Right Wing Nut House

We’re a month short of a year since Barack Obama took office with sky-high approval ratings and the people prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on a range of issues from the economy, to health care reform, to the environment.

I think in order to be fair, we should acknowledge that unlike George Bush, Barack Obama has tackled head on some very difficult, and divisive problems at the outset of his presidency. In contrast, looking at Bush’s situation prosaically, he got some popular legislation passed prior to 9/11 (tax cuts and No Child Left Behind) after which point his popularity rose to spectacular levels as a result of the attacks on America.

It’s easy for a president’s approval ratings to remain high if he doesn’t do anything controversial or is in office during a national security crisis. But president Obama did not have that luxury. He made a deliberate, calculated decision to tackle an economic crisis with a massive expenditure of funds, address global warming by getting the House to pass a carbon trading scheme, and tried to ram a gargantuan health care reform bill through the Congress.

We can argue the merits or demerits of what the president was attempting to do, but what is not at issue is that by addressing these controversial matters, Obama’s approval ratings were bound to drop.

But drop this far?

In December’s survey, for the first time, less than half of Americans approved of the job President Barack Obama was doing, marking a steeper first-year fall for this president than his recent predecessors.

Also for the first time this year, the electorate was split when asked which party it wanted to see in charge after the 2010 elections. For months, a clear plurality favored Democratic control.

The survey suggests that public discontent with Mr. Obama and his party is being driven by an unusually grim view of the country’s status and future prospects.

A majority of Americans believe the U.S. is in decline. And a plurality now say the U.S. will be surpassed by China in 20 years as the top power.

The president’s approval stands at 47% in this WSJ/NBC poll. That’s probably higher than it should be from the standpoint that the president is failing on a number of levels:

* The “stimulus bill,” the writing of which was outsourced to Congress, has not had the anticipated results and a majority of Americans now see it as something of a boondoggle.

* Cap and Trade/Global Warming was in trouble before Climategate with the public becoming increasingly skeptical of both the problem and the solution. Again, the president depended on his congressional lieutenants to carry the load to the point now where any action on the bill is on life support in the senate.

* Health care reform is currently in meltdown. Everybody agrees there is a problem. No one - except the president himself - likes what the process has done to the legislation. It is rare that something could get so screwed up that liberals, moderates, and conservatives can mostly agree - for different reasons - that the bill is a turkey.

It would be false to say the president hasn’t done anything right. Parts of the stim bill, like the monies for alternative energy research and development, were good and necessary expenditures of the public purse, and even parts of the health care bill address critical problems in a reasonable manner. And the president’s foreign policy record, while spotted with jaw dropping naivete in some respects, nevertheless has its good points as well.

But overall, the president simply isn’t delivering. Disaster seems to be overtaking his administration and for whatever reason, he seems powerless to halt the slide.

It could be that the issues are just too divisive, too complex to address. This would be a reflection on the current state of our politics where nuance and complexity are abandoned for sound bites and excessive partisanship. If this be the case, we are in deeper trouble than even that poll might suggest.

But I believe the president’s troubles go beyond the issues or the nasty backbiting that passes for political discourse today. I think a case can be made that the president simply isn’t demonstrating leadership. He is not convincing anyone. He is not inspiring a lot of people. His dealings with Congress are strangely docile and subdued, as if he is holding back, allowing them to take the lead.

He doesn’t appear able to use the full power of his office to get his way. And when he tries hardball - threatening Senator Nelson with the loss of Offut AFB, a key jobs generator in Nebraska for example - he overplays his hand. While he seems adequately engaged on the issues, his prescription for everything appears to be more speeches and town halls or transparent gimmicks like the “Jobs Summit.” Last weekend, he journeyed to the Hill and gave a pro-forma speech to senators - a gimmcky, useless exercise. Later in the week, he dramatically called senators to the White House only to let Rhambo read them the riot act, while the president sat by, all but disengaged from the fray.

Is this a fatal flaw in the president’s personality? We knew so little about the man before he became president that we simply couldn’t judge how his obvious leadership qualities would translate into concrete skills. Perhaps he abhors confrontation. Maybe he is getting bad advice. Whatever the cause, he better figure out a way to right the ship quickly.

With health care, the process has taken on a life of its own. Getting something, anything passed has now become the priority, and with that comes confusion and compromises. Shouldn’t the president be stepping in and drawing a line in the sand “this far and no farther?” This is what the Democratic base wants Obama to do and it is sound advice.

The process is out of control and the senate Democratic caucus is coming unglued because of it. Whether any kind of reform can get through either chamber is now up in the air with liberals taking the lead in opposing the senate bill. And with the president’s base now on the warpath, who is going to support what is clearly a flawed piece of legislation? It appears an impossible task for the president to be able to cobble together a coalition of Democrats that could make reform a reality at this point.

