers appeared to have targeted the President of France and the Foreign Minister of Germany. That’s the opposite of a terrorist organization that had been successfully contained.

Obama has been playing tactical word games over ISIS all along. He would “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS. Or perhaps dismantle the Islamic State. Or maybe just contain it.

Containment is closest to the truth. Obama has no plan for defeating ISIS. Nor is he planning to get one any time soon. There will be talk of multilateral coalitions. Drone strikes will take out key figures. And then when this impressive war theater has died down, ISIS will suddenly pull off another attack.

And everyone will be baffled at how the “defeated” terrorist group is still on the march.

The White House version of reality says that ISIS attacked Paris because it’s losing. Obama also claimed that Putin’s growing strength in Syria is a sign of weakness. Never mind that Putin has all but succeeded in getting countries that were determined to overthrow Assad to agree to let him stay.

Weakness is strength. Strength is weakness.

Obama’s failed wars occupy a space of unreality that most Americans associate with Baghdad Bob bellowing that there are no American soldiers in Iraq. (There are, according to the White House, still no American ground forces in Iraq. Only American forces in firefights on the ground in Iraq.)

There’s nothing new about any of this. Obama doesn’t win wars. He lies about them.

The botched campaign against ISIS is a replay of the disaster in Afghanistan complete with ridiculous rules of engagement, blatant administration lies and no plan for victory. But there can’t be a plan for victory because when Obama gets past the buzzwords, he begins talking about addressing root causes.

And you don’t win wars by addressing root causes. That’s just a euphemism for appeasement.

Addressing root causes means blaming Islamic terrorism on everything from colonialism to global warming. It doesn’t mean defeating it, but finding new ways to blame it on the West.

Obama and his political allies believe that crime can’t be fought with cops and wars can’t be won with soldiers. The only answer lies in addressing the root causes which, after all the prattling about climate change and colonialism, really come down to the Marxist explanation of inequality.

When reporters ask Obama how he plans to win the war, he smirks tiredly at them and launches into another condescending explanation about how the situation is far too complicated for anything as simple as bombs to work. Underneath that explanation is the belief that wars are unwinnable.

Obama knows that Americans won’t accept “war just doesn’t work” as an answer to Islamic terrorism. So he demonstrates to them that wars don’t work by fighting wars that are meant to fail.

In Afghanistan, he bled American soldiers as hard as possible with vicious rules of engagement that favored the Taliban to destroy support for a war that most of the country had formerly backed. By blowing the war, Obama was not only sabotaging the specific implementation of a policy he opposed, but the general idea behind it. His failed wars are meant to teach Americans that war doesn’t work.

The unspoken idea that informs his strategy is that American power is the root cause of the problems in the region. Destroying ISIS would solve nothing. Containing American power is the real answer.

Obama does not have a strategy for defeating ISIS. He has a strategy for defeating America.

Whatever rhetoric he tosses out, his actual strategy is to respond to public pressure by doing the least he can possibly do. He will carry out drone strikes, not because they’re effective, but because they inflict the fewest casualties on the enemy.

He may try to contain the enemy, not because he cares about ISIS, but because he wants to prevent Americans from “overreacting” and demanding harsher measures against the Islamic State. Instead of fighting to win wars, he seeks to deescalate them. If public pressure forces him to go beyond drones, he will authorize the fewest air strikes possible. If he is forced to send in ground troops, he will see to it that they have the least protection and the greatest vulnerability to ISIS attacks.

Just like in Afghanistan.

Obama would like ISIS to go away. Not because they engage in the ethnic cleansing, mass murder and mass rape of non-Muslims, but because they wake the sleeping giant of the United States.

And so his idea of war is fighting an informational conflict against Americans. When Muslim terrorists commit an atrocity so horrifying that public pressure forces him to respond, he lies to Americans. Each time his Baghdad Bob act is shattered by another Islamic terrorist attack, he piles on even more lies.

Any strategy that Obama offers against ISIS will consist of more of the same lies and word games. His apologists will now debate the meaning of “containment” and whether he succeeded in defining it so narrowly on his own terms that he can claim to have accomplished it. But it really doesn’t matter what his meaning of “containment” or “is” is. Failure by any other name smells just as terrible.

Obama responded to ISIS by denying it’s a threat. Once that stopped being a viable strategy, he began to stall for time. And he’s still stalling for time, not to beat ISIS, but to wait until ISIS falls out of the headlines. That has been his approach to all his scandals from ObamaCare to the IRS to the VA.

Lie like crazy and wait for people to forget about it and turn their attention to something else.

This is a containment strategy, but not for ISIS. It’s a containment strategy for America. Obama isn’t trying to bottle up ISIS except as a means of bottling up America. He doesn’t see the Caliph of the Islamic State as the real threat, but the average American who watches the latest beheading on the news and wonders why his government doesn’t do something about it. To the left it isn’t the Caliph of ISIS who starts the wars we ought to worry about, but Joe in Tennessee, Bill in California or Pete in Minnesota.

That is why Obama sounds bored when talking about beating ISIS, but heats up when the conversation turns to fighting Republicans. It’s why Hillary Clinton named Republicans, not ISIS, as her enemy.

The left is not interested in making war on ISIS. It is too busy making war on America.

Sultan Knish

CHATTANOOGA: Is What Happens When You Don’t Have the Balls to Name Your Enemy

by Ashley Intartaglia
July 18, 2015

 Today, I feel rage. Real, hateful, all-consuming rage. Which is not an emotion I feel very often. As a matter of fact, the last time I felt exactly as I feel right now was 14 years ago when terrorists flew commercial airplanes into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. If it’s possible to be so angry that you can feel the blood in your veins rising in temperature…that was how I felt then, and that is how I feel now.

Because on July 16, four United States Marines and a Navy Sailor were brutally murdered on American soil by what appears to be a radical islamic terrorist. Five people who voluntarily chose to defend this country, were shot to death, executed, on American soil.

Let me reiterate where they were murdered…by a radicalized muslim. On American soil. To make matters worse, they faced this lone-wolf extremist completely unarmed.

While the dead gunmen who carried out this plot can be held responsible for pulling the trigger, the blood of five members of our military stains the hands of countless others in American “leadership” who have sat idle as our President protects his legacy, and neglects our safety.

