Category Archives: Obama
Tale of Two Dicks
During an interview with Charlie Rose that aired Monday the president protested again that he’s not Dick Cheney. He has a point. I haven’t heard that Cheney tried to intimidate journalists and their sources, or use the IRS to intimidate political opponents.
James Taranto, in a column titled We’re all Dick Cheney Now, says Obama is trying to send a message to his base that they were right to distrust Cheney but not to distrust him for adopting and expanding the same program of spying on Americans.
Victor Davis Hanson says, “deception is now institutionalized in the Obama administration”. He calls it, “the most untruthful cast since Nixon, Halderman, Zeigler, and John Dean”.
Red Line
Mostly liberal columnist Richard Cohen is fed up with Obama’s dithering on Syria. Mostly conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer is fed up with Obama’s dithering on Syria too. Common ground.
Cohen wants to intervene on humanitarian grounds. As for Krauthammer : “A superpower’s role in a regional conflict is deterrence.” He feels Putin has taken Obama’s measure and our president comes up short – to put it kindly.
President Obama has said Bashar Assad will have crossed a red line if he gasses his own people. France says that gas would be Sarin.
Seems we’ve been down this line before.
Transparent
If your in-box had an email from Richard Windsor it wasn’t necessarily junk mail. It was from former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson. That was her account for communicating with insiders (which is why you didn’t have mail from Richard Windsor). It turns out lots of people in the administration use secret email accounts.
President Obama has proclaimed his administration the most transparent in history. And it is – if you can afford a million dollars to find out a bureaucrat’s email addresses. That’s what the Labor Department tried to charge AP ($1.03 million).
Kevin O’Brien of the Plain Dealer spills Richard Windsor’s guts here.
Off the Record
President Obama has proclaimed himself a fierce defender of the First Amendment . On cue, Eric Holderman called for a meeting of news honchos to clear the air about his secretive and nasty behavior toward them. True to form, the meeting was off the record.
Strange behavior for a couple of guys who only know what they read.
Update: Here’s a great Nat Hentoff piece on two Obamas. (He mentions the efforts of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to lead the pushback for the first amendment. Nat’s a RCFP steering committee member and so am I.)
War Bar
All good things must come to an end. Wars too. The president just doesn’t say how. Krauthammer is not impressed.
