Category Archives: Obama

by Barry Kelly | September 9, 2014 · 7:30 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 149

THE GOP NEEDS TRANSFORMING

Is America in trouble? I think so.

How did it happen?

Well, you cannot blame President Obama for everything that’s happened under his watch. The Republican Party insider group is also guilty. The House of Representatives has the total Constitutional power to appropriate money. Everything the progressives have done with Obama’s leadership had to be funded. The government runs on money, our money. The House is supposed to be the place funding requests begin.

Where has it been? Republicans did not provide a single vote to the passing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Yet they funded every bit of its implementation. Obamacare couldn’t have survived just on the funds that were appropriated when it was passed. The government had to pay for all the overruns, including the rollout. Instead of providing good stewardship of our money, the Republican leadership whined and complained about President Obama’s executive orders and the greatly increased scope and power of the HHS, EPA, IRS, DOJ, and Labor Department but was afraid to use its appropriation to bring Obama’s transforming of America to a near stop.

When they did try to bring Obama’s spending under control by refusing to raise the debt limit unless the president delayed a part of the ACA, the president refused to sign the appropriations legislation with the Republican amendment to raise the debt ceiling. He then began shutting down the parts of the government that would dramatically affect citizens, parts that could have been easily funded. Congress offered to help with authorization by allowing the president to shift funds to where they were needed. He refused and cleverly and successfully passed the blame onto the Republicans for shutting down the government. Not only did the American people accept the blatant blame shift, so did the Republican leadership. Now the speaker of the House and the Senate minority leader are afraid to use their Constitutional powers to defund certain parts of federal spending. With an opposition as timid and as inept as the current Republican leadership, we cannot look to them to act as a check on the growth of the federal government and spending.

The Republican Party leadership in and out of government is afraid to rock the boat. None of them would have signed the Declaration of Independence. (That is my yardstick for judging the courage of politicians.) In my state of South Carolina, several politicians and Republican leaders would have signed. Among them are Representative Joe Wilson, Senator DeMint, now the President of the Heritage Foundation, Governor Nikki Haley, Senator Tim Scott, and Representative Trey Gowdy. It is this kind of courage that is needed.

President Reagan believed that “Government isn’t the answer. Government is the problem.” Of all the threats we face today, big government is the biggest threat to our freedom and economic growth. The Republican insider group just doesn’t believe this. While the size of government has grown spectacularly under President Obama, conservatives must remember that the eight years of President Bush saw large increases in the size and scope of government. Term limits would fix a lot of problems with the Congress.

Written by the author of “Insights: Transforming America — Is This What We Fought For?” available now as an ebook, in paperback or hardcover on Amazon.com or BN.com. Follow the author on Twitter @factsfictions80. If you think this message is important, please share it.

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Filed under Barry Kelly, centralization, Conservative views, Intelligence & Politics, Obama, Obamacare, political solutions, Presidential Debate

Tagged as Bush, Congress, government, Obamacare, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, president reagan, Progressive, Republicans

by Barry Kelly | September 6, 2014 · 7:32 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 151

POLICY TO DEFEAT ISIS

Outlining a policy to defeat ISIS is not hard. Implementing the policy is much harder, especially when the government is run by a bunch of radical left wing lawyers and ideologues.

To begin, the president needs to recognize the problem. It is not workplace violence as the Obama administration stills labels the murder of soldiers at Fort Hood by a radical Islamist shouting Muslim slogans. With that mindset, this administration will never defeat ISIS with a law and order approach or a “management approach.” Wars are not won by lawyers spouting law and order sound bites: “We’ll bring them to justice.”

What kind of insanity is that? We need to destroy them with our military power. Our warriors need to be in charge of the battle. Keep the lawyers out.

Speaking of lawyers, who do you think has made it mandatory to ship all our weapons to the Kurds through the Shiite government in Baghdad? It has to be the Obama lawyer group. The government in Baghdad is useless. They are and have been a Shiite-dominated government. They are not going to pass weapons on to the Kurds. They don’t want the Kurds to have effective weapons. They have no intentions of helping the Kurds establish a Kurdish nation. And the Kurds will not again put themselves under a Shiite government in Baghdad or anywhere else. The Obama administration has lied again to Congress and the people. The Kurds are not, repeat not, receiving weapons to defend themselves and perform as “boots on the ground” in their area.