What took place in Chattanooga is what happens when you don’t have the balls to name your enemy. It’s what happens when you prioritize domestic feel-good-policies over a strategy to stop evil in its tracks.

In my opinion, the calculated execution of these service members by a radicalized muslim terrorist is equivalent to the acts of war we faced on September 11th, and when Pearl Harbor was attacked. In both cases, the loss of American life on our own soil was unacceptable, and we retaliated with full force against those who had committed such atrocities.

Like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, the Chattanooga murders were a shot across the bow. Will we now seek justice for the fallen by finally declaring war on an enemy who is already at war with us? Or will our “leaders” stamp some asinine classification on this shooting the same way they did with Ft. Hood, in an attempt to defer going to war. All in the name of Obama’s legacy as the “President of Peace”?

Two of the Marines and the sailor murdered yesterday leave behind children. And it’s crippling to imagine that one day those kids may have the following conversation with their mothers:
Child: Mom, how did Daddy die?

Mom: Well sweetheart, he died serving in the Marine Corps. He was killed by a terrorist.

Child: What country was he deployed to when he died, Mom?

Mom: Well honey…he wasn’t deployed. He was killed by that terrorist right here on American soil.

I don’t know about anyone else…but I can’t get that damn scenario out of my head. I can’t stop feeling rage because three families will have to have that conversation with their children and their grandchildren. I can’t stop feeling rage because a complete lack of “leadership” has led us to this place where our enemy is one step ahead of us.

Today, we are mourning the lives of four brave Marines and one Navy Sailor because our “leaders” are more concerned about not offending certain groups of people, than protecting this country from evil. Because they’re more concerned with the optics of the President’s term in office rather than making sure we are strong and safe from those who want to run a black sheet up the flag pole on the White House lawn.

To the families of GySgt. Thomas Sullivan, LCpl. Skip Wells, SSgt. David Wyatt, Sgt. Carson Holmquist, PO2 Randall Smith, we’re praying for you, and we stand with you. Because #MilitaryLivesMatter.

God Bless our brave men and women in uniform, and God Bless America.

Clash Daily

They're Just Committing the Crimes Americans Won't Commit

July 5, 2015
By Selwyn Duke

 
 With the San Francisco woman murdered by one of Barack Obama’s “new Americans,” we should ask: how much innocent blood will be spilled on the altar of the Left’s “fundamental transformation” of America? While callow and cowardly corporations are severing ties with Donald Trump because he dared speak a truth in an age of lies, the reality of far too many of the illegals invading our country is this:

They are just committing the crimes Americans won’t commit.

Some will say, of course, that Americans sometimes do such evil as well. But it’s also true that Americans do sometimes take the menial jobs so often performed by illegals, yet we nonetheless hear the statement, “They’re just doing the jobs Americans won’t do.” So since we’re indulging rhetoric and generalizations here, turnaround is fair play.

Will people ever rise up and make that sickening agenda-facilitating suppression of truth known as political correctness exactly what it should be: a recognized vile heresy, to be stamped out with extreme prejudice? I recently heard someone take exception to the term “illegals,” making that now stale point that “no one is illegal” (cue the tiny violin). This person argued that bank robbers break the law as well, but we don’t brand them “illegals.” Point taken. We call bank robbers “criminals.”

And if the Left wants to apply the same descriptive to illegal aliens, it works for me.
(Or would “undocumented criminals” be preferable?)

It would be wholly accurate, too. Generally lost in our self-flagellating, suicidal pander-fest is that every illegal migrant is a criminal by definition. This is why the lying Left — ever engaging in language manipulation — dislikes the word “illegal”: accurate terminology relates the truth of a matter. This is intolerable when your agenda is completely contrary to Truth.

An even better adjective for illegals, however, is “invaders.” And Francisco Sanchez, the vile murderer of the San Francisco woman, Kathryn Steinle, certainly fits the bill. He repeatedly invaded our country for the purposes of destruction, dealing drugs and being convicted of felonies seven times until he finally took a life. Yet he is not the only one culpable in his malevolent act.

 What do you call government officials who not only abdicate their responsibility to halt an invasion, but actually aid and abet it? Quislings? Traitors? Leftists? But I repeat myself.

These terms are not too strong. I previously reported on Obama’s plan to “seed” communities around America with foreigners who would, as the scheme goes, “navigate” and not assimilate as they “push citizens into the shadows” (that is, those they don’t push into graves). Again, what do you call such people?

It isn’t just Obama, of course. These traitors have many names, such as Jerry Brown, Jeb Bush, Rahm Emanuel, Hillary Clinton, Luis Gutierrez and Mark Zuckerberg. But, hey, who can blame them, right? They’re just pushing the policies Americans won’t push.

Unfortunately and as has been said before, treason today is now the norm. If you don’t drink deeply of the cup of multiculturalism, internationalism, Western demographic genocide and cultural suicide, you’re a “nativist” or, worse still, a “racist,” the latter of which has just come to mean “anything bad” to young skulls full of mush whose now putrefying gray matter endured endless sanitary spin cycles in the propaganda mills masquerading as universities. The inmates not only run the asylum, they’re numerous enough to classify the normal as abnormal. You’re a boy who’s sure he’s a girl? You’re white but identify as black? You think an invader is the equivalent of a citizen? Those people who’d cramp your style with that pesky Objective Reality are the problem. Off to re-education camps with them.

Another fancy is that Mexico isn’t a profound enemy. If you’re an illegal alien in Mexico, the best thing that can happen to you is that you merely get deported; also possible is that the police will beat you Pelosi-senseless or even kill you (it’s said that you can buy your way out of a fatal hit-and-run in Mexico for $450; the rule of law isn’t exactly big there). And no ACLU will come running and sue the government on your behalf. None of this stops that dysfunctional cartel-ridden nation from issuing its people actual instructions on how to better invade the U.S. and game our system. Nor does it stop them from lecturing us on the humane treatment of undocumented criminals. This is why a real president would tell the Mexican regime that if it didn’t stop weaponizing its population against us, we’d demonstrate that borders can be transgressed both ways and make Black Jack Pershing look like a missionary.

