What Obama finds humbling

Favorite part of last night's press conference:

Q: What has humbled the new president in his first 100 days?

Humbled by the — humbled by the fact that the presidency is extraordinarily powerful, but we are just part of a much broader tapestry of American life, and there are a lot of different power centers. And so I can’t just press a button and suddenly have the bankers do exactly what I want or, you know, turn on a switch and suddenly, you know, Congress falls in line.

He's humbled to discover that he doesn't wield absolute power. Dang.

(Does he know what "humbled" means? Perhaps he's got it confused with "disappointed.")

Deliver us, O Lord.

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Rationing healthcare to the 'temporarily alive'

Kid from Brooklyn agrees with Krauthammer: Obama is preparing the ground for the rationing of medical services, and the weak, the chronically ill, the elderly, and the dying will be its victims. Obama's recent remarks leave no doubt:

THE PRESIDENT: Exactly. And I just recently went through this. I mean, I’ve told this story, maybe not publicly, but when my grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she got cancer; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip. It was determined that she might have had a mild stroke, which is what had precipitated the fall.

So now she’s in the hospital, and the doctor says, Look, you’ve got about — maybe you have three months, maybe you have six months, maybe you have nine months to live. Because of the weakness of your heart, if you have an operation on your hip there are certain risks that — you know, your heart can’t take it. On the other hand, if you just sit there with your hip like this, you’re just going to waste away and your quality of life will be terrible.

And she elected to get the hip replacement and was fine for about two weeks after the hip replacement, and then suddenly just — you know, things fell apart.

I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting.

Q: And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.

THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

Q: So how do you — how do we deal with it?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

He puts the question in sentimental terms -- "upsetting"-- rather than in moral terms: that his grandmother's life has just as much intrinsic value as his, even though it has been "determined" that she's "terminal." "Upsetting" places the situation in Obama's "tough decision" category. He uses that phrase when he's about to stick it to someone.

When it comes to human life, Obama takes a utilitarian point of view. He measures the value of a baby's life by the legal implications rescuing it might create. May God save us from the kind of "independent group" his administration will create to decide for us who is worthy, and under what circumstances would continuing medical care constitute throwing good money after bad.

Don't forget that for Obama, some people are merely temporarily alive.

Please read Kid from Brooklyn's comments. An excerpt:

Allow me to cut through the sales pitch and translate: We’re gonna ration. Dude, if end-of-life and chronic care is 80% of the bill, and you’re looking to cut costs, isn’t that the first place you’d look to cut? I don’t see any other possible justification for a “difficult democratic conversation”, and I don’t think Obama’s vision of “guidance” is similar to mine. His kind of “guidance” is currently on display with TARP, GM, and Chrysler. Congressional Democrats aren’t looking to cram socialized healthcare through budget reconciliation just to give themselves “not-determinative guidance”.

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Maybe you should get married

And maybe sooner rather than later. That suggestion from a sociologist who has studied the subject.

*Scroll down for updates.

There's been chatter in the blogosphere of late about the benefits of marriage and babies. RS McCain takes a radical view and proposes that marrying young is a good thing, and that Christians might want to take the words "be fruitful and multiply" to heart. My response here.

Now, from yesterday's Washington Post, a secular argument for earlier marriage: Say Yes. What Are You Waiting For? by Mark Regnerus. (On the same page is an account of the decision to marry 'early' -- age 26 -- from an editor of Self magazine. More on that below.)

Excerpts from Mr. Regnerus:

First, what is considered "early marriage" by social scientists is commonly misunderstood by the public. The best evaluations of early marriage -- conducted by researchers at the University of Texas and Penn State University -- note that the age-divorce link is most prominent among teenagers (those who marry before age 20). Marriages that begin at age 20, 21 or 22 are not nearly so likely to end in divorce as many presume. . . .

Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you're fully formed. We learn marriage, just as we learn language, and to the teachable, some lessons just come easier earlier in life. . . .

