Tag Archives: Barack Obama

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Take ownership, not possession

Every now and then a politician and/or a pundit with whom I disagree offers a nugget of perspective that I find, well, agreeable.

Such was the case recently in a commentary written for CNN by a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives who raked President Obama over the coals for what he called the president’s constant trip to “fantasyland.”

I refer to Newt Gingrich, one of the smarter conservatives around – but also one of the more bombastic.

I’ll stipulate up front that I disagree with Gingrich’s wholesale analysis that Obama is a failed president.

But then he offered this tidbit of “truth” as he sees it, and frankly, so do I.

He referred to a recent speech in which the president used the first-person pronoun – “I,” “my” and “me” – 207 times. That was 207 times in a single speech, according to Newtie.

Bingo, Mr. Speaker. The president’s use of that personal pronoun annoys the daylights out of me as well.

I’ve noticed almost from the day the president took office in January 2009.

At the very beginning, it was an impressive display of ownership that the young president had demonstrated as he took office to tackle the horrible economic crisis that threatened to swallow up the nation’s financial infrastructure.

Nearly six years into his presidency, and after a stunning re-election victory in 2012, I am finding the use of the first-person pronoun a bit of a distraction.

Listen to the president’s speeches or off-the-cuff public comments. He refers to “my administration,” “my vice president,” “my attorney general,” “my national security team,” “my economic advisers,” etc., etc., etc.

Let’s not draw any inaccurate conclusions here. I continue to believe that Barack Obama has done a good job in fixing the economic crisis he inherited. I also believe he is correct in relying more heavily on diplomacy than military action whenever crises erupt.

However, I do not believe taking ownership of the responsibilities of a high public office means that you can take possession of the office itself.

The government belongs to us, citizens who take the time to vote on those who seek to operate the government on our behalf. Yes, I mean those who actually vote, although I certainly recognize that non-voters’ tax money is just as important to funding the government as those who have cast ballots.

Therefore, it would seem more appropriate for the president to perhaps use the second-person pronoun – “your” attorney general, “your” vice president and so on – when referring to the tough issues that face those who run “your” government.

All these folks work for us – you and me – not the guy who sits in that big Oval Office.

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U.S.-Russia dispute gets even more tense

If you thought the U.S.-Russia tensions couldn’t worsen short of an actual shooting war between the nations, well, you thought wrong.

They just did on the basis of what appears to be the deliberate downing of a commercial airline carrying more than 300 passengers and crew, including one American.

http://news.msn.com/world/obama-condemns-russia-after-airliner-downed-in-ukraine

A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 has been shot down in eastern Ukraine, allegedly by separatists allied with Russia, which seems to want to re-annex the former Soviet republic.

President Obama has condemned the Russians for supporting the separatists and it is now believed he is considering even more sanctions against Russia.

Of course, critics will contend the president should have prevented the shoot-down. For now, I’ll settle for encouraging the administration — and I would implore Congress to back Obama on this one — to tighten the screws even more against Russia.

The Russians are playing a dangerous game with their support of these separatists — who now have demonstrated that they will go to any lengths to make some political point.

Someone will have to explain to me, though, what on Earth was to be gained by shooting down a commercial jetliner with innocent and unsuspecting civilians aboard.

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Border not secure? Tell the detainees

It’s difficult to imagine the terror that young people face when they’re shipped from their homes and they find themselves essentially trapped in a country that cannot accept them.

Then they learn that many people in this strange country have turned on them, believing that they are somehow responsible for the plight in which they find themselves.

Welcome to the United States of America, young Central American refugees.

I’ve become disheartened by this story as it has unfolded. The young people, thousands of them children barely past toddlerhood, have been allowed passage through Mexico and into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Reports are that they’re fleeing repression, virtual enslavement and corruption in their home countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

They come here unaccompanied, sent here by parents or transported by those notorious “coyotes,” who deal in human trafficking.

The president of the United States is asking Congress for some extra emergency money to help repatriate these young people – humanely, of course. He’s asking for money to help pay for more border security. Some in Congress don’t want to spend the money – even though they demand the president does something, anything, to help stem the flood of refugees.

Of all the arguments I’ve heard from Barack Obama’s critics, however, perhaps the most maddening in this notion that our borders are “porous,” that federal agents aren’t enforcing immigration laws, that the country has become a “magnet” for those who think it’s OK just to enter the United States and they’ll be given a safe place to live with no strings attached.

What on Earth are these critics thinking?

The borders cannot be sealed off. Still, we continue to capture illegal immigrants every single day. We’re deporting them in record numbers. The tens of thousands of young people being held by federal immigration authorities were captured, for crying out loud, by officers actually enforcing U.S. immigration laws.

I want this crisis to end as much as the next guy. I also want us to stop demonizing the children who are being used as pawns in this nasty struggle – and I want the critics to stop tossing out that demagogic canard that the United States is not enforcing its immigration laws.

Those helpless children would beg to differ.

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Divide over border crisis? Shocking!