Instead, people are more worried about the Confederate flag flying in America than the Mexican flag flying here. As for Obama and his ilk, they welcome invaders because, upon being naturalized, 70 to 90 percent of them vote for leftists. And our leftists truly would rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

But who is really to blame? Our Hell-raisers are only in power because far too many of us are just voting for the politicians Americans wouldn’t vote for.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

American Thinker

The Left's Base Motive: Vengeance

January 2, 2015
By J.R. Dunn 

 
American leftism has gotten an awful lot of mileage by monopolizing the moral high ground. It is the sole force in American that favors the poor. The sole enemy of racism. The sole comforter of rape victims.  The sole protector of defenseless Muslims. The sole guardian of the environment, and so on ad nauseum.

It all falls apart eventually -- with friends like the left, nobody needs enemies. But often overlooked is that fact that it’s bogus from the start. Any prolonged glance at the left reveals it to be an ideology of power, its major tool violence, its goal revenge.   

Leftism has always been about revenge. The works of Marx are filled with fantasies of retribution and judgment. Their tone reeks of resentment and paranoia, with blame cast for even the most trivial. "The bourgeoisie,” Marx once declared in a letter to Engels, “will remember my carbuncles until their dying day.” That’s leftism in a nutshell.

The Paris communards of 1870, the first instance of an actual leftist government-in-being, immediately began shooting bourgeois on taking power, giving full rein to the European hatred for the middle class that is all but incomprehensible to Americans. That practice has been repeated by every hard left government that has ever taken power -- the USSR, communist China, Castroite Cuba, Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, down to minor examples such as Bela Kun’s Hungarian “Regime of Light” (1919), which reintroduced the Roman practice of decimation.

This unvarying tendency toward atrocity suggests that all these regimes had something in common, and it’s not that they all suffered from boils. It’s the lust for vengeance -- revenge for slights and crimes either real or imaginary,  that can be found in every leftist from Nechaev to Bill Ayers. No less than Barack Obama spilled that when, his back apparently against the wall in 2012, he began ranting about “voting for revenge”.

This was displayed clearly enough this past holiday season.
First in the wave of bogus rape stories, brought up not to assure prosecution or to curtail such crimes, but solely as ideological weapons for use by feminists.

American leftism has always been about magnifying trivial complaints to serve as excuses for revolutionary action. The U.S. has never had a feudal system, nor a proletariat, nor any other conceivable reason for revolution. (German Marxist Werner Sombart pointed out in 1903 that the American masses already possessed what the left was promising them. His comrades badgered him mercilessly for this insight.) Instead we see trivia blown up to apocalyptic proportions -- and nowhere less than in feminism. Betty Friedan hated the suburbs. Gloria Steinem served as a Playboy bunny and never got over the humiliation. They therefore set out to upend Western civilization by inflating these slights while millions of other women fastened on atrocities such as “the male gaze,” having doors opened for them, “manspreading,” and attempted pickups -- or lack of the same.

The one actual atrocity available was rape, which feminists have utilized as heavy artillery -- “all men are rapists”, “all sex is rape”, and the like. The latest barrage came from Tawana Dunham and Rolling Stone’s “Jackie.”  

Dunham, the East Coast sophisticate’s 300-lb. “It” girl, claimed in a memoir that she had been raped by an infamous Republican while at college,  while “Jackie” regaled Rolling Stone with a tale of gang rape at the hands of the always-reliable frat house.

Suffice to say not a single detail of either story help up. A “Barry” did attend Oberlin, and he was a power in local campus conservative politics, but he lacked a handlebar mustache and he’d never met Dunham. The fraternity in “Jackie’s” yarn threw no party the night in question, nor did she show any signs of suffering such an ordeal. One of the grotesque aspects of this scandal is that nobody in the legacy media so much as alluded to the Brawley and Duke hoaxes, which in many ways were identical to these accounts. In the Brawley case a black teenage girl, afraid to return home after a late night out, claimed to have been raped by a gang of whites under degrading circumstances. A gullible media hooted the story to the skies, egged on by the “Rev.” Al Sharpton. In the Duke case, the entire lacrosse team was publicly indicted for the mass rape of a stripper brought in to entertain a stag party.

Both these stories began to collapse almost immediately, but proponents insisted it didn’t matter -- white men had raped black women innumerable times before, so collective guilt demanded that someone be persecuted. As for Duke, lacrosse was an upper-class WASP sport, and the team deserved to be punished for that alone.

Dunham and “Jackie” would do well to contemplate the fates of the accusers in these hoaxes. 

Although Brawley’s champion Al Sharpton used the incident as his next step in clawing his way to the heights (if that’s the word) of MSNBC, Brawley herself today lives pseudonymously in Northern Virginia owing millions in legal fines. The Duke athlete’s accuser, Crystal Mangum, is serving hard time for the murder of a paramour.

Both Dunham and “Jackie” were looking for revenge for something -- all that we know is that it wasn’t rape.

Even more serious -- for the nation as a whole as well as those directly involved -- is current racial unrest triggered by blatant attempts to manipulate racial tensions through the actions and rhetoric of Barack Obama and Eric Holder et al. Long-term efforts to decriminalize the actions of black lawbreakers, beginning with the Trayvon Martin incident and progressing to the Ferguson shooting, have dovetailed with several standard episodes of police incompetence in Cleveland and Staten Island to create as fraught a racial atmosphere as at any time since the late 60s. (So much for the “post-racial” president.) This culminated in the assassination of two police officers in Brooklyn by an unstable career criminal, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who had boasted on his Facebook page that he was out to avenge the Brown shooting by “giving wings to pigs.” (With the customary competence of the urban gangster, Brinsley shot not white officers but Wenjian Liu, an Asian, and Rafeal Ramos, a Hispanic.)

Here is a case where the leftist yearning for vengeance was reified by a maniac -- a not at all uncommon occurrence. Their rhetoric and posturing brought their fantasies and desires for vengeance to life before their eyes -- though certainly not in a way that they would have approved of, seeing as there can be little opportunity to exploit it. Whatever else he was, Brinsley is in no way a revolutionary hero.