My wife and I married at 22 with nothing to our name but a pair of degrees and some dreams. We enjoy recounting those days of austerity, and we're still fiscal conservatives because of it, better poised to weather the current crisis than many, because marriage is an unbelievably efficient arrangement and the best wealth-creating institution there is. Married people earn more, save more and build more wealth compared with people who are single or cohabiting. (Say what you will about the benefits of cohabitation, it's a categorically less stable arrangement, far more prone to division than marriage.) We can combine incomes while reducing expenses such as food, child care, electricity, gas and water usage. Marriage may be bourgeois, but it's also the greenest of all social structures. Michigan State ecologists estimate that the extra households created by divorce cost the nation 73 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and more than 600 billion gallons of water in a year. That's a mighty big carbon footprint created in the name of solitude. Marriage may not make you rich -- that's not its purpose -- but a biblical proverb reveals this nifty side effect: "Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work."

There's a great deal of social pressure on young women to wait and wait:

Sara, a 19-year-old college student from Dallas, equated thinking about marrying her boyfriend with staging a rebellion. Her parents "want my full attention on grades and school because they want me to get a good job," she told me. Understandable. But our children now sense that marrying young may be not simply foolish but also wrong and socially harmful. And yet today, as ever, marriage wisely entered into remains good for the economy and the community, good for one's personal well-being, good for wealth creation and, yes, good for the environment, too. We are sending mixed messages.

More on this in the aforementioned column by Erin Hobday.

If age 26 is considered young in her circle, let's say that marrying between age 30 and 35 is considered average by these educated young women. In this scenario, after 10-15 years of contracepting, the not-so-young woman tries to turn her fertility back on. When this doesn't work as well as the couple hopes, they consult Dr. Frankenstein, who may or may not be able to help them obtain the child they're now so desperate to have. Does it not strike you as ironic when this story ends with the placement of the treasured child in full-time daycare? Just for the record, I hate daycare. I think it's bad for kids. And just for fun, here's a poem about marriage.

*Update: May I direct your attention to RS McCain's post about Jessica Valenti's book, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women. Here's one awesome quote:

Common-sense observations about human nature are now politicized as "conservative," so that every knocked-up 15-year-old can be said to be engaged in liberal activism and her baby-daddy is a "community organizer" of sorts.

And another:

Dishonest writers like Valenti seek mainstream acceptance of their ideology by expressing it in mild language that won't offend the soccer moms. The critic who distills their argument to its radical essence -- as is my wont -- will naturally be denounced as an extremist. Which I suppose is true in the sense that it takes one to know one. But one cannot be moderate in the discussion of virtue, which allows no compromise.

One is virtuous or one is not, and while I have never claimed to be a paragon of virtue, I can at least distinguish between virtue and vice. And must, lest I incur the ancient curse:

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil . . . -- Isaiah 5:20 KJV

A perverse non-judgmentalism, that refuses to praise virtue or condemn vice, is moral nihilism. Valenti goes beyond this, to celebrate whoredom and condemn chastity.

**Welcome, Creative Minority readers. For other topics of interest, see labels on lower left sidebar.

***John Derbyshire quotes Dr. Johnson on marrying young:

I believe it will be found that those who marry late are best pleased with their children, and those who marry early with their partners.

****Ramesh Ponnuru takes comments on the Regnerus article here.

*****RS McCain continues the discussion here, including links to those who disagree.

******Here's an interconnected chain of posts on marrying early: Elizabeth Foss, Rebecca Teti, and Frederica Mathewes-Green. The first two are from last fall and the third is from 2005.

Provocative thoughts from Mathewes-Green:

In fact, I have a theory that late marriage contributes to an *increased* divorce rate. During those lingering years of unmarried adulthood, young people may not be getting married, but they’re still falling in love. They fall in love, and break up, and undergo terrible pain, but find that with time they get over it. This is true even if they remain chaste. By the time these young people marry they may have had many opportunities to learn how to walk away from a promise. They’ve been training for divorce.

Late marriage means fighting God’s design for our bodies, and that’s never a fight we can win. My hobbyhorse in the project of restoring a viable idea of adulthood is to encourage finding ways to support and enable young marriage. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece detailing some recommendations for this, which I gave the intentionally shocking title, "Let’s have more teen pregnancy."

And from Elizabeth Foss, pure anecdotal support for marrying young:

This year, I've been married half my life--the better half, by far. I know the boy my husband was and I was there, holding his hand, as he became a man. We have history together and sometimes, it's history that gets you through the rough patches. We also had energy and youth and--frankly--hormones on our side in those early days of growing. Now, I think that perhaps the habits of affection step in and take over when energy and youth and hormones fail. We know each other. We know what works and what doesn't. It's not perfect. We still have rough patches, but time has always been on our side.

