David Limbaugh

New Column: Without Firing a Shot?

During the height of the Cold War, some feared the communists would take over the United States without firing a shot. Could it be that nearly a half-century later, we're on the verge of that becoming a reality?

President Barack Obama and Democratic congressmen won their respective elections -- no shots were fired -- and they are feverishly attempting to dismantle this nation's institutions, brick by brick.

The American people are getting a bird's-eye view of what the left, which completely dominates the Democratic Party, thinks of the Constitution, freedom and the right of the people to self-governance.

The people now attempting to govern us with an iron fist are Marxist-leaning in terms of not only the policies they support but also the ruthless tactics they employ to enact those policies into law.

As long as it served Obama's Machiavellian purposes to maintain a semblance of unity for his ambitious agenda, he donned his bipartisan cap. But as soon as he encountered intractable opposition from Republicans, God bless them, he began to show his true political colors.

]]> Barack Obama's congenial, compromising facade has disappeared. What remains, in plain view, is a narcissistic, arrogant and inflexibly ideological man who is determined to cram his socialist agenda down our throats by whatever means necessary -- irrespective of the legality of the procedures he utilizes, the truth of the words he speaks and the will of the people.

Obama doesn't care what we think -- and I'm not just talking about the majority of Americans who oppose Obamacare. Everyone who gets in his way is expendable, including principled Democrats who dare to oppose him.

Obama and his congressional cronies are systematically subverting the Constitution to advance their agenda. They have tried every trick in the book to pass Obamacare, such as lying about many substantive provisions in the bill and their inevitable effects on quality, price and choice.

They are also using accounting shenanigans to make the bill look budget-neutral. One such distortion is to count $52 billion in higher Social Security tax revenues that are reserved for Social Security benefits as offsets. Another is to rob a half-trillion dollars from Medicare to subsidize Obamacare, which Medicare's chief actuary estimates would cause 20 percent of Medicare's providers to either go out of business or discontinue seeing Medicare beneficiaries. Another is to defer certain outlays for about four years while beginning taxes immediately in order to achieve an artificial fiscal balance the first 10 years. There are many others.

But none of their chicanery has worked to fool the American people into allowing them to pass the bill through proper procedures. So they are prepared to do it illegally through improper application of the reconciliation process. If that fails, they're considering the even more outrageous idea of a "Slaughter Solution," which would deem the Senate's bill as having passed the House, even when it hasn't.

Remember Obama's showing contempt for the Constitution and Senate rules during his silly health care summit, when he flippantly argued that people care more about results than process, as if the Constitution were just an annoying little detail? His senior adviser David Axelrod showed similar contempt for the people when he said on NBC's "Meet the Press," "The one thing I am sure of is that the American people don't know or care much about the sequencing of parliamentary procedures."

Just look at how this administration is trying to do an end run around the people by having the Environmental Protection Agency impose stringent regulations when it couldn't even get the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress to pass the socialist cap-and-trade bill. And if its underhanded efforts to pass Obamacare in Congress fail, it reportedly has contingency plans to implement parts of it through a series of executive orders and administrative regulations -- just as it is planning to do, by its own admission, "across a front of issues."

Liberal cynicism aside, the Constitution's safeguards to limit government will only work if the ruling class remains honorable. If it continues to ignore its constitutional restraints and no one holds it accountable, the Constitution will degenerate into meaninglessness and be powerless to preserve our liberties.

Indeed, as fiscally devastating as Obamacare would be, cost is not the most important reason to oppose the monstrosity.

Obamacare is about government versus the people. It is about achieving that tipping point from a free market economy to a socialized one and from constitutional self-governance to something far less democratic.

The recklessness of Obamacrats in trying to shove through another -- and by far the biggest -- government entitlement at a time when existing entitlements and other government expenditures threaten to bankrupt the nation is staggering.

But they're just getting warmed up. Stay tuned for their education and immigration "overhauls."

New Column: Heads Liberals Win, Tails We Lose

The left habitually distorts and exaggerates to demonize and discredit its opponents but squeals like a stuck pig when conservatives use colorful language to call the left out. Unfortunately, some on the right encourage the left's squealing.

As for the liberals, it's hard to take them seriously when they register their indignation at, say, Sarah Palin for her "death panels" comment, other conservatives for describing Obama as a socialist or liberals as "liberals," or, most recently, Liz Cheney for calling seven Justice Department appointees the "al-Qaida Seven."

Liberals are the ones who knowingly lied in saying that "Bush lied; people died," that supply-side tax cuts are "just for the rich" and that Bush left people on the rooftops in New Orleans after Katrina because they were black. These weren't just harmless rhetorical barbs; they had and continue to have serious, substantively damaging consequences.

Nor are the above descriptions by Palin, Cheney and other conservatives a matter of tit for tat or a case of the left's wrong mitigating the right's. The conservatives' statements above are different because they have a strong ring of truth, and they are not just gratuitous; they serve the purpose of calling attention to what is truly going on.

I'm not advocating that we be uncivil or mean-spirited, but that we have the guts to tell the truth, using difficult-to-hear language when necessary. I dare say our failure to speak frankly and boldly has a lot to do with the horrible predicament we're in in this country. Speaking a little more truth to political correctness would be helpful. But the left's tactic of whining and crying foul at anything it chooses to be offended by, echoed by genteel enablers on the right, intimidates many from expressing truth for fear of public condemnation.

]]> Many believe, after reading versions of Democratic health care plans, that powerful bureaucracies would be created that would have authority over the types of treatment health care providers would give, especially end-of-life decisions. Those bills also would grant wide rule-making authority to those and other bureaucracies, which, if this nation's past and current practice of administrative law is any indication, would be given wide berth and have little accountability to Congress, much less the people. Add to that the mindset of those Obama has surrounded himself with and who have had or will have their fingerprints on the drafting of these health care bills or on the regulations to be promulgated under Obamacare, such as Tom Daschle and Ezekiel Emanuel. They are known for ghoulish advocacy of government-administered rationing of care, especially to the elderly, driven by their creepy values regarding human life. Tell me, then, how it's unfair or inaccurate for Sarah Palin to have called attention to that with "death panels"?

The same is true for graphic photos of abortions, decried as grotesque by the left. They're grotesque, all right, because what they depict is abominably grotesque. We have not only the right to force ourselves to face this grim, unconscionable reality by viewing grotesque pictures, if necessary, but also the duty. By shielding ourselves from these pictures showing what actually goes on in abortions, we make it easier on ourselves to do the wrong thing.

The upshot is that hard-hitting conservatives are condemned for telling the truth, which serves the best interests of people and the nation, while liberals are given a pass for telling outright lies that damage the national interest. This is a great deal for liberals and a terrible deal for the nation and the people: Heads liberals win (and the nation loses), tails the nation loses.

The same holds true for describing Obama as a socialist. What's wrong with telling the truth, especially when candy-coating it enables Obama to operate under the radar? Are those on the right who condemned their fellow conservatives for calling attention to his radicalism early on, when it might have mattered, ever willing to hold themselves accountable for their error?