The left’s entanglement with vengeance is easily understood -- it has nothing else. Their messiah has failed to lead them into Eden -- his policies, both domestic and foreign, have failed catastrophically one after another, leaving him nothing to show for six years as president and a nightmare gauntlet for the remainder of his term. His response -- and the response of the left as a whole -- amounts to little more than disjointed and incoherent actions. In the past six years, every last hope and dream of the left has been exposed -- there is nothing left.

So what does the left have but vengeance? It got them this far -- it will have to maintain them through the rest of Obama’s tenure, and beyond. 

So it follows that we will see more of it over the coming two years.  It could be argued, in fact, that a number of Obama’s recent actions amount to revenge. His immigration “reform” was punishment for a nation not worthy of him. His “opening” to Cuba acts as a punishment of Hispanics for letting him down in the midterms.

“Revenge is a dish best eaten cold”; “When seeking vengeance, be sure to dig two graves”. All the adages concerning revenge are cautionary. It’s something to be avoided, to be left to fate or karma or the hands of the Almighty. This is not something to be overlooked, if the condition of Tawana Brawley and Crystal Mangum are any indication.

But the left will overlook it. They despise ancient wisdom and they don’t have an Almighty. That being the case, we should prepare for a parade of Trayvons and “Jackies”, Lenas, and Ismaaiyls.

American Thinker

The Progressive Missionaries of Unhappiness

by Daniel Greenfield

There is no one that the left hates more than a man who does not hate, who goes through the day without outrage and who does not spend his life stewing with vindictive resentments.

Leftists call it “privilege” now. They have called it apathy, escapism and a hundred other things.

They will find a thousand other names for it as they march through the future centuries grinding their teeth and cursing their country for its backwardness, their people for their provincialism and their culture for its mercantilism. But privilege is simply freedom from resentment.

To be of the left is to confuse perpetual outrage with righteousness. The professional leftist believes that the path to utopia on earth lies in constantly denouncing thought criminals until they have all been unthought so that only their kind of ethical and empathetic people walk the earth.

Like most utopians, they plan for a utopia that they could never actually live in.

Leftists without grievances are like an army without guns. That is why leftist experiments in communes dissolved into denunciations, power grabs and authoritarian rules as soon the drugs ran out. Often even before. The leftist isn’t seeking freedom from capitalism, religion, nationalism, racism, sexism, office dress codes, bar codes and any of the other great evils of the moment. These are just the outrage fuel of the willfully outraged whose resentment has become both culture and religion.

What he wants is to express an egotistical grievance at a world that is not built around him. His resentments came before his ideology. They are in a very real sense his ideology. The idealistic leftist is a passing phenomenon. He is useful for getting the actual work done while everyone else shouts. Unless he is very dim, he eventually realizes that and heads off to volunteer in Africa. The core is the aggrieved leftist whose grievances merge with his storytelling skills into the compelling narrative of a narcissist.

The perpetually aggrieved deeply resent those who are oblivious to their anger. It is the theme that dominates the literature, the music and the political writings of an infuriated left throwing its anger at a mindless mass that is perfectly happy collecting paychecks, living in the suburbs and watching television. It is not their prosperity that the left hates, but their uncomplicated happiness.

It is this uncomplicated happiness that the left sets out to ruin at all costs.

Leftist activism is drama. It is deliberately destructive and disruptive. It glories in taking the happy lives of ordinary people and wrecking them. It plays the part of the troubled sibling, the one who is driven to destroy the happiness of the rest of the family out of his or her own willful unhappiness.

Happiness is a choice. It is not dependent on the condition of the individual, but on his state of mind. The essence of enduring happiness is a state of stability. Leftist politics are instability incarnate; the opposite number of happiness. That is why the left acts as the destroyer of happiness.

The left does not think that anyone should be happy. It is not unhappy because it is personally enmeshed in suffering. The ideological leaders of the left tend to come from the upper classes. They know no hunger except when they are dieting. They experience so few material shortcomings that they treat poverty as a lifestyle; slumming in poor areas and showily living on a few dollars a day.

It is the happiness of others that makes the left unhappy. It is convinced that this happiness is unearned and illegitimate because it does not take into account how unhappy this happiness makes the left.

Privilege is the accusation that the very lack of resentment and grievance, neurotic responses to simple phrases and a cloud of free-floating anger, represents an ignorant oppression. The happy are only happy at the expense of the unhappy and must recognize the unhappy privilege of their happiness.

Leftists are missionaries of unhappiness. Their creed is salvation through anger. Their governing philosophy is to make others miserable in order to teach them how they have overlooked the misery of others. They are forever spreading misery around the world for the sake of the greater good.

If the left sees anyone being happy, it must immediately set out to ruin the fun. The simple joy of others turns out to be only a cover for monstrous abuses that they are determined to make everyone else see. If it’s an object, it was made by oppressed workers. If it’s a social group, it’s discriminatory. If it’s food, it makes you sick. If it’s a sport, it’s abusive. If it’s art, then it’s escapism from the misery the left creates.

It is straightforward happiness that the left hates most of all. It is unable to appreciate anything directly unless it is medicated. It likes things only askew. It says that it likes bad art and ugly fashions because it is being ironic. What it really means is that it is only capable of liking something as a commentary on the absurdity of the thing and the emotion of liking it. Even its happiness is a critique of happiness.

Its joys are as sour as the rest of its nature.

The left views simplicity as dishonest. It is full of secret agendas and projects this in paranoid fashion. It is always finding the subtext in everything because it brings the subtext to the table. It is forever carrying around Rorschach inkblots in its head and shouting about all the terrible things it sees around it.

Deriving its happiness from the unhappiness of others, the left must see the destruction of happiness as moral and its victims as immoral. Happiness is selfish, it insists, while the awareness of how many evils are hidden beneath the simplistic façade of happiness is ethically enlightening. And yet its own obsession with destroying the happiness of others is the selfish way in which the left finds its happiness.

The left is only truly happy when it is destroying something. Its sublime transcendent moments are revolutionary. Their joy is derived not from what is being created, but from what is being destroyed. Every leftist revolution from the reign of Madame Guillotine to Obama’s election was full of vicious glee at things coming undone. Under the banner of equality, the left inaugurates inequality. Through calls for peace, it brings war and with cries of prosperity, it ushers in an age of terrible poverty.