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Obama's manipulation dream team and the power of the default option

*Updated: After reading this TIME article I feel I have a deeper understanding of Obama, his methods, and his goals.

From TIME: Obama is using a team of behaviorists to manipulate Americans.

Behaviorism was invented for the training of animals. Now it's used to raise children and manipulate spouses. And our fearless leader is deliberately using it to consolidate his power, advance his agenda, and create new social norms. This should give you a serious case of the creeps:

Two weeks before Election Day, Barack Obama's campaign was mobilizing millions of supporters; it was a bit late to start rewriting get-out-the-vote (GOTV) scripts. "BUT, BUT, BUT," deputy field director Mike Moffo wrote to Obama's GOTV operatives nationwide, "What if I told you a world-famous team of genius scientists, psychologists and economists wrote down the best techniques for GOTV scripting?!?! Would you be interested in at least taking a look? Of course you would!!"

Moffo then passed along guidelines and a sample script from the Consortium of Behavioral Scientists, a secret advisory group of 29 of the nation's leading behaviorists. The key guideline was a simple message: "A Record Turnout Is Expected." That's because studies by psychologist Robert Cialdini and other group members had found that the most powerful motivator for hotel guests to reuse towels, national-park visitors to stay on marked trails and citizens to vote is the suggestion that everyone is doing it. "People want to do what they think others will do," says Cialdini, author of the best seller Influence. "The Obama campaign really got that."

The existence of this behavioral dream team — which also included best-selling authors Dan Ariely of MIT (Predictably Irrational) and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago (Nudge) as well as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman of Princeton — has never been publicly disclosed, even though its members gave Obama white papers on messaging, fundraising and rumor control as well as voter mobilization. All their proposals — among them the famous online fundraising lotteries that gave small donors a chance to win face time with Obama — came with footnotes to peer-reviewed academic research. "It was amazing to have these bullet points telling us what to do and the science behind it," Moffo tells TIME. "These guys really know what makes people tick."

More on this from Bill Dupray of The Patriot Room, who points out that Obama understands from his manipulation team that most people don't know the difference between $100 million and $100 trillion, so telling them that you're cutting the equivalent of $1 from their family budget is conveniently misleading:

Seriously. President Obama has reportedly been working closely with noted behavioral economists, and their studies have shown that most people are “insensitive to scope,” meaning they are not very good at putting large numbers in their proper context. People will react about the same to a policy proposal whether the cost/benefit is $10 million, $10 billion, or $10 trillion. Consequently, the $100 million cut may seem huge to many voters.

But it ain't. Read the rest.

*Updated to comment more on the TIME article:

Studies of all kinds of human frailties are revealing how to help people change — not only through mandates or financial incentives but also via subtler nudges that preserve our freedom to make choices while encouraging us to make better ones, from automatic-enrollment 401(k) plans that require us to opt out if we don't want to save for retirement to smart meters that warn us about how much energy we're using. [emphasis added]

Or, to be accurate, manipulating us into making what someone else believes are "better choices."

Obama has a community organizer's appreciation for human motivation, and his rhetoric often sounds as if it's straight out of a behavioral textbook.

Obama's efforts to change us carry a clear political risk. Republicans already portray him as a nanny-state scold, an élitist Big Brother lecturing us about inflating our tires and reading to our kids. We elected a President, not a life coach, and we might not like elected officials' challenging our right to be couch potatoes.

Oh pleeze. Talk about a false dichotomy.

Obama's aides seem to favor nudges that preserve free choice over heavy-handed regulation, an approach Thaler and Sunstein, the co-authors of Nudge, call "libertarian paternalism." But it's still paternalism, and Sunstein will have the power to put it into action. The idea of public officials, even well-meaning ones, trying to engineer our private behavior to produce change can seem a bit creepy.

Only to RWE's. Author Michael Grunwald clearly isn't one of them. He embraces his new insect overlord:

But face it: Obama is right. Our emissions are boiling the planet, and most of our energy use is unnecessary. Our health expenditures are bankrupting the Treasury, and most of our visits to the doctor can be traced to unhealthy behavior. We do need to change, and we know it.