So when Liz Cheney dubs new additions to the Obama-Holder Justice Department the "al-Qaida Seven," I'm just not too exercised. As a lawyer who believes strongly in the adversarial system, I will defend the right of lawyers to represent whomever they want in our system.

But this isn't about the right of lawyers to defend unsympathetic clients. It's about placing lawyers in our Justice Department who might well be sympathetic to or soft on the enemy. And that's anything but far-fetched, given what we now know about Obama, his attitude about America's past and its alleged culpability in causing terrorism, the America-hating radicals he has appointed, and Eric Holder himself. Scrutiny is warranted.

Kudos to courageous conservatives for calling attention to unpleasant realities.

Obama vs. Insurers and the People, Part 2

President Barack Obama obviously has no qualms about slandering people or industries that interfere with his agenda. In the same creepy manner he defamed the Cambridge Police Department without benefit of the facts, he is scapegoating the insurance companies based on his distorted version of facts.

In the past week, he has ratcheted up his war on insurance companies, who, he apparently figures, must be destroyed if he is to accomplish his Utopian dream of socialized health care. He made them the focus of his wrath again, in his umpteenth health care speech, Monday in Philadelphia. Even the White House blog, in a post titled "Moving Forward to Put the American People Ahead of Insurance Companies," frames this debate as between insurance companies and the people.

Who is Obama to be smearing health insurance companies for allegedly bankrupting people to increase their profits when his policy agenda is already bankrupting America to increase government power? As the late Milton Friedman asked the clueless leftist Phil Donahue, "Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?"

It's not the insurance industry versus the American people; it is Obama's socialist leviathan versus the American people, with the insurance companies as necessary collateral damage.

Is it fair to accuse the insurance companies of arbitrariness when they refuse to cover what their contracts don't require them to cover? And isn't Obama implying that if the government were to take full control over health care, there would be no denial of coverage? We don't have to wait for his plan to take effect to know that's false. Everyone, including Obama, is aware of Medicare's denying or reducing reimbursements so drastically that an increasing number of doctors are refusing Medicare patients. Does he call that arbitrary?

]]> In addition, whether or not you bristle at those suggesting Obamacare would usher in death panels, you are in fantasyland if you think Obamacare doesn't contemplate increased rationing -- by the government.

The Democrats' plans involve the formation of an administrative board, which would make determinations on what kind of coverage the government would pay for and, perhaps, even allow.

What's the difference between that and an insurance company's denying coverage? Well, it's worse for the government to do it, actually. The government's coverage decisions would be dictated not by a private and at least somewhat consensual contract, but by the fiat of a largely unaccountable bureaucrat whose authority would be derived from powers delegated to him by whatever administrative bodies Congress might outsource to do its dirty work. The bureaucrat's charge would not be to infuse compassion in his decision, but to coldly cut costs. Read the Democratic bills!

Though I don't belong to the "Obama is a genius" school, I know he's smart enough to realize that insurance company profits are but a fraction of rising health care costs and that it's grossly misleading to make insurers the primary villains. This is simply Chicago politics writ large in a last-gasp effort to enslave us with government health care.

Obama is also dishonest in portraying his still-unwritten plan as middle-of-the-road between the extreme position of those who want socialized medicine and the extreme position of those who want to relax all regulations on the health insurance industry and just pass reforms in "baby steps."

First, he is intentionally mischaracterizing the Republicans' position. They don't advocate baby steps, but a series of market reforms that would not entail restructuring the entire system under government control.

Nor do they want to relax all regulations on insurance companies. They do want to remove some of the coverage mandates, not for the purpose of helping insurers, but to benefit consumers, who ultimately would have to bear the costs of elective procedures for others. Republicans also want to relax arbitrary laws preventing consumers from buying across state lines.

Further, Obama is misrepresenting his own plan as centrist and a composite of Democratic and Republican ideas. It is the last thing from centrist. His plan contemplates -- and would eventuate in -- full-blown government control, which is also deliberate and which he's on record advocating.

He has rejected outright all Republican ideas except for tort reform and "fraud and abuse." But he is just pretending to support tort reform with some meaningless smoke and mirrors. As for fraud and abuse, it's revealing that he would credit Republicans with a franchise on the concept, but his lip service promise to curb it is just more cynical sophistry. He already has a track record on this with his stimulus plan. Enough said.

Everything about this unprecedented federal power grab stinks, not least of which are the highhanded, unconstitutional and otherwise illegal methods Obama is explicitly advocating to pass this monstrosity over the informed will of the American people. We must pray he fails.

Obama versus Insurers and the People

President Barack Obama's obsessive, opportunistic demonization of insurance companies in his quest to pass his not-yet-written health care proposal is growing tiresome. Aren't you getting sick of a president attacking American citizens and businesses as if they -- not Obama's beloved government -- were the enemy?

His repeated implication that insurance companies are the primary reason for rising health care costs is politically expedient, but it's still untrue. Government is the main culprit.

Throughout his yearlong push for Obamacare, he has called insurance companies every name in the book. He has blamed them for soaring costs, bludgeoned them for taking profits, condemned their executives' salaries and savaged them for denying coverage for pre-existing conditions.

He even says insurers are the final arbiters of who gets care and who doesn't: "And insurance companies freely ration health care based on who's sick and who's healthy, who can pay and who can't."

Obama has framed the entire debate as if it were an insurance problem. In his theatrical speech Wednesday -- while flanked from all sides by white-coated props -- he said, "We began our push to reform health insurance last March," as if the thrust of his health care efforts has been to rein in insurers and little else.

]]> Though Obama surely hates insurance companies, we all know he is up to much more than just punishing them. This is about a government takeover, even if it takes several incremental steps. Vilifying insurers sells better than glorifying government to a center-right nation generally suspicious of government.

Insurance companies are not the main reason for our exploding health care costs. If they were, the solution would not be to increase regulations on them, but to deregulate them and let the market work its magic.

To blame insurers for increasing costs is to imply they are guilty of some kind of collusion or price fixing. Does Obama really believe we have an evil insurance cartel in America?

Could it be that their rates are symptomatic of higher health care costs rather than the main driver of those costs? That said, aren't we likelier to see more competitive rates if we relax onerous regulations, such as laws preventing the purchase of health insurance across state lines (one of the many Republican proposals)?

It's very clever -- and reminiscent of his street-agitating mentor Saul Alinsky -- for Obama to adopt the anti-government language of conservatives to use against insurance companies. They are "rationing" care, he says. No, they enter into contracts with individuals and groups to provide insurance coverage as defined in the contract. They don't arbitrarily deny coverage if they have contractually agreed to provide it. But if they do, legal remedies are available.

I realize Obama has no qualms about violating the contracts clause of the Constitution and interfering with private contracts, but that's not the way it's supposed to work in America. For him to suggest that insurers must be forced to cover pre-existing conditions is tantamount to saying the government is going to convert them from insurance companies to unconditional guarantors. How can you call it insurance if you remove their ability to calculate their own risk assessments?

If, in his dictatorial omniscience, Obama tells insurance companies what they must cover, how many of them will remain in business while forced to take losing deals -- absent government subsidies?