Imagine my fake surprise at news that Republicans and Democrats are divided over how to solve the immigration/refugee crisis on our nation’s southern border.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/immigration-reform-congress-closed-door-briefing-109027.html?hp=l1

Republicans who control the House of Representatives are trying to slash President Obama’s $3.7 billion emergency spending request to deal with the flood of young people fleeing Central America.

Democrats who control the Senate are trying to preserve most of what Obama has asked.

My take? If Republicans think the immigration crisis has reached some sort of critical mass, why are they scaling back so much of what the president is asking?

They want more border security? They want speedier repatriation of the immigrants? They want to hold the families and governments sending these young people to the United States accountable for their actions?

I believe the request does all of that. What in the world am I missing?

Yes, this crisis of serious national concern. There once was a time when leaders of the two major parties would lock arms and hammer out solutions — together. Those days appear to have vanished in the dust bin of recrimination that has become a way of life on Capitol Hill.

This is a disgraceful example of representative democracy failing to do what the people it represents want it to do.

Fix the problem.

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You go, ex-VP Cheney

Say what you will about Dick Cheney — and I’ve said more than my share in recent months — he’s a serious politician with serious ideas.

OK, so I cannot stand the former vice president’s constant carping about the administration that succeeded the one in which he was a key player. I cannot stomach that he cannot keep his trap shut about foreign policy issues, as he is undermining President Obama and Vice President Biden.

But this serious man said a serious thing about impeaching the president.

He calls such talk a “distraction.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/dick-cheney-sarah-palin-impeachment-distraction-108944.html?hp=r4

Cheney was referring specifically to an unserious politician’s talk about impeachment. That would be the former half-term Republican Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who’s weighed in with some notion that the president needs to be impeached. She hasn’t specified the high crimes and misdemeanors of which he is supposedly guilty.

It doesn’t matter, frankly. There aren’t any misdeeds that rise to anything close to an impeachable offense.

Still, Cheney is right to call down his GOP colleague — if only gently. He said he likes the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee. Cheney says she has a right to her opinion, which of course is quite correct. It’s just that she’s wrong on almost everything that flies out of her mouth.

For that matter, so is Cheney.

On this issue, though, he is right … to the extent he has spoken out at all about impeaching Barack Obama.

Cheney told CNN: “I’m not prepared, at this point, to call for the impeachment of the president. I think he is the worst president of my lifetime. I fundamentally disagree with him. I think he’s doing a lot of things wrong. I’m glad to see House Republicans are challenging him, at least legally, at this point, but I think that gets to be a bit of a distraction just like the impeachment of Bill Clinton did.”

He’s not going to give President Obama any kind of a break, to be sure. That’s expected.

Still, he’s trying to quell the nut-case talk among those on the right wing of his once-great political party. I’ll give him a modicum of credit for that.

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Surprise! Most GOPers favor impeachment

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A part of me is glad the talk of impeaching President Obama keeps percolating.

It serves to remind much of the country that today’s Republican Party is being dominated by nutty zealots who would impeach the president for passing gas in a public elevator if they thought they could get away with it.

Poll: 35 percent say impeachment justified

A new poll shows that 68 percent of Americans who call themselves Republicans believe Obama has done something merit impeachment by the House of Representatives. The poll, sponsored by YouGov and the Huffington Post, reports that 8 percent of Democrats think it’s a bad idea.

Wow. I’m shocked, shocked!

Reasonable Republicans — and there remain some of them in high public office — think otherwise about impeachment. House Speaker John Boehner says it won’t happen. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia says the president hasn’t committed the type of crime that merits impeachment.

That hasn’t stopped the likes of former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah “Barracuda” Palin from weighing in with impeachment talk.

I rather like Attorney General Eric Holder’s response to Palin’s recent demand for an impeachment. He quipped that the former Alaska governor “wasn’t a particularly good vice presidential candidate.” Holder said Palin was “an even worse judge of who ought to be impeached and why.”

I figure that as long as the media keep reporting this impeachment nonsense, the better it is for those who oppose the idea of proceeding with such idiocy. It exposes the modern GOP as a party dominated by fruitcakes who, absent any constructive agenda for governing, are left to talk openly about an issue intended solely to stoke its fire-breathing base.

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Do we ignore our guys’ missteps?

A friend of mine passed on a bit of wisdom this morning at the Amarillo Town Club that I’d like to share here.

All this give-and-take on social media — particularly Facebook — he says, makes him think about whether he is looking critically enough at his “guys'” missteps, mistakes, goofs and blunders.

He was speaking about some of the Facebook threads that have developed among people of differing political points of view. I’m happy to report that some of the threads to which he refers is in response to posts that appear on this blog.

I’ve given some thought to what he said and his wisdom makes sense.

We all have our own bias. I tilt to the left and I recognize my bias there. Many of my friends in the Texas Panhandle tilt the other way — no surprise there, right? I like sharing ideas with them, even though I recognize they’re always wrong and I’m always right.

OK, back to the seriousness. My pal, a well-educated man who works in the public sector, takes note of the need to assess whether we’re being as analytical as we can be when assessing some of these issues.