So why don't we? And how can we? The behaviorists have ideas, and the Administration is listening.

There's plenty more. It extends to the management of our money and our health and relies heavily on human passivity and laziness:

This is why default options pack such power. Most of us will save for retirement, run our computers in energy-efficient mode and be organ donors if we have to take action to say no — but not if we have to take action to say yes. Almost nobody signed up for a German utility's clean-energy plan until it became the default, and then 94% stuck with it. We're also much likelier to go to the doctor for preventive care like flu shots if the appointment is made for us. In a speech last year, Orszag even suggested charging us for doctor's appointments unless we take action to cancel, though he conceded that might sound "a little crazy at first blush or even second blush."

This is horribly insidious: a subtle extension of the nanny state where numerous decisions are pre-made and pre-packaged for us, and the exact opposite of what it once meant to be an American: independent-minded and self-determining.

More along these lines is heading our way. The Administration hopes to harness our inertia with its automatic pension plan, a major step toward universal savings accounts, and by dramatically simplifying applications for federal tuition aid. Its push to computerize health-care records — another big-ticket stimulus item — could make generic drugs and cost-effective procedures our default treatments. And seniors who don't select health-care or drug plans could be automatically enrolled in low-cost options. "It would be nice if we all behaved like supercomputers, but that's not how we are," Orszag says.

"Creating social norms":

But Obama is no therapist changing individuals one at a time. He's an organizer trying to build community and inspire collective action through house parties and Facebook as well as rhetoric about shared values. In other words, he's trying to create social norms — behavioral change's killer app.

Social norms help explain the attraction of opt-out 401(k)s as well: it's not just that we're too lazy to check a box but also that we assume the default is the accepted thing to do.

Grunwald is drunk on the messiah's koolaid and awaits Obama's brave new world with bated breath:

It would be nice if Obama could change our social norms so that green living and healthy eating and financial responsibility would be new ways of keeping up with the Joneses. But it would be enough if he changed Washington's social norms. We need better policies, not better attitudes.

Behavioral literature can be a depressing window on human folly. But it offers us ways to transcend our folly, to restrain our ids, to harness our conformity and inertia and weakness in order to do less of the things that hurt us and our country. "In the physical world, we understand our limitations," Ariely says. "Nobody gets upset because we can't fly. We just design something to help us fly." If Obama can help us fly from our bad habits, he'll provide the change we need.

Obama and company hope to make use of the weaknesses of human nature to engineer an American life lived by default. May God have mercy on us.


h/t: Pundit

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Georgetown covers Catholic symbol for Obama

Wow. This is pretty extreme. But our expectations for Georgetown (and its fellow pseudo-Catholic institutions) and for the Obama administration were already low.

Georgetown covers Christian symbols for Obama visit

Georgetown University says it covered over the monogram “IHS”--symbolizing the name of Jesus Christ—because it was inscribed on a pediment on the stage where President Obama spoke at the university on Tuesday and the White House had asked Georgetown to cover up all signs and symbols there. . . .

“In coordinating the logistical arrangements for yesterday’s event, Georgetown honored the White House staff’s request to cover all of the Georgetown University signage and symbols behind Gaston Hall stage,” Julie Green Bataille, associate vice president for communications at Georgetown, told CNSNews.com.

“The White House wanted a simple backdrop of flags and pipe and drape for the speech, consistent with what they’ve done for other policy speeches,” she added. “Frankly, the pipe and drape wasn’t high enough by itself to fully cover the IHS and cross above the GU seal and it seemed most respectful to have them covered so as not to be seen out of context.” [emphasis added]

Yes, by all means, keep Christianity in context. That's some strong faith you've got going on over there at Georgetown!
What will happen at Notre Dame? Will they have to temporarily change their name for the big visit? (Betcha ten bucks Obama doesn't know what 'Notre Dame' means.)


h/t: Charlotte F&C

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Rasmussen: socialism vs. capitalism

Rasmussen: Only 53% of Americans believe capitalism is better than socialism

It's the under-30 crowd that is most confused. I'm not the least surprised by this. Over and over during the presidential campaign I heard Americans on talk radio ask, "What's wrong with socialism? What's the matter with the way they do things in France, or Canada?" I've tried to write posts about it but have done a poor job of trying to explain to a hypothetical citizen just what is wrong with socialism. The bottom line is that many people frankly don't know what socialism is.