Our legalistic Obama administration just can’t grasp the fact that Iraq is no longer a nation. The American troops in Baghdad are primarily there to defend the embassy. For we are still pretending Iraq is a nation that we should continue to recognize and support. Baghdad will fall and the American embassy will be another R&R facility for the victors. Our second policy principle must be recognition that the borders in Iraq, drawn by the Western powers after WWI, are gone. Kurdistan has all the ingredients of nationhood and should be recognized and supported. The enemy does not recognize the border between Syria and Iraq. It is meaningless unless you are an Obama lawyer or diplomat. Our military and political efforts to defeat ISIS must ignore the old border.

The third principle is that we once had a working relationship with the Sunni tribal leaders. That relationship needs to be re-established. We will need to convince the Sunnis that we will keep our word and support them in their own autonomous region, independent of the Shiite government. They will fight for their own land, if supported with U.S. weapons and Special Forces operatives. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, and the Gulf States will support a Sunni homeland in what was part of Iraq. The lawyers will never support this shift. Therefore, it is time for President Obama to surrounded himself with operatives who have a grasp of the real world, instead of the ideologues now occupying the White House.

The fourth policy principle is the president must turn over the management of the war to the Defense Department. If he keeps the White House legal team, the UN, and the State Department out of the war business, we can defeat ISIS. John Kerry always makes everything he touches worse and the Obama lawyers and ideologues have absolutely no real-world experience. The UN has no love for America and is useless in serious peace keeping operations.

I do not expect the Obama administration to leave their progressive ideology to adopt these sensible principles. But they should!

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Filed under Barry Kelly, Conservative views, Eight Decades of Insights, foreign policy, Intelligence & Politics, Kurds, Obama, Shiite, Sunni

Tagged as current-events, iraq, ISIS, Islam, Middle East, military, Progressives, White House

by Barry Kelly | September 3, 2014 · 7:30 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 146

CLIMATE CONTROL SCAM

Climate control is one of the biggest scams in history. Even if you are arrogant and naive enough to believe people cause climate change, you don’t want any part of this international scam. Forget for a moment, you who are non-believers in the myth of humans causing change, the simple truths that climate does change, has changed, and will change. Also imagine that some prehistoric people emitted enough greenhouse gas to melt the deep glaciers of the ice age. You must also isolate natural causes like volcanoes, forest fires, methane gas leaks, meteor strikes, changes in the radiation from the sun, and small shifts in the earth’s orbit. Having ruled all those possible causes out, we now have an iron-clad case that humans are the cause of climate change, not cooling, but warming.

The president’s plan to attack this critical problem is still a scam. His proposal of levying a carbon tax on America and some places in Western Europe is simply another progressive ideological part of Obama’s core beliefs. It is a wealth distribution plan to further turn America into just another member of the United Nations subject primarily to international law. Taxing American industry as the biggest user of carbon-based fuel and distributing the collected taxes to those who burn little or no carbon fuel in their industries, especially if they have no industry. China and India, two other huge consumers of carbon fuels will pay no taxes because they know it is a scam and will not sign the treaty. They don’t see any gain in sending their wealth to other nations just to equalize wealth. Somewhere they missed the progressive, socialist, or communist requirement that all nations and people must strive to equalize the playing field by mandatory distribution of wealth, personal or national.

Ask yourself why any president with critical problems on the domestic front as well as those of national security and foreign policy, would bring up climate change now. Maybe he needed some misdirection and this issue, income distribution internationally, is very important to him and his progressive ideology. No matter the reason, it is outside what any previous president would bring up at a time like this with all the critical problems facing the nation. Very strange to say the least.

There is another reason President Obama wants to approve this treaty by executive order. There is no way he could get a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Even though John Kerry strongly supports climate control, only the far left fringe would vote today for a climate control treaty. The founders called for a two-thirds Senate vote to approve treaties to keep any group of fanatics from burdening the nation with bad treaties. Unfortunately, there is no founder’s provision to protect us from lunatic executive orders, except the ballot box.

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 147

A MAGIC TELEPROMPTER

http://www.frontpagemag.com

Our president talks the talk better than any modern-age politician. But that is it. Walk the walk never follows.

He seems to believe words do not need to be followed up by actions. By some magic, the teleprompter follows up with more words that are delivered passionately with a choir of adoring acolytes standing behind him taking in every word. These people also believe President Obama’s words are complete in themselves. No action is required. Putin, the Ayatollahs, Syrian President Asad, ISIS, China, Iraqi Prime Ministers, all will fall in line once the King has spoken.

Maybe it worked that way a long time ago in make-believe land, but not in this cruel, hard, beautiful world we live in. It is incredible a two-term president who has a Harvard law degree can stand on his podium with a straight face and watch the words flow off the teleprompter believing he has handled whatever the crisis was. Does he believe he has a magic teleprompter that converts words into actions?