Unable to create, the left ultimately only destroys. Its creative energies spring from bitterness. It glories in subversively undermining the happiness of others, directly and indirectly, but once all the things that it sought to destroy have been banished, it has nothing more to offer. Its hatred is sterile. It poison can be artfully disguised as idealism, humor and passion, but when there is nothing left to attack or subvert, it shows its true viral form by dying, as every virus that kills its host must inevitably do.

When the left finally triumphs, its first order of business is a total ruthless purge of its own professional dissenters because without such a purge, it would remain in the same dysfunctional state.

The left is satanic in its original sense of ‘antagonist’. It represents the darker side of human nature. It is the ideology of those who cannot let their anger go, who gain a perverse enjoyment from their grudges and define themselves less by what they are for than by what they are against. Its followers are motivated by an endless resentment that cannot be appeased because the resentment is their purpose.

It is impossible to meet the left halfway or to compromise with it because it is not seeking the stable balance that so many conservatives are. It finds its true purpose in the chaos of conflict. It gains its meaning in opposition not in co-existence. To compromise with the left is to rob it of its purpose. And the left pushes back against any such efforts through renewed bursts of radicalism.

Conservative parties lose when they fail to come to terms with this antagonistic dynamic and assume their opponents on the left also seek a stable state that they can find common ground on. Stability is the enemy of the left. Stability is privilege. Stability is happiness. Stability is everything that the left despises.

The left has learned to cloak its animosity and destructive aims in positive rhetoric. It destroys economies, families and freedoms in the name of equality. Its cheering mobs realize too late that its cause is not the equality of opportunity, happiness or liberty, but poverty, misery and slavery.

The left does not redistribute wealth. It redistributes want. It does not want everyone to share in the happiness of others, but to be burdened with a larger burden of their miseries.

No compromise can be had with the missionaries of unhappiness. Happiness can be shared without diminishing its quality, but the division of misery is the aim of the professionally miserable.

The left has suffered its worst defeats at the hands of the happy warriors of the right. Its greatest vulnerability is its meanness of spirit. Its defeat comes when its malaise is contrasted with happiness, when its deep suspicion of humanity is met with patriotic optimism and when its alarmist crises are met with laughter.

Sultan Knish

Sarah Palin to GOP: Fight for the 'Forgotten Man' to 'Win Big in 2016'

by Tony Lee 
20 Jul 2014

 Ronald Reagan won two presidential elections by fighting for the "Forgotten Man," and Sarah Palin said Republicans will only win presidential elections in the future if the party sticks up for the "little guy" and the "Forgotten Man" of all races and backgrounds.

 Building upon the themes she has always fought for and distilled in a landmark speech in Indianola, Iowa in 2011 in which she denounced the bipartisan permanent political class and their brand of crony capitalism that extracts wealth from American workers, Palin told attendees at the Western Conservative Summit in Colorado on Saturday to think about what Sam Griffith posted on her Facebook page. She said he wrote: “I grew up poor. My mother was a die-hard FDR Democrat. When I turned eighteen the first president I voted for was Ronald Reagan. My mother was beside herself. When she asked me why I had voted for him, I told her I didn't plan on staying poor.”

"This is our message. This is what we stand for," Palin exclaimed. "You wanna win big in these midterms, you wanna win big in 2016? Listen to Sam. Stand for a guy who still wants to believe in the American dream."

Palin said the "Forgotten Man" is not invited to parties in swanky zip codes and Washington D.C. where crony deals are cut. She said the Forgotten Man "is the hard-working middle class that just can't seem to get a break" and who is worried about their mortgage and the cost of college. She said the Forgotten Man "is the college grad who voted for Hope and Change, but now can’t find a job. Losing hope. Got no change."

She said the Forgotten Man is the soldier we sent off to war who has come "home forever scarred" and denied his "promised compensation" while he is shuffled around the Veterans Administration while VA bureaucrats "give themselves raises."

"Today, the Forgotten Man is the patriot," Palin said. "She starts a Tea Party group to champion the blessings of liberty and prosperity... but finds herself the target of the IRS." And Palin said when the "crystal-clear evidence stares" Obama in the face about the IRS's corruption, Obama slaps the Forgotten Man in the face and says, "no corruption at all." Not even a smidgen.

"Sadly, the forgotten man has used to being lied to," Palin said. She singled out Benghazi, where Palin said "our ambassador there begged for security and was ignored and murdered when the consulate was attacked by savage Muslim terrorists." She said Obama promptly lied to Americans and blamed a YouTube video for "this highly organized, premeditated attack."

Speaking at the same Colorado university in which she gave a Reaganesque foreign policy speech three years that found the sweet spot between retreating into isolationism and recklessly and naively trying to be the world's policeman, Palin said the "Forgotten Man is used to Obama's lawlessness" --  and she cited "amnesty" as the chief example.

Palin noted that Obama has turned America into an "unfunded charity" that illegal immigrants can invade and overrun after unilaterally passing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Palin also wondered why illegal immigrant children were being dumped in working-class and middle-class communities in not in swanky zip codes in Washington, D.C., Silicon Valley, and Manhattan, places where pro-amnesty advocates are pressuring Obama to not deport the nearly 60,000 illegal immigrant children who have unlawfully entered the country since October of last year.

Palin also blasted wealthy amnesty supporters who would rather replace American workers with cheaper foreign workers, denying the "Forgotten Man" an opportunity to "earn a decent living and the dignity that comes with that."

Palin said a decent living allows the Forgotten Man to get ahead and perhaps lay a foundation for their children to "finish what you started." She said that exceptionalism is lost when people don't play by the rules and those at the top promote lawlessness regarding illegal immigration and "collude" to "drive down wages of Americans by replacing them."

She said that the Forgotten Man believes "in this exception nation" and will fight anyone who wants to fundamentally transform America by undermining its rule of law and "making it just another chunk of land on a map no different from the countries our ancestors left to stake a claim here -- legally."

"But who’s looking out for the American worker? Who has got their backs? Who fights for them? Who will stand up for the forgotten man?" Palin asked. "One man did. He was an FDR Democrat. And he left his party because he said his party left him."