Here's part of a post I started last fall:

A civil, well-spoken woman called a conservative talk-radio show a few weeks back and asked the above question. All her life, she's been hearing that Europe is more culturally evolved and sophisticated than the U.S., and she hasn't probed beyond these assumptions. She wondered, what is so bad about France, for example?

Her question originated in the "spread the wealth" controversy brought up during the presidential campaign by Joe Wurzelbacher.

The answer she received from the host, about long waits for inferior medical care, super-high tax rates, and the injustice of turning your hard-earned pay over to the government, was all right as far as it went. But it wasn't going to break through her long-held unexamined opinions.

This woman needed to hear some of the following:

Socialism kills vitality and creativity. The nanny state, with all its entitlements, is the super-sized enabler of a dependent, malcontent, apathetic populace. Like the over-indulgent parent who is heavy on the material things but light on the time-investment that leads to real maturity and independence, socialist governments oversee populations of disaffected Peter Pans.

Why would we want to emulate Europe? I suspect many Americans, without being fully aware of it, hold on to a romanticized view of a culturally superior Europe. This image doesn't hold up to an examination of the real life in France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Spain, etc. Or Canada, so close to us but so infrequently on our radar screen. Why have conservative leaders failed to make better use of Canada as an example of the failures of socialism? Perhaps it's because there are so very few conservatives who are willing to articulate a real 'no' to socialistic policies.

One reason socialism is hard to fight is its power to co-opt people by creating a sense of entitlement in their minds. Voters who choose higher taxes and vote for the candidate who offers to take care of them have been seduced by socialism. Like the White Witch's turkish delight, it creates a desire for more and a blindness to the damage it inflicts on the human will.

Europe as we once knew it is nearly extinct. The cause of death is demographic suicide from low birthrates. Europe is not creative artistically, either. Its popular culture is mostly derived from America. Europe's scientists do not remain in Europe, but settle in the US to do their work.

Europe's people aren't happy. Socialism has sapped their vitality. Work is not rewarding. Content to let the government handle the important decisions, the people focus on entitlements and leisure, but don't gain satisfaction from them. From Mark Steyn's America Alone:

The European Union got rid of all the supposed obstacles to happiness -- war, politics, the burden of work, insufficient leisure time, tiresome dependents -- and yet their people are strikingly gloomy. (p. 110)

He cites number to back this up. Asked in 2002 if they were optimistic about the future, the following said yes: 43% of Canadians, 42% Brit's, 29% Frenchmen, 23% Russians, and 15% Germans. Contrast that to Americans, who answered 61% in the affirmative.

And there it abruptly ends.

Someone, somewhere, somehow, and it won't come from the public schools and even less from the colleges and universities, needs to educate our children on the meaning of socialism. That means parents. I haven't read it yet, but I wonder if Liberty and Tyranny might be a good tool for this effort.

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Cars and families

*Scroll down for update.

You'd have to be deeply stupid to call Mark Steyn "deeply stupid." Here he notes that even liberals are starting to take note of the problems posed by declining birth rates.

In more demography news (which I don't find boring in the least, Mark -- I love it when you speak demography), family size is seen as a function of the size of the family car.

There is a — drumroll, please — demographic element to the automobile question. Europeans often ask, "Why do Americans need those big cars?" The short answer is: Because Americans have kids and Europeans don't. So Italians and Spaniards and Germans (and Japanese) can drive around in things the size of a Chevy Suburban's cupholder because they've got nothing to put in them.

If you're a soccer mom schlepping three kids plus little Jimmy from next door around, you need a vehicle of a certain size. In the old days, you could just toss 'em all in there and they'd roll around as you took the hairpin bends in fourth gear. But now you can't stick kids in the front and you need baby seats for the youngest and booster seats for the oldest and soon nanny-state regulation will require every American under 37 to be in a rear-facing child seat, which is a pretty good metaphor for where the country's going.

That's one little example of the way bigger and bigger government, with its layer upon layer of regulations to make us safe, preempts our very vitality. As a parent I'm adamant about car seats and seat belts for my children. I would use them with or without government telling me I must, because my highest priority as a parent is in protecting my children from harm. This is my proper role. (You might ask: Would we even have seat belts if it weren't for government mandates? One could argue that consumer demand for safety might result in safe cars. Some consumers place safety ratings high on the list when they're shopping for a new car.)

