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By Weldon Berger, on October 22nd, 2011
I just completed a frank exchange of views with a devout Obama supporter who believes her president is curbing his liberal impulses from respect for the views of the losing voters on the right (they did lose, didn’t they?) and in order to establish a dynamic in which subsequent right-wing presidents will moderate their own ambitions from respect for Obama’s example and the voters who support it.
Well. Not exactly her president. She’s Canadian, although also Floridian. Hot Sun Bakes Canadian Brain. In the end we agreed that when Rick Perry invades Iran in five years after taking office by winning 45% of the popular vote, I will deserve to be drafted and sent off to fight and presumably die in that war because I think Democrats should pursue big projects like universal health care, the cramming of which down American throats led George W. Bush to invade Iraq. Damn you, Harry Truman!
Continue reading Let’s trade Obama to Canada for players to be named later
By Weldon Berger, on October 14th, 2011
If you were to set out building a fantasy Bad Foreign Policy team, one that could reliably saddle you with the most foul, murderous foreign policy disasters imaginable, the place you would want to start is here, at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). That’s what the Bush administration did, staffing their foreign policy and national security establishments with signatories to the now-dormant organization’s statement of principles.
Continue reading The case for invading Iraq: Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team is on it
By Weldon Berger, on September 18th, 2011
All of your woes can be traced to that one moment of missed opportunity.
President Obama said the day of the 9/11 anniversary that in the decade following the 9/11 attacks, Americans have preserved our values and our character. He’s right. America’s history is of a whiny, over-privileged, self-aggrandizing and self-victimizing bully, and the decade since 9/11 has been clarifying.
Continue reading If you really loved America, you would have died on 9/11
By Weldon Berger, on August 27th, 2011
Yesterday I wrote this somewhat carefully considered thing about how Obama’s reelection prospects aren’t as bad as a lot of people think because he’ll have many boatloads of money and the only official GOP candidates who aren’t too obviously insane to win in the general election are saddled with a Mormon problem that will probably doom them in the primaries. That could change, but so far none of the Republicans who don’t have those problems seem to think they can win, so they’re not running.
What never occurred to me is that Obama might run on his record; I just assumed he would run a two-pronged effort to paint Republicans as the slavering sociopaths they are while he proposes popular legislation that he can’t and probably doesn’t want to get passed. I forget that some people still take him seriously, and that presumably he and his staff do as well.
Continue reading So, well, okay: Maybe Obama really is toast.
By Weldon Berger, on August 25th, 2011
Barack Obama has two huge disadvantages going into the 2012 election: The economy and the economy. He also has two huge advantages: The Republicans and the Republicans. Despite the administration’s addiction to neoliberal crack, economic conditions could, possibly, in a perfect world, by accident, improve before the election; the Republicans can’t, and they’re what’s driving the Obama fundraising machine so far.
Make that three advantages: Few of his potential supporters seem to care much about his militarism—imagine the infuriated cries of liberals had George Bush been the president who decided to exclude the (no doubt furiously protested) bombing of Libya, and hence future air campaigns against whichever states are pissing him off, from Congressional oversight the way Obama did—or his national security excesses, or his refusal to prosecute even publicly confessed war criminals, or that he claims the right to execute Americans without due process. Turns out Democrats aren’t much different than Republicans when it comes to forgiving the hypocrisies and sins of their own. So all is well on that front.
Continue reading Time, God and a billion in the bank: Why Obama’s prospects aren’t so bad
By Weldon Berger, on July 19th, 2011
“Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”
– Max Boot
Max Boot is my favorite neoconservative. He is completely unfamiliar with the concept of shame and like the rest of his clan he won’t ever flinch when it comes time to put somebody else’s life on the line. Anyone whose conscience survives initiation into that club soon gets voted out.
Where Max really shines is as a polemicist. He’s a good writer. He can turn a juicy phrase like few others. That one above, his juiciest ever—and I know writers, I know he looked at it and thought to himself, “damn, I am good …”—went into a piece he wrote for the Weekly Standard not long after September 11.
Continue reading What Max Boot learned about Libya from Afghanistan and Iraq
By Weldon Berger, on July 16th, 2011
A few days ago I wrote about a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by former Microsoft COO Bob Herbold, who had recently returned from a visit to China. Herbold was enthused by the strides that country is making toward building a modern infrastructure and investing in technology development and scientific research. The lesson he took away from China’s progress is that the US needs to deal with “the burden of entitlements”—no surprise, coming from the Journal’s editorial pages—and elect a unified government capable of emulating China’s five-year plans. He expressed admiration for China’s own government, saying that “[t]he autocratic Chinese leadership gets things done fast (currently the autocrats seem to be highly effective).”
Herbold is far from the only person who dreams of a unity government and has access to opinion pages. New York Times doofus Tom Friedman reliably calls for a gridlock-shattering third party representing the massive Tom Friedman segment of the electorate, although he stops short of recommending dictatorial powers for Michael Bloomberg or whichever “centrist” plutocrat/daddy figure he thinks can crack the whip over a fractious Congress and impose the grownup agenda favored by wealthy columnists across the land. (Particularly entertaining was his insistence that Bloomberg couldn’t be influenced by money because he already has most of it.)
Continue reading Moving closer to one-party right-wing rule
By Weldon Berger, on November 21st, 2010
Actually it’s just the one, former president George H. W. Bush, who is a far less egregious choice than his son would have been, but in general, were one’s advice to have been asked, it would have been that the less said about former presidents of the past three decades or so, the better. . . . → Read More: The Robot Pundits address Obama’s Medal of Freedom recipients
By Weldon Berger, on August 26th, 2010
Is Barack Obama a Christian? a Muslim? an Etruscan vase given life and human form by some forgotten Egyptian deity? Well, whatever.
I’m not religious about my atheism, and I have no particular quarrel with religious people other than the ones who show up uninvited on my stoop, and even then I feel no . . . → Read More: “Let he who is without sin,” yadayadayada
By Weldon Berger, on August 1st, 2010
UPDATE:Since I wrote this post arguing that if a Republican president had done some of the things Obama is doing, then liberals would be hot off the mark in calling for his impeachment, the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights have gone to court to sue for their right to represent the only known . . . → Read More: If Obama were Republican, liberals would be demanding impeachment
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Word of the Decade Ignoranus: An ignorant asshole.
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