Palin said that man was Ronald Reagan, who said, “You can’t be for big government, big taxes, and big bureaucracy, and still be for the little guy.”
Palin said Reagan "stood for us," and that's why American workers stood with him.

Saying that Republicans represent the calloused hands of people who built the country and the little guy who can't afford seats at swanky fundraisers but also does not begrudge success and loathes crony capitalism, Palin reminded attendees that the Forgotten Man wants freedom and the culture of life and the military to be respected. Palin also said "defending our borders and defending our constitution and rule of law" are important to the forgotten man.

Palin has been one of the few politicians in either party who has never forgotten the "Forgotten Man," and that is why both establishments have often derided and reviled her. But Politicians on both sides of the aisle are tapping into the anti-crony capitalism spirit that continues to percolate. Even the mainstream media is finally recognizing it. Palin was ahead of the curve, though. Before there was Dave Brat and Elizabeth Warren, Palin delivered a landmark speech in Indianola, Iowa in 2011 where she injected crony capitalism on both sides of the aisle in "Boomtown" into the political bloodstream to make it an issue. Before she blasted the bipartisan "permanent political class" in her Indianola speech, Palin took them on in Alaska. She won and enacted significant reforms, accomplishing nearly every one of her campaign promises.

Palin also said impeachment should be used as the ultimate check against a lawless executive, and she again indicated that Obama's lawlessness on illegal immigration was the tipping point for her to call for impeachment because no issue adversely impacts the "Forgotten Man" of all backgrounds and races more.

That is why Palin announced in an op-ed on Breitbart.com that Obama's "many impeachable offenses" can no longer be ignored.

"It’s time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment," Palin wrote. 

As Breitbart News noted, "Palin specifically said Obama's lawlessness on illegal immigration was the tipping point because it impacted Americans -- native-born and legal immigrants -- of all backgrounds":

The federal government is trillions of dollars in debt; many cities are on the verge of insolvency; our overrun healthcare system, police forces, social services, schools, and our unsustainably generous welfare-state programs are stretched to the max. We average Americans know that. So why has this issue been allowed to be turned upside down with our “leader” creating such unsafe conditions while at the same time obstructing any economic recovery by creating more dependents than he allows producers? His friendly wealthy bipartisan elite, who want cheap foreign labor and can afford for themselves the best “border security” money can buy in their own exclusive communities, do not care that Obama tapped us out.  

Have faith that average American workers – native-born and wonderful legal immigrants of all races, backgrounds, and political parties – do care because we’re the ones getting screwed as we’re forced to follow all our government’s rules while others are not required to do so. Many now feel like strangers in their own land. It’s the American worker who is forced to deal with Obama’s latest crisis with our hard-earned tax dollars while middle class wages decrease, sustainable jobs get more scarce, and communities become unrecognizable and bankrupted due to Obama’s flood of illegal immigration. 

Who’s looking out for the American workers? Who has their backs? Who fights for them? 

We should.

Big Government

Benghazi Hearings Committee Announcement Showcases Democrat Schizophrenia

May 11, 2014

By Marilyn Assenheim

It didn’t take long for the Democrat ruling class, infesting Washington’s power corridors, to become habituated to saying something and having it accepted as truth without question.  When anything happens to disrupt their sojourn amongst the unicorns of their fancy, however, Democrats have a tendency to resort to doubling down on dogmatic mythology to score points, relying on volume and repetition instead of sense.

For years, despite the best/worst efforts of the Democrat party to subvert the cause and meaning behind the Benghazi attack, the people have remained outraged and have refused to be shielded from a Democrat political agenda that has yet to be laid bare.  When e-mails, previously redacted and withheld from Congress, were unearthed by Judicial Watch’s successful lawsuit against The White House, John Boehner reversed his previous stance on launching investigative hearings on Benghazi.  It appeared that not only had there been a deliberately fabricated tale, instructing Obama's minions on what to say and how to say it, but the e-mail specifically stated that the tale was designed to serve the president’s agenda – to make him look good and deny that Benghazi had anything to do with faulty presidential policies.

The White House immediately began to try to defuse the bomb they’d launched.  Jay Carney denied that he’d ever lied then denied that the e-mails, written in plain English, really were about Benghazi at all.  But it was too late.

The story had exploded, and the demand for House hearings could no longer be dodged, even by Boehner.  An undisguised antagonist of the conservative base, Boehner nevertheless appointed Congressman Trey Gowdy, R-SC, a hard-line conservative, to chair the committee.  Gowdy’s appointment as chairman made matters worse for Democrats.  Cue Democrat panic.

Depending on who is being quoted, Democrat strategy for containing the fallout is all over the map. 

  Responses in the last couple of days range from muddled vehemence to sanctimonious pity to attempts to convince America that the committee is nothing but a political gambit.  FOX News quoted Nancy Pelosi. 

 Her comments appeared to display equal parts projection and Dissociative Identity Disorder: “What we've asked for is as much bipartisanship as possible,” but also, “[t]he fact is this is a stunt. This is a political stunt; that's what this is. We've been there, done this, over and over again.”

Then there is CNN’s report, citing Steny Hoyer, number-two Democrat in the House.  Hoyer seems to share the afflictions.  He called for meaningful bipartisanship: “If they [Republicans] want to have a substantive effort, it ought to be an equally balanced committee so this is not an exercise in partisanship.”  He urged a Democrat boycott in the next breath: “Hoyer said he would urge all fellow Democrats to vote against the bill creating the [committee].”  Just to be certain that he’d covered all of the bases, Hoyer’s parting shot attempted to sell the idea that a House investigation proves that Republicans believe that Darrell Issa is incompetent: “Either they [the House] think Mr. Issa is a competent chairman and is pursuing a competent investigation or they don't[.]”  Darrell Issa, who doesn’t think he is incompetent, supports the House hearing and is a huge advocate for Trey Gowdy serving as chair.