Even if you believe insurers are culpable, you will still be hard-pressed to demonstrate that any insurance pricing abuses are responsible for more than a fractional percentage of our rising health care costs. Republicans made that point quite cogently during Obama's bogus summit, and he didn't even pretend to have an answer for it.

I believe our rising costs are attributable mostly to government interference with free market forces. The price mechanism is not allowed to work because, due to tax laws, most people get their insurance through their employers and don't have to pay out of pocket for their own insurance and so the costs are invisible to them. They don't base their consumption on what they can reasonably afford.

In addition, the government has mucked things up with Medicare and Medicaid, mandates insurance coverage for unnecessary procedures, prevents interstate insurance purchases, as noted, and obstructs health savings account reforms and tort reform.

By demonizing insurers, Obama is diverting attention from the real villain here -- an intrusive federal government -- so he can give it even more control.

The people know better, which is why he's endorsing legislative shenanigans to get it done, despite condemning that approach in the recent past.

Oh, yes, and if you believe he's going to rein in government costs and "fraud and abuse," there's some real estate I'd like to sell you at a fictitious address with a phantom ZIP code.

Health Care Summit Charade -- A Clinic in Obama Partisanship

For a guy who touts himself as bipartisan and demands bipartisanship from Republicans, President Barack Obama had a funny way of showing his bipartisanship during last week's health care summit.

Obama has repeatedly promised an open, honest and bipartisan process on health care reform, but from the beginning, he has quarterbacked a highly partisan, closed-door and dishonest campaign.

In his opening remarks at the "summit," he said he wanted to make sure the participants didn't just trade "talking points" or engage in "political theater." He said, "If we've got an open mind, if we're listening to each other, if we're not engaging in sort of the tit for tat trying to score political points during the next several hours ... we might be able to make some progress."

He then proceeded to a) open the curtains for his own political theater, with one anecdotal Democratic sob story after another about the horrors of American health care; b) deliver his own talking points throughout the day, including his obligatory "tit for tat" following almost every Republican speaker; and c) demonstrate his own partisanship through (i) patronizing dismissals of the Republicans' substantive contributions as "talking points"; (ii) volleying partisan barbs at Republicans; (iii) mischaracterizing his positions and those of the Republicans; and (iv) accusing Republicans of not showing a good-faith willingness to make any movement in his direction when he made no effort to compromise with them.

To invoke my own anecdotal experience here, I have worked with people like Obama before, those who sanctimoniously demand collegiality and compromise while exhibiting no willingness to compromise themselves and then -- wholly blind to their own dogmatism -- castigate you for not "meeting them halfway" (meaning: wholly embracing their proposals).

]]> This summit was an orchestrated setup for Obama to showcase himself as bipartisan, reasonable and, above all, motivated by compassion to improve health care for all Americans and demonize the Republicans as partisan, obstructionist and heartless. With this predicate, he would appear justified in imposing, unilaterally, his Obamacare monstrosity.

But what struck me even more than Obama's unfairness, pettiness and partisanship was his acutely self-absorbed performance throughout the day. His well-known narcissism was on full display, the most telling evidence of which was that he was so hopelessly immersed in satisfying his own hierarchy of ideological needs that he obviously had no idea he was coming off that way.

He advertized the conference as a balanced exchange between the two sides, setting himself up as the referee in chief who would enforce impartiality and fairness. Instead, he injected himself at every interval, using almost as much time as all the Republicans combined, saying his time didn't count because he is president, and never offering Republicans any opportunity to rebut his endless soliloquies.

When Republicans were scoring heavily, Obama revealed his displeasure with his facial expressions and body language. When he couldn't refute their arguments, he degenerated to "the election is over," exposing his real attitude about working toward a joint solution.

If there was any doubt about Obama's blinding egotism and dripping arrogance, he removed it with his snarky remark that if he were to adopt John Boehner's bill, "we'd get a whole bunch of Republican votes" -- as if that proved that Republicans were the problem and as if he was willing to move an inch from his position.

If there was any doubt Obama was not in good faith, he removed it when he characterized Republicans as being unconcerned about the alleged 30 million uninsured and philosophically unwilling to embrace reform addressing this issue. Well, he's already been forced off his bogus 47 million figure, presumably because it included illegal aliens and other illegitimate groups, but his 30 million is no less misleading. He intentionally fails to mention that his figure includes millions who are already entitled to government benefits but don't avail themselves of it and tens of millions who can afford insurance but choose not to buy it.

But the worst thing about his false accusation is that it implies that unless Republicans are willing to agree to socialized medicine, they oppose care for those who actually do fall through the cracks. First, all Americans are already entitled to emergency room care. Plus, Republicans believe that if their ideas were implemented, medical costs would decrease and fewer people would fall through the cracks. But they don't oppose benefits for those who do fall through, provided it doesn't entail a complete restructuring of the best health care system in the world.

The real philosophical difference between the parties is not about whether to help the truly needy, but whether government is the solution or the culprit.

Just in case any doubt remained about Obama's partisan mindset, he removed that, too, when he made clear that "procedure" (and the U.S. Constitution) be damned, he is going to cram this down our throats.

Liberal Paranoia About Christian Conservatives

The left's paranoia about the intersection of Christianity and the public square continues unabated. It's amazing how much they fear something that represents such a little threat to them.

In his column in the British newspaper The Guardian, Northeastern University associate journalism professor Dan Kennedy rails against Republicans' "intolerance" of secularism and accuses them of representing a threat to the First Amendment.

In their penchant for projection, leftists accuse conservatives and Republicans of intolerance, when in fact, their own intolerance dominates the issues of freedom of speech and religion. Liberals accuse conservatives of being theocrats, when they are the ones trying to chill religious freedom and expression.

One would expect that Kennedy, having made these charges, would provide some proof in his column that Republicans have abridged or advocated abridging someone's First Amendment rights -- such as using the authority of government to infringe on citizens' freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly or petition or somehow violating the establishment clause.

I searched in vain for the payoff. He provided no examples, no scintilla of proof that Republicans are even skirting up against an activity that could fairly be considered threatening to Americans' First Amendment guarantees.

]]> The main source of Kennedy's current angst seems to be a few statements from Republican politicians at the Conservative Political Action Conference a week ago. Apparently, the greatest offender was Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, whom Kennedy describes as a "fire-breathing Christian warrior and aspiring presidential candidate in his spare time."

What did Pawlenty say that struck such fear in Kennedy? He said: "I want to share with you four ideas that I think should carry us forward. ... The first one is this: God's in charge. ... In the Declaration of Independence, it says we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. It doesn't say we're endowed by Washington, D.C., or endowed by the bureaucrats or endowed by state government. It's by our Creator that we are given these rights."

Kennedy responds that Pawlenty misrepresented the Founders' "intent" because Jefferson, the "primary author" of the declaration, deleted all references to Jesus' deity from his personal Bible.