As the president jets off to Copenhagen - another disappointment, although the lack of any significant agreement is not his fault - he leaves behind an administration that is on the precipice of failure. Sure he has three more years to go, and he could no doubt recover enough to beat any Republican challenger in 2012.

But the high hopes and high expectations that he rode into office are fading fast, and by the time he delivers his state of the union speech, he may have to think hard about re-calibrating his priorities and perhaps even re-inventing his presidency.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome technology writer Charlie Martin and my AT colleague Larrey Anderson for a look at the confusion roiling the Copenhagen climate conference as well as the latest on health care reform.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

Last night on Hannity, Dick Cheney charged the president with heresy.

Sean Hannity: You said about Barack Obama that he is projecting weakness to America’s enemies. Expand on that.

Dick Cheney: Well, I think most of us believe and most presidents believe and talk about the truly exceptional nature of America. Our history, where we come from, our belief in our Constitutional values and principles. Our advocacy for freedom and democracy and the fact that we’ve provided it for millions of people all over the globe and so unselfishly. There’s never been a nation like the United States of America in world history. And, yet when you have a president that goes around and bows to his host and proceeds to apologize profusely for the United States, I find that deeply disturbing. That says to me there’s a guy who doesn’t fully understand or share that view of American exceptionalism that I think most of us believe in.

American Exceptionalism is our civic religion. I take a little less expansive view than Cheney of what Exceptionalism represents; that it is, at bottom the simple recognition that our founding, our evolution, certain unique character traits, and the unimaginable expanse of the land itself sets us apart from other nations.

But does it set us above others? Does it make us a “superior” nation?

I believe that it does. There has never been a nation like America in the whole history of human civilization. This doesn’t make us perfect - not by a long shot. But if one were to balance the good against the bad in all that America has done both here and abroad, the scales would tip decidedly in favor of the good.

In fact, I have argued on this site that it is this dichotomy - the mix of good and evil, slavery and freedom, selfless sacrifice for others abroad combined with grubby commercialism and exploitation - all of this together is what makes America, “America” and is unique, special, and without peer anywhere else. People the world over still line up to get in, and failing that, will do just about anything to get here legal or not. I believe that all of this places America above any other nation in history. It makes us better. It makes us superior. It makes us special.

This singular fact is so self-evident that those who deny it have to twist themselves into knots of illogic trying to debunk it, or more often, leave out inconvenient facts in order to achieve their goal of trying to prove that relative to the rest of the world, we are just another ordinary place. There has never been anything “ordinary” about America whether it be our sins or virtues. Our mistakes have been huge as have our triumphs. Destroying fascism, militarism, and Communism all in breathtaking short order, while also destroying much of Southeast Asia, Iraq, and what was left of Afghanistan must be seen in the context of our capacity to do enormous good while causing enormous suffering.

“Ordinary?” Not hardly.

In agreeing with Cheney, Ed Driscoll calls the president a “transnationalist.”

Flashback to the the preface Obama gave in April when asked by a journalist his view on the topic:

“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Which is a perfectly Clintonian “I didn’t inhale” sort of response: I’m willing to pretend, for the purposes of the more ceremonial aspects of my current position, to believe in the charade of American exceptionalism. But as a dedicated transnationalist, I’m far, far beyond such a petty antediluvian concept, myself. After all, those modern day “Greeks” and “Brits” are living on history that’s increasingly in the rearview mirror. They and plenty of other exhausted former empires believed in their own exceptionalism, and didn’t they seem awfully foolish in retrospect when their period in the sun expired, leaving behind nations a shell of their former selves — a moment I’m doing my best to engineer, myself.

Is this a fair criticism of the president? Is it even a criticism at all?

It is by no means a monolithic view on the left that the president espouses, but I think it fair to say that Obama’s transnationalism informs the views of many liberals who are suspicious of Exceptionalism as being just another word for “nationalism.” In this, it may surprise you to find out that I share those same worries. Substituting a raw chauvinism and an almost fervid religiosity with regard to our uniqueness instead of a balanced and realistic view of the pluses and minuses in our past is a danger to our politics and policy. It is this attitude that brooks no criticism of America, or her history - a form of “America: love it or leave it.”

This is Exceptionalism transmogrified by ideology. Something similar can be seen among the Noam Chomskys of the left who constantly confuse “America” with the “American government” and blame much of the world’s ills on our very existence. That too, is an ideological construct, informed by a pathological loathing of much of what the rest of us see as our virtues. Chomskyites don’t hate America as much as their Weltanschauung prevents them admitting that our arrival on the world stage should be seen as a blessing, not a curse. They can more accurately be portrayed as “anti-Exceptionalists” - the reverse image of the civic religionists.