The back-benchers contribute to the Democrat spin cycle.  Charles Rangel, D-NY, shares his own Sybil-wannabe moment.  CNSnews.com provided a platform:

• Ennui: "I don't think people, Americans, Democratic or Republicans, are going to lose sleep over Benghazi.
• Pity: “I think it's tragic that the Republican Party would destroy itself in 2016 by not having one issue that the American people believe should be a priority…”
• Deflection: Issa's Oversight Committee “has had all of these hours and days and weeks and months investigating this, that now you're saying you have no confidence in him, so you have to bring in a new member to head up a new committee to find the answers?”

Democrats resurrect bipartisanship only when they are at a disadvantage.  Remember when they lost the House in 2010?  After losing over 60 seats, Democrats insisted that their meager numbers be seated among the Republicans, who vastly outnumbered them, during the State of the Union speech.  That had never been done before.  It had nothing to do with “bipartisanship”; they didn’t want to look bad in front of a television audience.  Strangely enough, the issue of bipartisanship didn’t trouble Democrats when they literally locked Republicans out of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee meetings in 2009.

 Even The Daily Beast, a longtime supporter of POTUS, came out against the disgraceful behavior of Democrat subterfuge from the top down.  A column, written by Ron Christie, despite negative comments about the president, cannot be attributable to racism.  Mr. Christie, too, is black.

I read with interest my Daily Beast colleague Michael Tomasky’s column Wednesday, in which he asserted that the establishment of a Special Select Committee to investigate Benghazi is nothing more than bulls**t…I’m troubled by the motivation of many on the left, who have sought to demonize anyone who questions the narrative the Obama administration has spun…I’ll tell you what’s BS, Mr. Tomasky: The Obama administration has misled, dissembled, and otherwise given the finger to the families of those who lost their lives that night in service to their country…We need a Special Select Committee on Benghazi to…ensure that such a disaster never occurs again. We need truth, not bullsh*t, from the president and his administration, but so far, that’s all they’ve been shoveling.

One can only hope that Democrats, in their misguided arrogance, will elect to boycott the House Benghazi hearings.  Unlike ObamaCare, IRS and NSA misdealing, and a rogue Justice Department, this is an issue with persistent “legs.”  Americans remain infuriated at the ham-handed, derisive, and insultingly incompetent arguments Democrats have thrown against the wall, hoping that something – anything – will stick.

If Democrats in the House take their ball and go home, it will provide final evidence to anyone watching that they are craven hypocrites rather than persecuted victims of Republican injustice.

American Thinker

Obama Stars in The No-Name Law That Sank His Party

December 8, 2013
By Clarice Feldman

When the Pelosi-Reid-Obama troika triumphantly celebrated cramming through the ACA (Affordable Care Act) over majority sentiment, they crowed that this was the president's signature achievement and ACA soon took on the name of its creator, ObamaCare. Though not one of them, nor any of the Democrats in the Senate who voted it into law uni-partisanly had read it, they all assured us that we'd grow to really, really like it. Boy, were they wrong.

We've paid almost a billion dollars to a Canadian firm whose vice-president is a college buddy of Michelle Obama's from their black radical days at Princeton to create a webpage to enroll people mandated by this law to do so, Obama having turned down the U.S. firm IBM's offer to create it for free. It doesn't work. 

Moreover, the continuing problems with this webpage -- and law -- are so substantial and intractable that the White House propaganda machine has stopped referring to it as ObamaCare or even the Affordable Care Act. Everyone now knows that for most people, the plan loaded with mandated coverage to curry favors with privileged tranches of voters like college girls who want free contraceptives and abortion coverage and to permit anyone to sign up after they found out they need costly care, not before, is far more expensive than what they were previously paying for medical insurance. It's some kind of no-name thing. Either that or, to be an honest descriptor, we could call it the UCA (Unaffordable Care Act). Under any name it's dramatically swamping the president and his party's standing among voters.

Younger voters who passionately supported the president in both election shots are running away from UCA, a law which depends on them to foot a disproportionate share of the financial burden:

A new poll from Harvard University's Institute of Politics shows young people increasingly cooling to President Obama and his signature domestic achievement, Obamacare. Fifty-four percent of young people (ages 18 to 29) disapprove of the job Obama is doing. A total of 47 percent of young people, including 52 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 24, say they would choose to recall Obama if they could.

Obamacare is undoubtedly a major force in this change among so-called Millennials (61 percent say they disapprove of his handling of health care). The poll found that 57 percent of young people disapprove of Obamacare, with just 38 percent approving of the law. The numbers were not significantly different when those polled were asked how they felt about the "Affordable Care Act" as opposed to "Obamacare." A plurality said the law would make their health care worse (44 percent for "Obamacare" and 40 percent for the "Affordable Care Act") while a majority (51 percent for "Obamacare" and 50 percent for the "Affordable Care Act") said they believed the amount they would pay for health care under the law would increase.

As Ron Fournier at National Journal points out, younger Millennials (those under the age of 25) are in particular turning against Obama.

And each day we learn of new, more difficult to resolve, problems with it.

For one thing, there's no way to pay for the mandated insurance by December 23 as the law requires purchasers to do.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: People are receiving cancellations. They know they lost their insurance. There is no way to talk around it.

The other thing that the Obama administration, the White House, is pushing is the success of the exchanges because they got 30,000 people supposedly enrolled. Let's assume it's enrolled.

They aren't enrolled.

BRET BAIER: There's nobody that really paid their premium.

KRAUTHAMMER: Exactly. Shopping and semi-enrolled -- aspirationally enrolled, let's put it that way -- in two days. Well, if you do the math on that and you continue that enrollment up until the deadline of the 23rd of December, you come out with a number, which means that of the 5 million people who have lost insurance, 6% will have it restored. All the rest will not have it. And that's without adding a single person who never had insurance in the first place. It is a disaster with the numbers that the White House is touting.

Hit and Run describes the payment issue's evolution on Just One Minute:

"In addition to fixing the technical problems with healthcare.gov, the significant 'back-end' issues must also be resolved to ensure that coverage can begin on January 1, 2014. In particular, the ongoing problems with processing "834″ enrollment files need to be fixed." AHIP President, Karen Ignagni said (via WaPo), December 1.