Jefferson's Christianity may be subject to debate, but it is clear that he didn't view himself as expressing his own views in the declaration; rather, "it was intended to be an expression of the American mind." (The American mind, it should be noted, was decidedly Christian.) Plus, a congressional committee led by the devout John Adams made more than 80 changes, deleting nearly 500 words and adding two references to a providential God. The declaration was a corporate statement of Congress. Also, Jefferson was not present at the Constitutional Convention. So Kennedy's reference to Jefferson is at best misleading, as is his convenient omission of many other relevant facts -- including that 52 of the 56 signers of the declaration and 50 to 52 of the 55 signers of the Constitution were orthodox Trinitarian Christians.

Kennedy's other proof of Pawlenty's intolerance and "hatred"? He "oozed mild-mannered hatred for anyone who doesn't share his beliefs." Kennedy's basis for that claim? Pawlenty "trashed anyone who attended 'Ivy League schools' or who go to 'chablis-drinking, brie-eating parties in San Francisco'."

Please get a life, Mr. Kennedy, and learn to take at least a little ribbing in exchange for your vitriol.

You see, in Kennedy's leftist mind, if you simply disagree with and make fun of the left, you're guilty of hatred. If you merely invoke God in your public pronouncements, such as Pawlenty's "God's in charge" or Huckabee's call to "take this nation back for Christ," you're proposing "a theocracy of believers. It is an assault not just on anyone who isn't one of them, but on the American idea, and on liberal democracies everywhere."

Once again, Kennedy is projecting. He's the one objecting to the speech of others. He's the one accusing them of advocating a theocracy, when nothing could be farther from the truth. He's the one exhibiting intolerance for the other man's religious views and speech.

He cites no evidence of Republicans advocating any theocratic ideas. When Christians say God is in control, they mean that in the sense of his divine sovereignty -- not as some endorsement of turning any political control over to a national church, much less any individual church.

When we witness this kind of scattershot Christian-bashing paranoia from the left, we must remember that you won't find censorship of speech or thought or infringements on religious liberty emanating from conservatives or Republicans. Those impulses, when present, generally originate from the left.

So settle down, liberals. When it comes to threats to liberty, you have nothing to fear from us. We will fight to protect your religious liberties and even your political speech -- wrong as it is. Can you say the same in reverse?

Obama Doesn't Even Fake Bipartisanship Well

How long will it take for every last American to realize President Barack Obama is not about bipartisanship, reconciliation (other than as a process to cram his health care bill through Congress) and uniting Americans? As his latest gyrations on health care demonstrate, he will not be deterred in his quest to saddle Americans with socialized medicine, even if it greatly increases the likelihood he won't be re-elected.

Here we have Obama, frenetically busy with at least three of his hands, pushing different buttons and sending mixed signals. I guess being a self-perceived messiah means you don't have to worry about being flagrantly inconsistent, even on the same day or in the context of one speech.

He's invited Republicans to a bipartisan summit on health care, intending to create the illusion that he's interested in conservative ideas on the subject.

But at the same time -- he can't even pretend long enough to let this ruse play out -- he is threatening Republicans that if they filibuster current congressional health care proposals, he will urge Congress to pass Obamacare by bastardizing the reconciliation process.

But wait, just like a Ginsu knife infomercial, there's more. Obama has also unveiled the outlines of his own new health care proposal, but it is hardly a model of bipartisanship.

]]> As for his "bipartisan" summit, why would anyone believe he is interested in the Republicans' ideas on health care? Has he given any indication he is through this nearly yearlong process? Has he not shut Republicans out of the entire process until tendering this counterfeit overture -- after wholesale repudiation of his plan by the American people?

Thinking people know that the Republicans' proposals involve market reform and that such ideas do not register with Obama's rigid statist mindset. He's not interested in their ideas, which he views as wholly incompatible with his own -- and he's right. There's no room for getting the government out of the way when he is determined to increase the government's role dramatically. It's like pulling your punches when you're going for a knockout.

How silly do we have to be to imagine he's even thinking about compromise? It's not just that the Republicans' ideas are incompatible with his own; it's that in his megalomaniacal mind, he's the boss. Indeed, let's not forget that this is the guy who scolded opponents of his nationally bankrupting agenda with: "I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them just to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don't mind cleaning up after them, but don't do a lot of talking."

Is that the attitude of a uniter? Of one who has the slightest interest in working with the other side? His sole purpose for the summit is to entrap Republicans in a political trick bag, painting them as unreasonable and obstructionist. Thankfully, they finally appear to be onto him and preparing themselves accordingly.

Obama's cavalier attitude is also on display in his threat to invoke the reconciliation process to push his plan through Congress. His stated reason is that he "expects and believes the American people deserve an up-or-down vote on health reform." What? Surely he jests.

But sadly, he does not. This is the tone-deaf guy who has refused to hear the American people's repeated rejections of Obamacare for months running. They've already given him scores of down votes, but he thinks he can go back to the well, despite his evaporating charisma, and fool them one last time.

Folks, do you think that if anywhere close to the barest majority of American people slightly supported Obama's nationalized health care scheme, he and his supermajorities in Congress wouldn't have been able to pass it already? They couldn't even pass it after bribing -- with our money -- members of their own party in Congress. The American people have spoken, sir, and it is against socialism. Please quit insulting our intelligence with your smoke and mirrors to the contrary.

But no less insulting are some of the highlights of the president's new plan -- as set out on the White House's Web site. Obama actually claims he'll cover the 31 million uninsured while "reducing the deficit by $100 billion over the next ten years -- and about $1 trillion over the second decade -- by cutting government overspending and reining in waste, fraud and abuse." Seriously, how gullible must he think we are?

Oh, yes, and he's going to impose controls on health insurance premiums, as if there exists an omniscient central government that can best determine prices -- and as if such command and control models have ever worked in the history of the world.

Now is not the time for Obama's opponents to get complacent. We face -- America's freedom faces -- a relentless adversary.

When the Facts Don't Help Pound the Table

When you're president of the United States and your primary claim to fame is your economic prowess but your economic record fails by all objective measures, what do you do? You call on your skills as a virtuoso propagandist.

With the perceived catastrophic economic crisis of 2008-09, President Barack Obama captured the presidency at the perfect time in America's modern history for him to unleash his grandiose socialist policies -- policies so ambitious that the American people would never have tolerated them under any other circumstances.

With the nation in near panic over the impending doom of the economy, Obama presented his now-infamous "stimulus plan" to artificially create government demand by spending more than $800 billion of borrowed money to "jump-start the economy."

Being a die-hard Keynesian, Obama probably believed his program would create jobs. But given his attitude about the wealthy being undeserving of their good fortune, he probably wasn't risking too much in the event it didn't work. The funds would redistribute wealth to those less fortunate and whom society, in Obama's view, has cheated. It would also force allocations of money to "green" enterprises that would never be pursued if left to the sanity of private-sector consumer demand, further expand the public sector in general and provide ample slush money to reward unions and other supporters to shore up his re-election efforts.

According to Keynesian theory, as I understand it, it doesn't matter much where the government spends other people's money -- just as long as it spends it. Once the money is injected into the economy (never mind that an equal amount is taken out of the economy from the private sector), a multiplier effect unfolds to stimulate economic growth and jobs.

