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Obama's Talking Disease Can Be Disastrous For US
The Advocate
By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin
Our president has a serious and dangerous disease. It is called the talking disease. When you suffer from this affliction, you confuse talk with action and speeches with reality.
For example, President Barack Obama talks about bipartisanship and a new day dawning, but he doesn’t translate that into action. He talks like a bipartisan but acts as a partisan. What’s worse, he is so eager to talk, to speechify and to hear his own voice that he enters into negotiations and conferences that support bigotry and other anti-American forces.
We’ll address the talking disease and bipartisanship first. Our president thinks talking about bipartisanship and inviting Republicans to the White House and going through all the gestures suggesting openness is enough. But when it comes to compromising or giving the other side something to latch on to, he doesn’t budge. He says things like, “We won the election.” So it’s sweet talk but no real compromise and coming together.
The Obama administration’s version of bipartisanship is to talk about it, be cordial in meetings and then expect the other side to do whatever you want. That’s bad enough but the talking disease has spread to the mainstream media, which have become little more than puppets and advocates of the Obama administration. The disease is obviously contagious and one of the recent victims is the Philadelphia Inquirer and its reporters, including one Thomas Fitzgerald. The disease showed up in its most virulent form in his front-page story on Feb. 22, titled “Obama to Turn Up Heat: Pressure will replace bipartisanship as he seeks support for his 2010 budget.”
Mr. Fitzgerald merrily assumes President Obama was practicing bipartisanship during the proposal and passage of the stimulus package. How does he explain that was done?
Mr. Fitzgerald writes, “He invited them [Republicans] over to watch the Super Bowl, visited them in their caucus rooms on Capitol Hill and even flew a couple of them on Air Force One. But for all that wooing, President Obama got zero Republican votes in the House and just three in the Senate for passage of his economic-stimulus legislation.”
How simple-minded if not downright stupid can the Inquirer get? They clearly think that bipartisanship is inviting people to watch the Super Bowl and even flying a couple of them on Air Force One. Wow, after that the Inquirer assumes the Republicans would say, “He invited me to the White House, he even flew me on Air Force One, so I’ve got to go along with his in sane porky, pet-project stimulus bill.”
Give me a break. This view of bipartisanship sounds more like the Chicago-style of politics in which you get votes by bribery and other means.
You can see in this kind of goofy logic that the Inquirer has lost its way. If someone writes something that silly, you would think an editor down the line would question his reasoning and require a rewrite of some kind.
If I were Brian Tierney, publisher of the Inquirer, I’d wonder what I’m paying an army of editors for. When they let that kind of stuff slip into the above-the-fold, right-hand story in a Sunday paper, perhaps the most important story of the week, they clearly aren’t doing their job. Perhaps this might be a way for the Inquirer to improve its shaky finances — just fire all the editors. The people at the Inquirer have decided that better journalism is not the way to revive a dying paper and reverse the slogan I’ve proposed for the paper, “In Philadelphia nearly everyone hates the Inquirer.” And with good reason, I might add.
When the Inquirer reported on the reasons for its bankruptcy, it mentioned an advertising downturn, rising costs of newsprint and the migration of readers to the internet. It forgot to mention that the Inquirer has systematically alienated large segments of readers with its biased, dishonest and fraudulent reporting, which has been a frequent subject of this column.
So now that his sweet-talk-only version of bipartisanship has failed, what is the president going to do? The Inquirer story reports, “aides say Obama will rely more on his persuasion skills, to build pubic pressure on lawmakers than on the inside game in coming battles.”
Consider that because its implications are shocking beyond belief. What the advisers are really saying, as demonstrated by that above quote, is that President Obama and his administration have already given up on bipartisanship (what is referred to as the “inside game”), and will now rely on pubic pressure to force the Republicans to go along.
So this shows what a fraud and a farce the Obama bipartisanship claims were and will continue to be. He tries what he considers bipartisanship on the first major legislative proposal of his administration. And when his sweet talk produces only three votes in Congress (from RINOs, Republicans in Name Only), he gives up on bipartisanship.
He is apparently so little committed to bipartisanship that he is willing to give up on it after one try. Apparently no one in the Obama administration is smart enough to ask, “Maybe our ‘bipartisanship’ didn’t work, because we made mistakes. Maybe just talk isn’t enough. Maybe we ought to negotiate and compromise with the Republicans. Maybe we ought to let them offer alternatives and amendments. Maybe we better not shut them down out of the legislative process. Maybe we ought to give them time enough to read the bill before it’s passed. Maybe we ought to read the bill ourselves.”