Some of the social media posts do twist off in irrational directions. Barack Obama is seen by many on the right and far right as a traitor who intentionally seeks to degrade America’s ability to defend itself. I try to restrain myself when I see that kind of opinion tossed into cyberspace. My friends on the left and far left are equally perverse, suggesting for example that George W. Bush actually sanctioned the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to get us into a war with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. I also restrain myself on that nonsense as well.

The vast middle ground between those extremes is where we need to focus our attention.

I’m willing to talk sensibly with anyone. I’m also willing to acknowledge that I tend to look differently when my guys mess up than when the guys on the other side mess up. I’m not going to apologize for that. It’s my bias and I’m entitled to wear it on my sleeve, just as the other side is entitled to display its own bias.

My friend’s point about taking care to look critically at my side, though, holds up.

I hereby pledge to seek to do so — even if it produces the same response.

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Obama might be able to fix border crisis

What? You mean the president of the United States has the executive authority to tinker with an immigration law and can start sending some of the children back to their home countries?

And he can do it without fighting with Congress?

Do it, Mr. President.

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-may-hold-fix-flood-immigrant-kids-172132339–politics.html

Two key lawmakers, one Republican and one Democrat, think President Obama has it within his power to act. Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said the president needs to “re-engage” this effort. “We can safely get them home,” Rogers said on “Meet the Press.” He said, “And that’s where the president needs to start. So he needs to re-engage, get folks who are doing administrative work on the border. They need to make sure they send a very clear signal.”

But would he get sued for acting on his own? Let’s hope not. Congressional critics have been complaining that the president hasn’t acted forcefully enough on a whole host of issues, the immigration crisis being the latest. The children and young adults are political refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Sending them back willy nilly could expose them to mortal danger.

A 2008 law signed by President Bush was implemented to help prevent human trafficking. It supposedly makes it more difficult to send children back when they’ve entered the country illegally. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished. Smugglers have taken that 2008 and sent these young people here to take advantage of that law. And for that the president has been pounded?

Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said the law allows for administration action in the event of “exceptional circumstances.” She should know; Feinstein helped write the 2008 legislation.

If the president is facing a protracted fight with Congress over the emergency spending bill he has requested, then he should just take the action he has authority to take.

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Tax cut … with no spending offsets?

I’ll have to admit that I’m a little slow on the uptake at times.

Folks have to explain some things to me on occasion to help me make sense of trends and decisions.

This decision by the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives falls into that head-scratching category.

http://www.kxly.com/news/politics/house-republicans-vote-for-business-tax-cut/26906060

The House has approved a $287 billion business tax cut. It hasn’t included any spending offsets to pay for it. Speaker John Boehner boasts that the House is working to create jobs. Maybe it will. Then again, maybe those businesses benefiting from the tax cuts will take that money straight to the bottom line. That’s been happening quite a bit lately, you know?

What’s got me puzzled is why the House GOP keeps insisting on spending offsets whenever the Obama administration proposes job creation ideas. Infrastructure spending? Can’t afford it unless we cut spending in other places.

Another thing needs noting. The deficit is coming down in rather dramatic fashion. A tax cut of the size just approved by the House is going to blow up the deficit yet again.

My memory isn’t perfect, but I do remember a time when Republicans belonged to the party of “fiscal responsibility.” They loathed deficits, while Democrats blew them off. Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 partly because President Carter and Congress ran deficits of a whopping $40 billion annually; there was some other stuff also that contributed to Carter’s defeat.

Memory also reminds me of how quick congressional Republicans were to share in the credit for the balanced budget and the surpluses run up during the final years of Bill Clinton’s presidency. They made sure we all knew that their spending restraints were more responsible for the surplus than the modest tax increases proposed by the president — and, oh yes, approved by Congress.

The new age of Republicanism, though, sees the party in control of one half of one branch of government talking out of both sides of its mouth.

Spending offsets only count when the other guys want to do something. Tax cuts for business? Who cares?

In the meantime, President Obama is asking for $3.7 billion in emergency spending to help deal with that crisis along our southern border. The GOP response? It costs too much money.

Go figure.

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Stop laughing, Mr. President

A friend of mine got upset early today at a picture.

The picture showed President Obama sharing a light moment with someone at a conference table. Texas Gov. Rick Perry also is present. He’s not laughing. At the moment the picture was snapped, he appeared to be scowling. I doubt that was the emotion he was expressing.

Pictures such as the one to which I refer serve to inflame partisans. My pal was angry that the picture showed Obama laughing at a meeting called to discuss the border crisis involving those tens of thousands of children who are fleeing into the United States from Central America.

I have no clue what caused Obama to chuckle at that moment. Neither does my friend.

Strangely enough, I understand why he would be upset. He’s angry about the crisis. He thinks the president should do something to stop it. There’s nothing funny at the meeting, my friend believes.

Well, maybe someone said something that tickled Barack Obama’s fancy. Maybe the governor of Texas cracked a joke later, or perhaps he’d done so earlier.

Pictures, as they say, can tell a thousand words. This one, though, tells just a few. The president of the United States had the temerity to actually laugh.

God have mercy if this kind of thing is going to get us upset.