]]> But just to hedge his bets, Obama was careful in choosing his words in predicting the coming prosperity. He said he would "save or create 3 million jobs" -- or whatever number suited his purposes at the particular speech he was giving. Reasonable people said at the time that this was a bizarre formulation -- that it would be impossible to prove or disprove such a claim -- but the media dutifully ignored the skeptics.

But Obama wasn't always disciplined in his message. Sometimes he allowed his exalted opinion of himself to seduce him into projecting that his plan would guarantee that unemployment would not exceed 8 percent.

A year later, with employment still about 10 percent, Obama has dispatched his minions to tout the enormous "success" of his plan, without which, he claims, we would have suffered a depression. It's no accident that he included "audacity" in the title of one of his books.

By every reasonable measure, his stimulus plan has been an abject failure. When you examine the empirical evidence, you'll find there is an inverse relationship between the monies he spent and employment; as more money was spent, there was less employment. The chart doesn't lie.

Obama now claims he saved some 2 million jobs that would not have been saved but for his stimulus package. But as Heritage Foundation scholars note, he bases his numbers not on any evidence whatsoever, but on the preposterously circular argument that Keynesian theory holds that these government expenditures must have created that number of jobs.

But in fact, reports Heritage, we have lost 3 million real jobs held by real people (as opposed to cartoon characters producing widgets), making the gap between Obama's promised 3 million jobs gained and the actual jobs lost some 6 million jobs. In the meantime, most of the money Obama purloined from the private sector has been completely wasted. Did you see the report that his inane plan to create 90,000 "green" jobs throughout America has succeeded in weatherizing only 9,000 homes at an average cost of $57,362? But don't worry; Obama hasn't finished spending all our money yet, and he's planning a second stimulus as we speak. There is never a shortage of cartoon characters or widgets.

Don't ever let anyone tell you that history doesn't repeat. For 70 years, liberals have been spinning the yarn that FDR's New Deal, despite all the evidence that it exacerbated and prolonged the Great Depression, quickened our economic recovery. Indeed, I remember scratching my head when one of my college history professors in the 1970s tried to convince us of that theory and its corollary -- an even better howler -- that FDR was actually a conservative, because if he hadn't implemented his socialist programs, the republic would have died right there.

But despite all of Obama's assaults on America and its solvency during the past year, we have witnessed one encouraging development: The American people aren't buying his propaganda anymore -- so let him keep talking.

Bipartisanship Equals Single-Payer-ship

It's not a good idea for Republicans to accept President Barack Obama's invitation to a "bipartisan" health care summit, because it would not advance acceptable health care reform. The only thing it likely would advance would be Obama's propaganda message -- and, thus, his socialist agenda.

Everyone knows Obama wouldn't be considering such a move if the American people had not so resoundingly rejected Obamacare.

From the very beginning, he has approached this issue more as a dictator than one interested in hearing genuine input from the other side. Nor has he shown good faith, having broken his cynical promise to televise the debates on C-SPAN and having misrepresented his plan in a number of particulars.

When called on the C-SPAN pledge, he glibly replied that most of the process has been televised in regular sessions of Congress and committee hearings, knowing full well that's not what anyone understood him to mean when he made his promise.

He has been as highhanded and dishonest in dealing with this issue as he has been with any other, which is quite a mouthful. He has ridiculed Republicans for their alleged obstruction and for not offering ideas of their own, when it was Republicans who first called for bipartisan talks last May and who did offer alternative plans, which Obama summarily rejected.

]]> He looked us straight in the eye and told us, disingenuously, that in his plan, there would be no federal funding for abortion, no rationing, no interference in the doctor-patient relationship, no forcing people out of their private plans, no bill that was not budget-neutral, no single-payer plan and no decrease in patient choice with his public option.

As he waltzed unannounced into a news conference after failing to make himself available for one for some seven months, he proceeded, as usual, to decry "the political posturing that often paralyzes this town." I wonder whether he considers himself a participant in such posturing. After all, no modern president has ever engaged in the kind of incessant sniping at his predecessor or his opponents that Obama has. None has failed to take responsibility for his own actions the way Obama has. None has debased a State of the Union address to "call out" his political opponents.

If he wouldn't even square with us in his short statement on the proposed "bipartisan" health care summit, why should we expect him to in the meeting itself?

When he announced that he is "going to continue to seek the best ideas from either party," what were other members of his administration saying?

One White House official told The Washington Post, "This is not starting over. Don't make any mistake about that." And Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that Obama will "absolutely not" reset the legislative process. "I think he sees this as a step to actually accelerating the process forward," she said. "He wants a bill at his desk, and he sees this as kind of closing the loop and let's go."

He views this, just as he did his appearance at the Republican retreat, as an opportunity to use Republicans as a prop, to depict them as partisan obstructers of his magnanimous plan to save our health care system.

Obama says the American people are demanding bipartisanship and "a seriousness of purpose that transcends petty politics."

I don't think so. And I don't think his primary concern is what the American people want. If he were truly listening to the people, he would hear their rejection of Obamacare and the rest of his socialist agenda. He would heed the freshly released Rasmussen poll showing that 61 percent of Americans want him to drop health care reform. Yes, the American people have spoken, but what they're demanding is not bipartisanship. Rather, they want him to cease and desist from his socialist schemes.

Indeed, bipartisan compromise in this case would likely be very detrimental to America's best interests. What Obama means by bipartisanship is that he be allowed to proceed with his plan to expand government control over health care with the fewest possible cosmetic changes necessary to con Republicans into signing on -- a ploy right out of the Saul Alinsky street agitation playbook.

Any bipartisan action on this bill would necessarily result in further government control over health care and move us ever closer to a single-payer system. Yet the only way to improve our health care system is to roll back, not increase government's role. It follows, then, that no reform at all would be vastly superior to so-called bipartisan reform.

Seriously, does anyone believe that Obama will agree to any plan that includes market reforms? Of course not. Republicans -- on behalf of the American people -- should just say "no!"

Lashing Out Beats Accountability

Conservatives understand that liberals often demonize their opponents rather than debate the merits of the issues because the tactic works. But you have to wonder whether another reason they lash out is that they are angry that reality doesn't cooperate with their ideologically driven solutions and it's easier to blame others than to face up to the unpleasant truth of their failed ideas.

It's not just the tirades of liberal talk show host Ed Schultz, who said he would cheat to keep Scott Brown from winning his Senate election, or Chris Matthews, who said Republicans indoctrinate their members in the same way Cambodian communists re-educated their subjects, or the nasty outbursts of presidential adviser Rahm Emanuel.

I was also reminded of this, on a subtler level, when reading a Washington Post piece on David Plouffe, Barack Obama's presidential campaign manager, who recently returned to the Obama camp to quarterback the Democrats' election efforts in 2010 and beyond.

Plouffe said: "Politics is a comparative exercise. This isn't just a referendum on Democrats. ... It's a choice. ... Republicans right now are just sitting back and slinging arrows. We need to ... shine some light over their side of the fence."

Plouffe said he would remind voters that Democrats have spent two years trying to fix problems, whereas Republicans want to wheel a "Trojan horse" into Washington and spill out bankers and health insurance executives. Sure, why not vilify bankers and insurers when it helps your guy avoid accountability for his policies?