President Obama is no ideologue on the matter of Exceptionalism. But his radically skewed idea of our history - a fault I believe he shares with many liberals - where he cherry picks and takes out of context what he considers to be our faults, is an extension of his own Nicene creed about the world order.

Indeed, since day one, the president has sought to re-engage the world on America’s behalf by walking softly, carrying no stick at all, and when he feels it appropriate, pointing to our past sins, and acknowledging that we caused problems. Little noticed when he does this is his strong, unapologetic follow up, taking his listeners to task for their knee jerk anti-Americanism. It’s almost Socratic in its dialog although I wonder how effective it is.

Not exactly “apologizing,” but at the very least, inviting his foreign audiences to draw untoward conclusions about our past - or his interpretation of that past if you prefer - while mildly remonstrating against the unreasoning hatred of America felt by many overseas makes it appear Obama wants his transnationalist cake while eating an Exceptionalist one. As we are coming to expect from the president, his Solomonic decision making process where he tries to split the difference on most issues serves the purpose of giving something for everyone while satisfying no one.

President Obama is not just an internationalist in the traditional American sense. He is seeking to re-order the world by deliberately subsuming American interests to make us “first among equals.” He is cooling the relationships with traditional allies like Great Britain and NATO, while making an ostentatious display of submitting to the will of the international community represented by the United Nations. For the moment, this has garnered him praise and support from around the world. I sincerely doubt that will last.

There will come a time in crisis where all heads will turn toward America for succor and Obama will stare blankly back, not quite believing that all of this talk about the new international order was mostly for show; that the governments of the world really do look to America to solve their problems for them come crunch time. It is here that a pragmatic belief in American Exceptionalism gives a president the confidence to proceed despite the usual clatter that will be raised against us.

Without that belief, would Obama risk his international standing to intervene to prevent catastrophe? Faith in international institutions is fine as far as it goes. But what happens in a few months when Israel is faced with the question of war or peace regarding Iran? What happens if the worst case scenario occurs in Pakistan and fundamentalists seize control of the government and dozens of nuclear weapons fall into the hands of those allied with terrorists? Does anyone expect the UN to be able to do anything to address these kinds of crises?

I am not advocating war. But the world will expect the US to get out front on these crises and I wonder if the president’s worldview would allow him to deal with these problems effectively? He may very well prove able to do so. I pray that is true.

But I think it logical to think that a strong belief in your own country’s superiority might make his job a little easier.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Monica Showalter, Rich Baehr, and Ed Lasky for a discussion of the Copenhagen Conference, Climategate, health care reform, and other newsworthy topics.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Dan Reihl, Clarice Feldman, and Alberto de la Cruz for a discussion of Afghanistan, Climategate, and the Honduran election.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome technology writer Charlie Martin to discuss the CRU scandal and its implications for science, for AGW, and for society.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

The debate over “The Greatest Generation” and whether the way America is today could duplicate their stunning achievements in winning two wars and fighting through a depression while maintaining unity has been hashed and rehashed by far superior minds than mine.

But I just can’t help thinking about it after watching the History Channel this week and their excellent series, “Word War II in HD.”

If you haven’t been able to catch any of it, they will run the entire 10 hours on Saturday starting at 8:00 am central time.

Quite simply, it is the grandest, the most heartbreaking, the most stirring documentary series on World War II ever made. And that includes both “Victory at Sea” and “The World at War.”

TWAW is the gold standard - 32 hours of in-depth analysis of the politics, the strategy, the personalities, and ordeals experienced by civilians during the war. But it is rather soulless. It’s academic approach can be dry, although the images and words of survivors lend an emotionalism outside the rather clinical analysis offered.

“Victory at Sea,” on the other hand, went hard for dramatic effect. With the sonorous voice of Leonard Graves supplying the narration and music by Broadway impresario Richard Rodgers, VAS was a made for TV blockbuster that went right for the heart and kept the viewer entranced with its quick cuts, and snappy pace.

Other documentaries of individual battles (there have been a couple of excellent treatments of D-Day) have suffered from using stock footage that, if you watch enough of these things, you recognize from other projects.

But the History Channel sojourn into the past with “World War II in HD” is everything a good documentary should be; highly original, well scripted, images lining up with narration in an artistic mix, all the while marching forward with a pace that allows the viewer to digest the information and feel what the documentarian is feeling about his subject.

But it is the images that capture the mind and rend the soul. Culled from literally thousands of home movies - many in color - and long lost color combat footage, there is a freshness and even an immediacy about the entire package that has held me absolutely in thrall for the entire run of the series.

The technique is itself, fresh and original. Focusing on several individuals who fought in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters, the survivors take us through everything from the home front, their battle experiences, the horror, mud, blood, guts, and monumental sense of loss when a comrade falls. The narration is accompanied by stunning combat footage - real “You Are There” images of mortar rounds exploding just feet from the camera, horrific sights of the wounded and dead, and always, the total destruction that war leaves in its wake.