"The back end sounds like some obscure curlicue in the process," Krauthammer said. "It's the cash register! It's the point at which you make the purchase. And if you don't have correct information or any information, you don't have a purchase. You don't have enrollment. You don't have a plan, you have a catastrophe."-- stuff Krauthammer said, December 3

Dun dun dun!

"Now, this is like having a really good product in the store and the cash registers don't work... so we are working overtime to get this fixed."-- stuff Obama said,

...wait for it...

November 6.

Requiring people to buy insurance when you don't have a cash register to take their money is typical of the law and website's conundrums and when you learn Obama apparently manages by telekinesis, you can understand why:

The Government Accountability Institute report found that since Obamacare was signed on March 23, 2010, Obama met with "various Cabinet secretaries a total of 277 times," but his presidential schedule did not "document a single one-on-one meeting" with Sebelius. There was, though, "one instance of Secretary Sebelius meeting jointly with the President and Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner." Breitbart Big Govt 

Obama shut down the federal government rather than delay UCA's individual mandate provision though he keeps exempting new favored blocs and delaying various provisions. Instead he's cranked up the propaganda machine, particularly the stuff aimed at the young. The efforts have been ridiculous, a clear sign, 

I suppose of how little regard he has for the intellectual capacity of those who voted disproportionately for him (a point on which he and I are in rare agreement}.

By way of example, HHS named as a winner of their video propaganda outreach one entry which is titled "Forget About the Price Tag."

In a White House Youth Summit, Obama "called on young people to do whatever they can to promote his signature health care law -- including plying their customers with cheap booze. "If you are a bartender, have a happy hour," Obama said as the crowd laughed. "And also probably get health insurance because a lot of people don't have it." Obama also encouraged young people who are student body presidents or workers at nonprofit organizations to help people get enrolled. "If you've got a radio show, spread the word on air," Obama added. Obama called on young people's sense of patriotism to join...."

Increasingly, more substantive problems with UCA were making themselves known. Many top hospitals were refusing to participate. Many doctors were retiring rather than go along with this quality care killer. 

Indeed, it was reliably reported by Washington Examiner's Richard Pollack that seven out of ten California doctors were refusing to participate in that state's health exchange. Reminds me of Sam Goldwyn's observation that when people don't want to come to the theater nothing can stop them.

So far, the law applies to a relatively small number of people -- when it expands to cover employer mandates and more millions are thrown into the UCA pool, the disaster will snowball. As my friend DoT notes: "Once the employer mandate kicks in they'll be hunting Democrats with dogs in this country."

Noemie Emery explains why Obama's "inverse genius" is causing so much voter angst and disdain:

By threatening their lives as well as their budgets, Obama has created a huge class of losers, who statistically overrun the small class of winners and outweigh them in savvy, no doubt. "A significant minority of losers or self-perceived losers and a few high profile bad outcomes are more than enough to cause real political problems," as Kaiser Foundation head honcho Drew Altman informs us. They're not a minority, and they have, and they will.

As National Journal's James Oliphant tells us, the plan will insure about 25 million, about half of the number serviced by Medicare, at the expense of almost everyone else in the country, who stand to lose something -- in anxiety, money, or care. Those helped "represent just a relative handful of people, many of whom sit at the lower end of the political spectrum, and engage little with the political process ... that's what's going to make any sort of renewed national sales pitch so difficult. Among the politically active, the damage is done."

Math is so hard for Democrats.

So, if Obama wasn't managing his namesake signature legislation, apart from ribbon cuttings, offending our allies, giving away the store to our enemies, firing our military officers, and blowing through the national treasure, what has he been doing? He's been acting as the star of his own production, Obama, the President and starring in a series of preposterous publicity poses the White House photographers then release to show, for example, that the meaning of the deaths of famous people and the commemoration of historical figures are really significant only as they reveal his reactions to these events.

So while Obama paid no obvious attention to the provisions in the 2,000-plus pages law or the thousands of regulations HHS churned out along with the inoperability of a critically defective, grossly overpriced website, what was he doing?

Ace of Spades explains that Obama and his most ardent fans, including, of course, the New York Times and Chris Matthews, see the presidency as a drama in which the hero, not his MacGuffin [object of the quest], is all that matters.

It's the Hero that the rapt fan is interested in, not the MacGuffin.

The left is just interested in the character, the Hero... [Ed: he fisks the NYT's sappy account of Obama's Christmas book buying]

President Obama has never visited the rugged mountains of Chechnya, but if he digs into one of the novels he bought last weekend, "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena," he will be transported to a land of unremitting violence and tragedy, where the innocent are caught up in war as often as the guilty.

Perhaps Mr. Obama is seeking a deeper understanding of the roots of the ethnic bloodletting after Chechnya vaulted back to the front pages this year with the Boston Marathon bombings. Or perhaps he is thinking about his troubled relationship with Russia.

Either way, the novel would give the president a more visceral feel for one of the world's most brutal conflicts than the graphic intelligence papers that cross his desk.

"I imagine someone in his position gets a lot of facts and figures," Anthony Marra, the author of the book, mused the other day. "But the novel is really about the experience, about the psyche and the soul."

A reading list offers a rare window into the presidential mind, a peek at what a commander in chief may be thinking about beyond the prosaic and repetitive briefings that dominate his days.

Yes who cares about those repetitive boring briefings. I mean, there's nothing interesting going on, certainly, apart from the intense drama of his signature policy initiative going up in flames.

[snip]

I'm not sure if we can call a several-times-per-week [ed: of Obama's reference to "his journey"] occurrence rare.

In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the concern for Obama's actual record that's rare. The intense interest in Obama the Personality is the common thing.

The right has repeatedly belittled Obama as a "Celebrity." And indeed that is what he is. His fans are primarily interested in Barack the Man, Barack the Personality.

And not so much as Barack Obama, the executor of federal law.

[snip]

[The books he purchased] are volumes about identity and reinvention, about what it means to be American, and about family, love, betrayal and redemption.
Yup -- movie themes. Book themes. Story themes

[snip]

The New York Times, like Chris Matthews, is not interested in policy. It is solely interested in the travails and triumphs of their Hero, Barack Obama.

Right now I, too, see Obama as star of his own movie, he's standing on the prow of the Titanic as it sinks beneath the waves.

American Thinker