]]> It's shamelessly Machiavellian of Democrats to accuse the GOP of going negative, when Democrats use Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" (e.g., "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it") as an instruction manual. But hey, they're out of fresh ideas, so what other choice do they have?

Notice how liberal Democrats frame almost any issue: stressing their supposedly good intentions and the Republicans' alleged lack of compassion to avoid a genuine debate and scrutiny of their policies. Consider:

On welfare, Democrats insist on ever-greater redistributionist programs with the ostensible goal of "ending" poverty. Nearly a half-century and $5 trillion since the war on poverty was initiated, we've barely made a dent in poverty. In fact, prior to the Republicans' Contract with America in 1994, we were losing ground in all relevant categories -- with black families, particularly black children, being the hardest hit.

Despite the evidence, Bill Clinton had to be dragged kicking and screaming into signing the welfare reform bill, for which, of course, he claimed full credit. But sadly, the manifest successes of the reforms -- which saw significant improvements in poverty and the rate of illegitimacy, especially among blacks -- didn't keep uber-liberal Barack Obama from rolling them back with a vengeance, something the public has barely noticed. These liberals cannot afford to allow success to stand, lest they be with fewer victims to exploit and conservatives to demonize.

On tax policy, the overwhelming successes of supply-side economics at improving the lots of all income groups without a loss in tax revenues didn't prevent liberals from falsely depicting the policies as sops for the rich and blaming them for the spending-induced deficits. More revealing was Obama's damning revelation that he favors capital gains tax increases as "a matter of fairness" despite admitting they result in decreases in revenue. Here he can't even credibly claim noble intentions. Instead of helping the poor, he's willing to hurt them, as long as everyone else is hurt, too. Class envy trumps results, which is really twisted when you think about it.

On education, liberals refuse to support school vouchers, the result being that many poor people, especially minorities, remain locked in inner-city schools without a key. Otherwise, liberals wouldn't be able to demand endless tax dollars for public education, which only they can "deliver."

On homosexual "marriage" and "don't ask, don't tell" policies for the military, liberals absurdly impugn conservatives as "homophobes" instead of addressing their valid interest in protecting traditional marriage as one of society's pillars and preserving the cohesiveness of the military unit, respectively.

On abortion, liberals refuse to consider mounting scientific evidence that the unborn are live human beings (as if further evidence were needed to confirm what we already know), because it forces them into moral accountability. Instead, they falsely declare the matter unknowable and, worse, try to co-opt the moral high ground as champions of women's rights while condemning their life-advocating opponents as bigots.

On man-made global warming, they cling to their flat-earth alarmism while refusing to discuss the evidence and accusing their opponents of willful blindness. Surreal on stilts!

On health care, they demand socialist solutions to achieve "universal coverage," when such solutions have failed everywhere they've been tried and will, studies show, leave millions uninsured.

But they're still superior because they care. Or do they?

This 'Messiah' Isn't Delivering Peace

President Barack Obama's delusional perspective on fiscal issues is only surpassed by his surreal approach to the war on terror, which he doesn't even consistently recognize as a war. The ideological extremism of his policies is only surpassed by his flailing incompetence in administering them.

During his presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly denounced President George W. Bush's "unilateralist" and "imperialistic" foreign policy.

Obama carefully cultivated an image as a domestic and global healer who could leverage his personal background to rise above internal and foreign bickering and address the root causes of this conflict en route to a peaceful resolution. Frighteningly enough, he obviously believed his own hype.

What about those root causes? Well, Obama's entire approach to the war (he seems to prefer "law enforcement issue") is driven by his belief that Muslim extremists didn't become terrorists because of their ideology but because we have mistreated them. He thinks we have goaded potential terrorists into becoming terrorists and given existing terrorists further cause to hate us. "Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al-Qaida recruit terrorists to its cause," he said. "Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained."

Well, he was going to turn all that around with euphemisms ("man-caused disaster," "overseas contingency operations"), a flurry of lofty rhetoric (his world apology tour), a few symbolic steps (closing Gitmo) and certain policy reversals (Mirandizing terrorists and trying enemy combatants in civilian courts).

]]> The result -- his posture of relaxation and retreat -- has been an unmitigated disaster. He went out of his way to avoid identifying the Fort Hood jihadist as a terrorist; he admonished us not to jump to any conclusions about the Christmas underwear bomber; he promised to close Gitmo with no plan to relocate the prisoners; he moved the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to ground zero with utterly no consideration for the local or national security implications involved; and his Justice Department allowed the Christmas bomber to lawyer up after only 50 minutes of interrogation.

After the public outcry over his reckless and foolish policies, he's backtracking like an indecisive neophyte, sort of like the time when he endlessly vacillated over whether to crank up our operations in Afghanistan.

He just can't seem to grasp that the real world involves more than street organizing, speechmaking, symbolic gestures and his grand appearance on the world stage as a veritable messiah. His miscalculations are disturbingly naive.

Remember his interview on Al-Arabiya, in January 2009, when he assured the Muslim world that things would be much different under his regime? He said that if we would "listen (and) set aside some of the preconceptions that have existed and have built up over the last several years ... there's a possibility at least of achieving some breakthroughs." Is it me, or did he sound as if he was patronizing all Muslims as potential terrorists there?

By "preconceptions" Obama seemed to be suggesting that the Bush administration had been promoting the idea that all of Islam was our enemy and the religion had contributed nothing constructive to the world.

Indeed, Obama agreed when his interviewer said, "President Bush framed the war on terror conceptually in a way that was very broad." Obama responded: "We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith's name. ... The language we use has to be a language of respect. ... My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy."

But maybe it was a preconception-ridden Obama who hadn't been listening to Bush's statements on Islam and the war. Perhaps Obama ought to treat Mr. Bush's words with more respect, such as in not flagrantly misquoting him.

Time and time again, President Bush hailed Islam as a peaceful religion and made clear that the United States was not at war with Islam, only with the extremists who distort the religion. He also said, "America treasures the relationship we have with our many Muslim friends, and we respect the vibrant faith of Islam, which inspires countless individuals to lead lives of honesty, integrity and morality."

Shouldn't Obama have gotten a clue that sweet-talking the Muslim world -- or promising to close Gitmo (which President Bush also did, regrettably) -- doesn't deter terrorists.

In fact, the verdict on Obama's messianic approach is already in. Despite his overtures, his own CIA director, Leon Panetta, just testified that al-Qaida is growing and gearing for an attack in the United States in the next three to six months.

No worries. If it happens, he can blame Bush for that, too.

An Unusually Bad Prevaricator, Unusually Bad

Former Sen. Bob Kerrey famously said that Bill Clinton was "an unusually good liar. Unusually good." Well, then, President Barack Obama is an unusually bad liar. Unusually bad.

Obama said in his State of the Union speech (and similar statements several times since): "By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program. On top of that, the effects of the recession put a $3 trillion hole in our budget. All this was before I walked in the door."

Though it's true that the deficit for President George W. Bush's final year in office was close to $1.3 trillion, it must be noted that Obama and his fellow Democratic-controlled Congress members approved the TARP bailouts and are largely responsible for the other budget expenditures leading to that record deficit.