But I shouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Fitzgerald and the Philadelphia Inquirer for producing pure intellectual garbage in its front-page story. You have to remember, that the Inquirer, along with the rest of the mainstream media, didn’t bother to investigate President Obama during the campaign.
They proclaimed him “The One” and “The Messiah” and acted as cheerleaders and campaign manager for his candidacy. Now if they had investigated, they would have found that he has a long career of following the party-line, and has never demonstrated one shred of significant bipartisanship in his career. He is a highly partisan, left-wing, radical Democrat. That’s his history and that explains his failure not only to fail to practice bipartisanship, but also to fail to even understand what it is.
Here’s another aspect of President Obama’s talking disease. He has just warned mayors that he will “call them out” if federal stimulus money is wasted on pork projects that do not stimulate the economy. He told 80 mayors at their meeting, “If a federal agency proposes a project that will waste money, I will not hesitate to call them out on it and put a stop to it.”
Again, I can only say give me a break. Here’s a guy who is on one of the most wild and gigantic spending sprees in the history of the country, now well more than $1 trillion and growing. Here’s the guy who promised to go over every budget item line-by-line during the campaign, and didn’t do that or even give anyone a chance to read the bill.
Here’s a guy who cheered on a bill so full of pork and pet projects that it would make even the masters of pork and special interest legislation blush. Someone should ask, “Mr. President, why didn’t you call out yourself?”
But in $1 trillion stimulus law (with interest) overflowing with pork and pet projects, he keeps saying that there is no pork in the law. He thinks saying it makes it so. That’s what you think when you suffer from the talking disease.
When I was still in school, I once worked as a pork packer in one of the big packinghouses in Omaha, Neb., and I can assure you I know pork when I see it. When Rep. Nancy “San Francisco Values” Pelosi put the stimulus package together for President Obama, she must have had a platoon of pork packers at work for her.
But in a way the two examples of the talking disease discussed above perhaps show only the hypocrisy, the incompetence, the ignorance, the naiveté and the phoniness of the Obama administration. But sometimes the consequences of the talking disease are even more serious.
Take President Obama’s eagerness to negotiate with every genocidal, murderous, tyrant starting with Iran. That’s when the talking disease gets dangerous and that’s when I first encountered that term, “talking cure,” in an article, “Obama’s Talking Cure,” by Joshua Muravchik in Commentary Magazine (September 2008) that discussed Obama’s approach to Iran, thinking that would somehow solve the problem. He concluded, after a careful review of other attempts to negotiate with tyrants, that the talking cure doesn’t cure, but only causes complications and deadly side effects.
It’s clear that negotiating with Iran is just a waste of time and merely gives them more time to develop a nuclear bomb. John Bolton, in his writings, has clearly demonstrated that the talking cure won’t work on Iran, and it is folly to try. What’s worse, in addition to merely affording them more time to produce their bomb that will threaten world security, it also lends credibility to this rogue regime.
This again shows where the talking disease takes you. And if the mainstream media had vetted President Obama, they would have discovered another reason he is so susceptible to the folly of the talking disease. In one of his books containing his quotations, he says he knows that if given a chance, he can convince anyone of the validity of his position.
He really thinks he can talk these genocidal madmen in Iran out of their plans, which involve their most basic worldview and religious beliefs. He’s on a fool’s errand, and doesn’t have a clue. Maybe the mainstream media have convinced him he really is the Messiah.
And here’s another example of the talking cure becoming even more unattractive and dangerous. Mr. Obama has decided to participate for now in the work leading up to the U.N.’s so-called Durban II conference, scheduled for April 2009.
Durban II is designed to carry forward the work of Durban I. At Durban I, there was a call for curbs on freedom of expression to have critical discussions of Islam. Durban I, in the words of Carolyn B. Glick, the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., also “called for a coordinated international campaign aimed at delegitimizing Israel and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination.” It also belittled the Holocaust.
But President Obama is so eager to talk to the people at the conference that he sends a representative to the planning sessions for Durban II. There he clearly sides with the genocidal enemies of America and Israel, and puts the U.S.’s credibility on the side of bigotry and denial of free speech. In the process President Obama becomes an ally of those waging war on America and Israel.