When questioned about where is the presidential action, his puppets speak with one voice, with great patience, and in a condescending manner refer the rude questioner back to what the president said. It is wonderful to watch the expression on the questioner’s face — “Did I hear what I thought I heard?” — and so on until the next magical speech like the one he gave recently to the American Legion. Here, he promised a number of executive orders to improve the life of veterans needing assistance. There is nothing wrong with the executive orders, except, if he can do that with his pen why wait until now. Didn’t he know the Veterans Administration was in deep trouble over the deceitful ways it covered up its failure to help veterans? Don’t worry, the teleprompter will reach out and fix all wrongs. The imperial president has spoken.

The magical teleprompter won’t be able to fix the real problem of the president’s deliberate down-sizing of the Armed Forces. The teleprompter can’t do away with battalions of terrorists, or an increasingly aggressive China, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, or Putin’s plan to re-constitute the Soviet Empire. At times it seems Putin also has a magic teleprompter. Probably built one with the information Snowden stole from NSA.

How can a sane person stand in front of a audience of veterans and cast out promises of a better life for warriors when he is firing them and sending them back to an economy that has no jobs for them when the world grows more dangerous by the day? The teleprompter, in its best voice, implied American soldiers were responsible for the world troubles we are facing today because of their long occupation of other countries. Maybe he never heard of America’s role in two world wars or the Marshall Plan to give the European economy a new start. A world without America would be very different and not for the better. Does leaving some U.S. force level in Iraq look like a bad option now?

President Obama is stuck with his teleprompter in a pro-Muslim, anti-American mindset where the only solution is to destroy American military and economic power so wealth can be shared with the third world nations we have prevented from equal development and prosperity. All words, but very dangerous words because his inaction and failure to maintain a strong military force level equipped with advanced weapons will lead to the destruction of this great Republic. The only applause will be from radical Islamists.

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 145

RESIST OR RESIGN OR BOTH?

The president, as commander-in-chief, directs the activities of the Defense Department. The secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs advise the president and send him recommendations. We all know that. Civilian rule over the military is a long-established and necessary doctrine. But what happens when the commander-in-chief is not capable of developing defense policy and providing the leadership to implement the policy? Are the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs still required to follow presidential guidance? The answer is a clear yes. We have a thing called the ballot box that settles who is our commander-in-chief.

President Barack Obama announces former Senator Chuck Hagel, second from left, as his nominee for Secretary of Defense. Photo by Matt Compton, from whitehouse.gov.

But that doesn’t mean that General Dempsey and the secretary of defense are powerless to resist dangerous policies or can’t argue forcefully against presidential (commander-in-chief) orders. We have a president who, to my memory, has not been right in a single foreign or military issue. His decisions always put his politics and image ahead of what professionals think/know is best for the nation. Just review the mess in Libya with Gaddafi’s regime looking better every day since he was ousted and central control over Libya vanished, ending up with Benghazi and weapons flowing to radical Islamic groups though out the Middle East and Africa. The president’s inability to see the world as it is has led to a dangerous situation in the Ukraine as Putin takes advantage of the absence of American power and resolve. The famous disappearing redline in Syria, the failure to aid moderate Islamic forces to overthrow Asad, the vacillation over the reformation of the Iraqi government, the plans to drastically reduce the armed forces, the constantly televised presidential statements telling our enemies what we will not do and when we are leaving the theater are some critical examples. It is too late for the moderate secular Muslims have now been killed or absorbed into ISIS.

Dempsey and Hagel have had ample opportunity to judge the effectiveness and wisdom of their commander-in-chief. Some of their statements indicate they disagree with President Obama. Even if their refreshingly strong recent statements are walked back within a day or so, it might be a start. They are required to follow President Obama’s lead by our founding documents but they also took an oath to defend America and its people. If they cannot convince the president to change or modify his orders, both need to resign and take their case to Congress and the public. They have a duty to do so. But maybe they think they are indispensable or that by remaining in office they are preventing a bad situation from getting worse. Or do they just want to keep their prestigious positions and titles? I hope both of these men who have honorably served their country will choose the right path.

At the very least they need to stop the disintegration of the Armed Forces back to pre-World War II levels and to invest in developing new weapons to ensure America’s ability to defend itself and its allies. Congress will cooperate, they know peace comes through strength. War thrives on weakness. Every historian, except those with a progressive political agenda, will agree.