Plus, The Heritage Foundation's blog, "The Foundry," says that Obama's claims concerning the causes for that deficit are "clearly misleading." Despite those factors, "the budget deficit still stood at just $162 billion when the recession began in late 2007. The larger subsequent deficits have been driven by the recession (which Obama did acknowledge), the financial bailouts, the President's stimulus bill, and large discretionary spending hikes enacted by a Democratic Congress."

Also, there is major disagreement over Obama's assertion that Bush's projected deficits over the next 10 years were $8 trillion. But even if you let Obama slide on that claim, the more relevant comparison, as pointed out by Rep. Jeb Hensarling, is the annual average deficit for the 12 years that Republicans most recently controlled Congress -- $104 billion -- versus that of the past three years under the Democratic-controlled Congress -- $1.1 trillion.

]]> Indeed, before the financial meltdown -- which was mostly caused by liberal mortgaging and housing policies -- Bush's deficits had been significantly reduced, even cut in half before he predicted they would be. In addition, Bill Clinton would never have been able to co-opt credit for those deficits or "his" surplus if not for the Republican Revolution and Contract with America.

Granted, a major portion of the high deficits under the Democratic Congress can be attributed to TARP, which the Bush administration proposed (and Democrats approved). But that was -- to borrow a Dick Cheney phrase -- a one-off event. Neither Bush nor his would-be successor John McCain had any intention of repeating TARP (which I'm not defending), and their goal was that the TARP monies be repaid -- and much of them reportedly have been. Republicans had no plans to impose an $800 billion "stimulus" package.

When Obama took office, he used that extraordinary, one-off deficit of $1.3 trillion as the new base line from which all future deficits would be measured, and he planned to treat any future annual deficit less than $1.3 trillion as a triumphant reduction. This isn't even sophisticated deception, but some people are still apparently buying it.

Obama, then, has used the extraordinary budget year as an excuse to spend even more wastefully -- with trillion-dollar-plus budgets in perpetuity -- and then disguise his profligacy with duplicitous rhetoric and such illusory policies as his anemic fractional discretionary spending freeze.

It's incredibly childish for Obama to blame his reckless spending on Bush, but have you considered how preposterous it also is? It is substantively untrue: Bush's extraordinary deficit year doesn't require Obama to continue on that path, converting a one-off event into a permanent, unsustainable affair. But more importantly, the issue is not who should be blamed for spending too much in the past, whether Bush or Obama. It's what we plan to do going forward to stop this hemorrhaging that will -- not might, but will -- destroy this nation if not turned around ASAP.

Even if Obama's misleading depiction were true -- that Bush, er, I mean Obama and the Democratic Congress, bequeathed him with annual $1 trillion deficits -- that would still not justify his intention to give us more of the same. Falsely blaming it on Bush -- or even accurately blaming it on Bush, if that were justified -- wouldn't add one dollar to retire the exploding federal deficit.

Bush has no control over what Obama is doing now. He is not making Obama implement bankrupting "stimulus" packages and soaring expenditures across the board (excluding the paltry, dishonest 17 percent discretionary spending freeze delayed until 2011).

It's as if your wife controlled your household finances the year before and ran up enormous debt, threatening your family's solvency, and when you took over the following year, you said: "Well, I'm going to spend more than she did even though it's my money, too, because she did it, so I can, too. We'll go bankrupt, but it will only be partially my fault."

Too bad we have to wait until 2012 to get a divorce.

There Was the President's Speech, and There Is Reality

Watching President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech makes me wonder whether the reason he tells so many fibs is that he believes them himself. Either that or he is an even better actor than he is a teleprompter reader.

Obama not only wasn't contrite about his broken promises and disastrous record; he was on the attack, daring anyone to oppose his agenda -- even in the face of the Massachusetts rebuke. But let's see how some of his statements match up with reality.

On health care, he taunted congressmen to "let me know" if any of them have "a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses," as if his own plan would do those things.

Even the Congressional Budget Office has said most of the Democratic plans would increase the budget. Besides, you can't reduce overall costs when government forces an increase in demand, even if it caps insurance premiums and shifts costs elsewhere and/or imposes rationing. The CBO has also reported that with Obamacare, millions would remain uninsured. So under his plan, costs would rise, quality and choice would decrease, care would be rationed, millions would remain uninsured and, worst of all, the government would acquire an unprecedented level of control over all aspects of our lives.

Do conservatives have better ideas? Of course. Restore market forces through tort reform, strengthening health savings accounts, abolishing government coverage mandates, allowing consumers to purchase policies across state lines and eliminating the tax laws incentivizing employer-provided health care, which unnecessarily increase demand by making prices invisible to consumers.

]]> A candid Obama would have said, "If any of you have a plan that does not involve restoring market forces and reducing government's role in the health care industry, I'll at least pretend to look at it." "Make no mistake," neither Obama nor his Democratic colleagues will support genuine health care reform, because to reduce costs, we must reduce government control, and they can't abide that. Period.

As for spending, Obama didn't once apologize for his reckless expenditures. Instead, he blamed his soaring deficits on his predecessor, completely misrepresenting the projected deficits under President Bush and ignoring his own deliberate doubling of the national debt over the next 10 years. That's the issue Americans are losing sleep over, and he offers only Band-Aids and smoke and mirrors.

He says he will freeze a portion of the discretionary budget, but as Cato Institute reports, 83 percent of the budget will be off-limits. Other than his "stimulus" insanity, the real explosion in spending is occurring in the entitlements that he refuses to touch. Even his mini-freeze wouldn't begin until 2011 (why wait?), and it would be dwarfed by his planned spending increases for other socialistic projects, including a new "stimulus plan." And how about that assault on personal and fiscal responsibility with his promise to forgive student loans after 20 years?

How Obama can stand before the nation and insist on spending more borrowed money to accomplish something his first "stimulus plan" didn't achieve (job creation), but exacerbated, is beyond me. How he can blame President Bush for his own broken promise that unemployment wouldn't exceed 8 percent if his "stimulus" bill were implemented is jaw-dropping. He even said he saved 2 million jobs. Scary delusional! Or scary sinister!

Speaking of chutzpah, did he actually dare to utter the words "transparent" and "accountable"? How about those phantom legislative districts receiving stimulus monies, Mr. President? How about that promise to televise the health care debates on C-SPAN?

He said he hadn't raised income taxes "a single dime" on 95 percent of the people. Yet in almost the same breath, he promised to redouble his efforts on cap and tax, which would increase the average family's energy costs by almost $3,000 per year. I don't believe his campaign promise was limited to income taxes, by the way.

How about his righteous ranting on earmark reform? Sorry, we've been down that twisted road with you before, Mr. President.

Then there was his audacious riff on lobbyists. Been there, done that, too, Mr. President, with your phony promise to keep lobbyists out of the White House.

Obama also railed against "partisanship, shouting and pettiness" as he filled most of his speech with just those things, even castigating the Supreme Court, erroneously, for opening the door to foreign corporations' campaign contributions.