Here’s what the U.S. is doing at those planning sessions. The Palestinian delegation proposed a paragraph to the agenda of the conference that “calls for implementation of the advisory opinion of the ICJ [International Court of Justice] on the wall [i.e., Israel’s security fence] and the international protection of Palestinian people throughout the occupied Palestinian territory.”
Ms. Glick reports that the U.S. raised no objection to that propos al. So, in Ms. Glick’s words, this is what that U.S. approval signed onto: “Issued in 2004, the ICJ’s advisory opinion on Israel’s security fence claimed that Israel has no right to self-defense against Palestinian terrorism. At the time, both the U.S. and Israel rejected the ICJ’s authority to issue an opinion on the subject … By not objecting to this Palestinian draft, not only did the U.S. effectively accept the ICJ’s authority, for practical purposes it granted the anti-Israel claim that Jews may be murdered with impunity.”
Ms. Glick cites many other examples of how President Obama’s decision to participate and talk in the planning of Durban II, means the U.S. has lent its credibility to the war against Israel and the Jews and to the bigotry of Durban I, which is scheduled to be repeated at Durban II.
The Obama administration defends its decision to talk at Durban II, with these words from an Obama spokesman, “If you are not engaged, you don’t have a voice.”
But it is clear that the U.S., with all its engagement and talking can’t bring about change as the Durban meeting is dominated by Arab and Third World countries which will adhere to their plans. They will not be persuaded by more Obama sweet talk.
So when I say the talking disease can be dangerous think of Durban II and how the United States, by talking in the wrong place at the wrong time, is striking a blow against free speech, is legitimizing the war against Israel and is undermining our own historic foreign policy.
The more I see President Obama in action, the more I think I should add incompetence to the usual list of adjectives and nouns I pin on him: hypocrite, fraud, phony, radical, hyper-liberal leftist, to name a few.
That’s what I said dozens of times during the presidential campaign and I’m sorry to report that President Obama is proving my appraisal was right. When you elect, a highly partisan, radical, leftist, with a history of associations with anti-Americans, terrorists, and bigots, don’t expect a George Washington, an Abe Lincoln, or an FDR to suddenly come forth after the inauguration. And don’t expect a Messiah either.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
For example, President Barack Obama talks about bipartisanship and a new day dawning, but he doesn’t translate that into action. He talks like a bipartisan but acts as a partisan. What’s worse, he is so eager to talk, to speechify and to hear his own voice that he enters into negotiations and conferences that support bigotry and other anti-American forces.
We’ll address the talking disease and bipartisanship first. Our president thinks talking about bipartisanship and inviting Republicans to the White House and going through all the gestures suggesting openness is enough. But when it comes to compromising or giving the other side something to latch on to, he doesn’t budge. He says things like, “We won the election.” So it’s sweet talk but no real compromise and coming together.
The Obama administration’s version of bipartisanship is to talk about it, be cordial in meetings and then expect the other side to do whatever you want. That’s bad enough but the talking disease has spread to the mainstream media, which have become little more than puppets and advocates of the Obama administration. The disease is obviously contagious and one of the recent victims is the Philadelphia Inquirer and its reporters, including one Thomas Fitzgerald. The disease showed up in its most virulent form in his front-page story on Feb. 22, titled “Obama to Turn Up Heat: Pressure will replace bipartisanship as he seeks support for his 2010 budget.”
Mr. Fitzgerald merrily assumes President Obama was practicing bipartisanship during the proposal and passage of the stimulus package. How does he explain that was done?
Mr. Fitzgerald writes, “He invited them [Republicans] over to watch the Super Bowl, visited them in their caucus rooms on Capitol Hill and even flew a couple of them on Air Force One. But for all that wooing, President Obama got zero Republican votes in the House and just three in the Senate for passage of his economic-stimulus legislation.”
How simple-minded if not downright stupid can the Inquirer get? They clearly think that bipartisanship is inviting people to watch the Super Bowl and even flying a couple of them on Air Force One. Wow, after that the Inquirer assumes the Republicans would say, “He invited me to the White House, he even flew me on Air Force One, so I’ve got to go along with his in sane porky, pet-project stimulus bill.”
Give me a break. This view of bipartisanship sounds more like the Chicago-style of politics in which you get votes by bribery and other means.