When you see some of the consequences of the ever-expanding nanny state, its hard not to question the role of government as insulator from all bad things. (Am I becoming a libertarian?)

From Mark:

And, if you mandate small cars and child-seat regulations, don't be surprised if the size of the American family starts heading south, too. The difference between U.S. and European vehicles isn't an emblem of environmental irresponsibility or American corpulence but of something more basic and important.

Namely, the willingness to embrace risk in the pursuit of happiness.

Or to put it another way, human beings don't breed well in captivity.

It's really all about fear. Big government appeals to the fearful who want to believe their falls will be cushioned. We're all afraid at times. But the chronically fearful, in their attempt to avoid failure and loss, which are integral to living, will also avoid success and fulfillment.

*Marianne's family (see comments), like the P&P family, doesn't think it makes sense to let your family size be determined by the size of the car you happen to own.

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Weakness at the top

What a hollow man. Instead of real knowledge of the world and how it works, a foundation that takes years of study fueled by intellectual curiosity, our president's head is filled with slogans and prejudices. It becomes clearer every day that he's profoundly unqualified to be our Commander in Chief. Our enemies have to be seeing this, too.

These are hard times for the mothers among us:

America is no longer a Christian Nation??!! Out of the mouth of our Commander in Chief himself - in Turkey today! You can read about it here.

I'm interrupting to insert the quote here:

Obama said Monday that "one of the great strengths of the United States" is that it does not consider itself "a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values. I think modern Turkey was founded with a similar set of principles."

Who's writing this stuff? And again, are they evil or just incompetent?

Back to Marilyn:

Apparently we are a nation of citizens - don't know why but what comes to mind is Robespierre and his "citizenry" and the Reign of Terror.

I have generally been so self-controlled about not writing about politics (though you should see my drafts folder!!) - because just listening to the news gives me contractions - no kidding! Take tonight - I hear all about Dean Koh as Obama's choice for State Department lawyer - I was in shock - to see the man who is constantly criticizing the United States (comparing us to Iran and North Korea) and who favors transnationalism. Then I hear Obama giving his European speeches, putting down the US and former President Bush (I thought it was an unspoken rule, a mark of civility for Presidents not to criticize their predecessors?).. so I turned off the TV before I started hearing more about the economy or the violations of the civil rights of preborn children or the erosion of the rights of parents, or the divisions in the Catholic church that the Obama administration is exploiting...or the host of other things that the new adminstration is so intent on doing.
[. . .]
..and now to go to dinner and discuss with my children who are asking if Obama knows all about the founding fathers of this nation, and their beliefs....

Read the rest. I suspect Marilyn's kids could tell Obama a thing or two about American history. They might even know that Austrian is not a language. My twelve year old does. But El Supremo does not. Not quite the cosmopolite that was advertized.

Pundit and I had a similar reaction to this:

"We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better, including my own country," Obama said.

That reaction was HUH? Really? Such as? Michael Savage suggested Paul Anka. Beyond that I got nuthin.

Some of us are getting that Manchurian candidate vibe. I'm resisting it. But we aren't the only ones discombobulated by his rhetoric. Aljazeera carried a story, which they have since removed, declaring that Obama is a Muslim.

Whatever his religion, he's a complete mess and a lightweight when it comes to foreign policy. Listen to John Bolton. Obama is profoundly ignorant of history. He's just faking it:



Rough transcript of Bolton's remarks:

To me the most important thing was not the words that he used or the precise points he made but the attitude that it demonstrates, which is incredibly naive and simplistic, and if these are the thoughts that are rambling around in the presidential brain that's guiding our foreign policy I'm very troubled by this. This is somebody who doesn't have a kind of basic grounding not just in contemporary history but in the history of the relationship between the United States and Europe over a long period of time.

More from Mr. Bolton on Obama's lack of foundation:

VAN SUSTEREN: Is President Obama right? Ambassador Bolton is still with us. What do you think about his speech?

BOLTON: I was shocked at how poor his knowledge of history is. If he thinks tensions between Europe and the United States are of recent vintage, particularly during the Bush administration, he really needs some additional schooling.

Take it away, Sam:


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