How about his statement that "America must always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity"? Hmm. Tell that to the Iranian and Honduran peoples. He must have meant once he's out of office.

Then there was his bizarre out-of-body pivot, when he blamed Washington for our problems.

All of this, especially Obama's obvious incapacity for self-doubt, is disturbingly surreal.

'It's Not About Me' -- Wink, Wink

The more painful exposure we have to Barack Obama -- and we're talking hyper-exposure at this point -- the more we realize how narcissistic he is. Indeed, we are treated to this overexposure precisely because of his narcissistic impulses. He can't keep himself out of the spotlight.

So it was that on the heels of his crushing personal defeat in the Massachusetts senatorial election last week, Obama's principal reaction was, "This isn't about me."

When someone says that one time or a few times, you might believe him. But when he says it repeatedly (see below), you have to conclude he is protesting too much and means just the opposite.

Given what we've learned about Obama's self-absorption, it's not a stretch to infer that when he says "it's not about me," he wants to project an air of humility while receiving personal credit for that which he denies seeking credit. What he really means is, "The causes I am working on are greater than self, but -- wink, wink -- I darn well expect you to applaud me anyway, not just for my transcendent accomplishments but also for my being humble and selfless about it."

The context of his "not about me" statement following the Massachusetts election bears this out. After the obligatory disclaimer, he added: "This isn't about politics. This is about a health care system that is breaking America's families, breaking America's businesses and breaking America's economy."

]]> Forget the distortions for now. But notice that he is seeking plaudits for his important work, which he's willing to do even if it damages him in the polls. He also gets the added benefit here of deflecting blame for the defeat by implying the election results weren't about him.

But make no mistake -- to borrow another Obama phrase -- health care is all about him (everything he says and does is about him); it's not about the Democratic Congress, though it's complicit. He's the one driving this train, even if not in the policy particulars.

His entire domestic and foreign policy agenda is so much about him that he insists on cramming it down our throats even though the polls overwhelmingly indicate that we Americans do not want it and, more importantly, that it is bankrupting this nation and making us less safe. That's not selflessness. It's self-indulgence and conceit to an obscene degree. He is so brainwashed in Marxist and appeasement ideologies that he continues to believe in their maxims in the face of their historical failure and of the miserable failure of his own agenda in the here and now. He is so convinced he knows better than we do what is in our best interests that he must thwart our ignorant will.

If it weren't all about Obama, why would he say, "We (meaning I) are the ones we've been waiting for"? Why would he cultivate a messianic image, replete with echo-enhanced microphones, a grandiose Greek temple backdrop at Invesco Field, and that far-off and high-above look he has mastered for his ethereal orations?

Obama's effort to present himself as otherworldly, of which the rhetorical device "it's not about me" is but a part, is not something he just contrived in the past year. It's part of a deliberate pattern he established long ago and has continued with consistency, as my research has confirmed in spades.

Consider this sampling:

--On Feb. 15, 1990, after becoming "the first black president of the influential Harvard Law Review," Obama said, "I realized my election was not about me, but it was about us, about what we could do and what we could accomplish."

--On Nov. 2, 2004, when Obama visited the campus of the University of Illinois during his campaign for U.S. senator, he said: "Ultimately, this election is not about me. ... It's about the willingness of our citizens to get engaged and get involved."

--On Dec. 11, 2006, in a speech in New Hampshire, Obama said, "It's not about me." But, according to an NPR reporter, "it really is all about him."

--On Dec. 10, 2007, Obama said, "This campaign is not about me; it is about the hundreds of volunteers ... in Rhode Island ... and the millions of people across the country who want change we can believe in."

--On Dec. 14, 2007, when asked about a New Year's resolution, Obama said he needed to keep reminding himself, "This is not about me."

--On Aug. 28, 2008, Obama said in his acceptance speech, "This election has never been about me; it's about you."

--On July 20, 2009, Obama said (exactly as he repeated following the Massachusetts election): "This isn't about me. This isn't about politics. This is about a health care system that is breaking America's families, breaking America's businesses and breaking America's economy."

Whom do you think it's about?

Obama's 180 Degrees Out of Phase With the People

Reading excerpts of President Barack Obama's interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos underscores how tone-deaf and self-absorbed Obama is -- and that his tone-deafness is a function of his self-absorption and rigid ideology.

Obama said: "One thing that I regret this year is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values. And that I do think is a mistake of mine. I think the assumption was, if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or are we making a good, rational decision here ... people will get it."

Let's unpack that mouthful. It's all about him; in almost every line, he is bragging or excusing himself. No wonder he can't see any farther than his navel.

Note in the opening sentence his umpteenth gratuitous reference to "crises" he inherited; he doesn't use the word "inherited" there, but his meaning is clear.

In the next sentence, he pretends to criticize himself (for not speaking directly to the American people) as a backdrop for patting himself on the back for "just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises." Even if he hadn't immediately turned the phony self-deprecation into a boast, we'd know he wasn't sincere because the substance of his statement is flat-out false.

]]> If he hasn't spoken "directly" to the American people more than any politician in modern history, then I'm a politically correct progressive who idolizes Al Gore -- unless, of course, by "directly," he meant "truthfully." But I'm sure that's not what he meant. Has any president gone "directly" to the American people more than he has, desperately trying to convince them that this or that proposal is in their urgent self-interest?

In fact, one could argue that all this guy does is give speeches. Only rarely does he engage in the nitty-gritty of policymaking, which is not quite glamorous enough for him. Don't get me wrong; I'm convinced he's the driving force behind the socialist hellfire being inflicted on this country, but he leaves the "details" to his minions.

But notice also what he says he didn't talk to the American people directly enough about: "what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values."

Is it just me, or is this psychobabble? What institutions? I can find no antecedent in his statement to indicate what he's referring to.

Could he mean that he needs to do a better job of conforming his policy agenda to the people's values? If so, he's not going to learn those values by giving speeches all the time and never listening. He's not going to learn them by listening, either, though, if he doesn't remove his ideological earplugs.

Tea Party after Tea Party, poll after poll, legislative obstacle after legislative obstacle -- they all indicate that his policy agenda couldn't be more out of phase with the values of the American people, who are literally beside themselves over his reckless fiscal and national security policies.

And just in case you think I'm drawing unwarranted inferences, look at how he ends the statement. He says that if he had spent more time explaining himself -- not listening, but talking -- to the American people instead of nobly grinding through the slog of public policy decisions, the people, thickheaded as they are, would "get it."

What? The correct formulation is that if he had spent less time dictating a policy agenda with total disregard for the values and will of the American people -- not to mention the best interests of the nation -- he might "get" that his values are completely at odds with an overwhelming majority of Americans.

Besides, the problem is not the "crises" Obama inherited. It's the ones he's creating. He has lived in such a socialist policy shell all his life that he doesn't have a clue that he's on a different planet than most of us. If he were just slightly less narcissistic, he might be able to figure this out.

But in the meantime, if you take away anything from his statement, let it be that no matter what adjustments he promises to make following the Boston Massacre, he still intends to govern like a socialist. He only wants to do a better job of figuring out how to do it less visibly, hoping we won't "get it" before it's too late.