You can see in this kind of goofy logic that the Inquirer has lost its way. If someone writes something that silly, you would think an editor down the line would question his reasoning and require a rewrite of some kind.
If I were Brian Tierney, publisher of the Inquirer, I’d wonder what I’m paying an army of editors for. When they let that kind of stuff slip into the above-the-fold, right-hand story in a Sunday paper, perhaps the most important story of the week, they clearly aren’t doing their job. Perhaps this might be a way for the Inquirer to improve its shaky finances — just fire all the editors. The people at the Inquirer have decided that better journalism is not the way to revive a dying paper and reverse the slogan I’ve proposed for the paper, “In Philadelphia nearly everyone hates the Inquirer.” And with good reason, I might add.
When the Inquirer reported on the reasons for its bankruptcy, it mentioned an advertising downturn, rising costs of newsprint and the migration of readers to the internet. It forgot to mention that the Inquirer has systematically alienated large segments of readers with its biased, dishonest and fraudulent reporting, which has been a frequent subject of this column.
So now that his sweet-talk-only version of bipartisanship has failed, what is the president going to do? The Inquirer story reports, “aides say Obama will rely more on his persuasion skills, to build pubic pressure on lawmakers than on the inside game in coming battles.”
Consider that because its implications are shocking beyond belief. What the advisers are really saying, as demonstrated by that above quote, is that President Obama and his administration have already given up on bipartisanship (what is referred to as the “inside game”), and will now rely on pubic pressure to force the Republicans to go along.
So this shows what a fraud and a farce the Obama bipartisanship claims were and will continue to be. He tries what he considers bipartisanship on the first major legislative proposal of his administration. And when his sweet talk produces only three votes in Congress (from RINOs, Republicans in Name Only), he gives up on bipartisanship.
He is apparently so little committed to bipartisanship that he is willing to give up on it after one try. Apparently no one in the Obama administration is smart enough to ask, “Maybe our ‘bipartisanship’ didn’t work, because we made mistakes. Maybe just talk isn’t enough. Maybe we ought to negotiate and compromise with the Republicans. Maybe we ought to let them offer alternatives and amendments. Maybe we better not shut them down out of the legislative process. Maybe we ought to give them time enough to read the bill before it’s passed. Maybe we ought to read the bill ourselves.”
But I shouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Fitzgerald and the Philadelphia Inquirer for producing pure intellectual garbage in its front-page story. You have to remember, that the Inquirer, along with the rest of the mainstream media, didn’t bother to investigate President Obama during the campaign.
They proclaimed him “The One” and “The Messiah” and acted as cheerleaders and campaign manager for his candidacy. Now if they had investigated, they would have found that he has a long career of following the party-line, and has never demonstrated one shred of significant bipartisanship in his career. He is a highly partisan, left-wing, radical Democrat. That’s his history and that explains his failure not only to fail to practice bipartisanship, but also to fail to even understand what it is.
Here’s another aspect of President Obama’s talking disease. He has just warned mayors that he will “call them out” if federal stimulus money is wasted on pork projects that do not stimulate the economy. He told 80 mayors at their meeting, “If a federal agency proposes a project that will waste money, I will not hesitate to call them out on it and put a stop to it.”
Again, I can only say give me a break. Here’s a guy who is on one of the most wild and gigantic spending sprees in the history of the country, now well more than $1 trillion and growing. Here’s the guy who promised to go over every budget item line-by-line during the campaign, and didn’t do that or even give anyone a chance to read the bill.
Here’s a guy who cheered on a bill so full of pork and pet projects that it would make even the masters of pork and special interest legislation blush. Someone should ask, “Mr. President, why didn’t you call out yourself?”
But in $1 trillion stimulus law (with interest) overflowing with pork and pet projects, he keeps saying that there is no pork in the law. He thinks saying it makes it so. That’s what you think when you suffer from the talking disease.
When I was still in school, I once worked as a pork packer in one of the big packinghouses in Omaha, Neb., and I can assure you I know pork when I see it. When Rep. Nancy “San Francisco Values” Pelosi put the stimulus package together for President Obama, she must have had a platoon of pork packers at work for her.
But in a way the two examples of the talking disease discussed above perhaps show only the hypocrisy, the incompetence, the ignorance, the naiveté and the phoniness of the Obama administration. But sometimes the consequences of the talking disease are even more serious.