A small example of the originality of the series can be found in the way that the narration will, from time to time, fade out slowly and the reading of the script is picked up by the actual survivor. It is an extraordinarily effective technique in that it humanizes the actor reading the narration when, after just a few seconds of the survivor reading, the voice of the actor portraying him is slowly brought back up, while the survivor’s words fade away. This is not a new technique but it it works spectacularly.

The music is obtrusive without overwhelming the action. Indeed, the music is used as a dramatic device to measure the pace of the documentary, mirroring the pace of the excellent narration (Gary Sinise). Beautiful editing builds bridges to succeeding each scene, allowing for seamless segues from clip to clip. A truly masterful job.

A word about the HD: It could be that they really didn’t have anything else to call the project, what with “World War II in Color” already taken. Shooting the program in HD is not the reason to watch it, nor is much of it in HD anyway. The films, as you can imagine, are grainy, and out of focus at times so even with an HD TV, it really doesn’t enhance the viewing experience that much.

All in all, “World War II in HD” is a triumph of documentary film making that should do for World War II what Ken Burns’ “Civil War” did for that conflict; bringing the viewer up close to the war while allowing for us to get to know some fascinating characters who increase our understanding of the conflict. (Burns’ “The War” was good but lacked the dramatic punch of the History Channel treatment.)

And as the last scenes of the documentary faded and the survivors, now all near or over 80 years old were left with their memories, it hit me that the hackneyed question about whether America today could pull together and perform such magnificent feats of arms and industry as those of my father’s generation manged, needed another airing.

Strip away our gadgets, our scientific wonders, and all the cultural, economic, and social touchstones that make up America today and ask yourself; How much like them are we? There’s no doubt that we are quite different in some respects. But like Robert Graves, the great essayist of the World War I generation who saw extraordinary love in the sacrifice of soldiers who marched lockstep into the most murderous fire, is there that kind of feeling for America today that would allow us to meet such huge challenges?

By World War II standards, our military is tiny. More than 16,000,000 Americans wore their country’s uniform in the Second World War. But there is little doubt that our current military is every bit as good, soldier for soldier, as those who beat the Nazis and the Japanese. So the question isn’t really a military one. It is a question of character. The real question should be; How similar is the character of today’s American to that of the World War II generation? Are we made of the same stuff? Do we believe in America as passionately as they did - enough to put aside our political differences and unite to see the job through to its conclusion?

I have my doubts. The whole idea of American sovereignty is fast disappearing - or at least the sort of sovereignty the WWII generation believed in. Call it a blind faith if you will, or perhaps you think it small minded and childish to harbor such notions that sometimes, there is only one side to take and that is the side of the country of your birth. It’s called “chauvinism” today and is quite unfashionable. But without it, we might have quit in 1944. Without that absolute certainty that we were in the right felt by the overwhelming majority of Americans whether at the battlefront or the homefront - whether fighting with a gun, or laboring in the factories and fields - I don’t think we could have done it.

There are many who would celebrate this loss of faith as the inevitable result of America “growing up” or worse, the consequence of a government that has betrayed the people time and again whether it was Viet Nam, Watergate, or some other national event that showed our leaders using us, lying to us, or betraying the principles on which the country was founded.

And yet…

We don’t know, do we? As implacable a foe as radical Islamism, it can’t come close to the existential threat of Hitler and his thugs or the economic threat to our emerging commercial empire in the Far East by Japan. And remember, all of this played out with the backdrop of a national depression where unemployment was still over 10% and most people hurting economically.

I want to believe we’d be up to those kinds of threats regardless of about which generation of Americans you want to talk. I don’t think it would matter what era you choose, I still see Americans as comprising a specific, exceptional “race” if you will. There are national characteristics unique to people who live here that are found nowhere else. We simply couldn’t have achieved what we have achieved, overcome what we’ve been able to overcome (self-inflicted or otherwise) without some spark deep within us that makes us “Americans.”

The conventional answer might be that we wouldn’t stand a chance fighting a long war like WWII today. But one thing is for sure; if I were a foreign power, I wouldn’t make the mistake that the Kaiser made in 1917, Tojo and Hitler made in 1941, or Saddam made in 1991.

And that is underestimate the United States of America.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, Andrew Ian Dodge, Melissa Clouthier, and Sister Toldjah join me for a discussion on the relevancy of Sarah Palin in national politics.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, it’s an All American Thinker night as I welcome Rich Baehr, and Larrey Anderson for a discussion of the Fort Hood shooting as well a discussion the future of health care reform in the senate.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, it’s an All American Thinker night as I welcome Editor Tom Lifson, Rich Baehr, and Ed Lasky for a close look at the race in NY23 as well as a discussion of the latest in health care reform.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.