Take President Obama’s eagerness to negotiate with every genocidal, murderous, tyrant starting with Iran. That’s when the talking disease gets dangerous and that’s when I first encountered that term, “talking cure,” in an article, “Obama’s Talking Cure,” by Joshua Muravchik in Commentary Magazine (September 2008) that discussed Obama’s approach to Iran, thinking that would somehow solve the problem. He concluded, after a careful review of other attempts to negotiate with tyrants, that the talking cure doesn’t cure, but only causes complications and deadly side effects.
It’s clear that negotiating with Iran is just a waste of time and merely gives them more time to develop a nuclear bomb. John Bolton, in his writings, has clearly demonstrated that the talking cure won’t work on Iran, and it is folly to try. What’s worse, in addition to merely affording them more time to produce their bomb that will threaten world security, it also lends credibility to this rogue regime.
This again shows where the talking disease takes you. And if the mainstream media had vetted President Obama, they would have discovered another reason he is so susceptible to the folly of the talking disease. In one of his books containing his quotations, he says he knows that if given a chance, he can convince anyone of the validity of his position.
He really thinks he can talk these genocidal madmen in Iran out of their plans, which involve their most basic worldview and religious beliefs. He’s on a fool’s errand, and doesn’t have a clue. Maybe the mainstream media have convinced him he really is the Messiah.
And here’s another example of the talking cure becoming even more unattractive and dangerous. Mr. Obama has decided to participate for now in the work leading up to the U.N.’s so-called Durban II conference, scheduled for April 2009.
Durban II is designed to carry forward the work of Durban I. At Durban I, there was a call for curbs on freedom of expression to have critical discussions of Islam. Durban I, in the words of Carolyn B. Glick, the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., also “called for a coordinated international campaign aimed at delegitimizing Israel and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination.” It also belittled the Holocaust.
But President Obama is so eager to talk to the people at the conference that he sends a representative to the planning sessions for Durban II. There he clearly sides with the genocidal enemies of America and Israel, and puts the U.S.’s credibility on the side of bigotry and denial of free speech. In the process President Obama becomes an ally of those waging war on America and Israel.
Here’s what the U.S. is doing at those planning sessions. The Palestinian delegation proposed a paragraph to the agenda of the conference that “calls for implementation of the advisory opinion of the ICJ [International Court of Justice] on the wall [i.e., Israel’s security fence] and the international protection of Palestinian people throughout the occupied Palestinian territory.”
Ms. Glick reports that the U.S. raised no objection to that propos al. So, in Ms. Glick’s words, this is what that U.S. approval signed onto: “Issued in 2004, the ICJ’s advisory opinion on Israel’s security fence claimed that Israel has no right to self-defense against Palestinian terrorism. At the time, both the U.S. and Israel rejected the ICJ’s authority to issue an opinion on the subject … By not objecting to this Palestinian draft, not only did the U.S. effectively accept the ICJ’s authority, for practical purposes it granted the anti-Israel claim that Jews may be murdered with impunity.”
Ms. Glick cites many other examples of how President Obama’s decision to participate and talk in the planning of Durban II, means the U.S. has lent its credibility to the war against Israel and the Jews and to the bigotry of Durban I, which is scheduled to be repeated at Durban II.
The Obama administration defends its decision to talk at Durban II, with these words from an Obama spokesman, “If you are not engaged, you don’t have a voice.”
But it is clear that the U.S., with all its engagement and talking can’t bring about change as the Durban meeting is dominated by Arab and Third World countries which will adhere to their plans. They will not be persuaded by more Obama sweet talk.
So when I say the talking disease can be dangerous think of Durban II and how the United States, by talking in the wrong place at the wrong time, is striking a blow against free speech, is legitimizing the war against Israel and is undermining our own historic foreign policy.
The more I see President Obama in action, the more I think I should add incompetence to the usual list of adjectives and nouns I pin on him: hypocrite, fraud, phony, radical, hyper-liberal leftist, to name a few.
That’s what I said dozens of times during the presidential campaign and I’m sorry to report that President Obama is proving my appraisal was right. When you elect, a highly partisan, radical, leftist, with a history of associations with anti-Americans, terrorists, and bigots, don’t expect a George Washington, an Abe Lincoln, or an FDR to suddenly come forth after the inauguration. And don’t expect a Messiah either.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
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