Our new president’s foreign policy is at sea.

This appears to be the sort of foreign policy posture our new administration has adopted. This is bound to make us more popular with our allies and enemies alike, right? Yeah, right…

 

Obama’s ‘Kick Me’ Diplomacy

By Charles Krauthammer 

I would like to think the supine posture is attributable to a rookie leader otherwise preoccupied (i.e., domestically), leading a foreign policy team as yet unorganized if not disoriented. But when the State Department says that Hugo Chavez’s president-for-life referendum, which was preceded by a sham government-controlled campaign featuring the tear-gassing of the opposition, was “for the most part . . . a process that was fully consistent with democratic process,” you have to wonder if Month One is not a harbinger of things to come.

Read more here.

The stimulus bill will bring on economic Armageddon

Peter Schiff says the best thing to do to help the economy is to do nothing.  What the government is proposing will be an unmitigated disaster, even worse than the Great Depression, because the present conditions are similar to 1929, only worse.

Check out the video here.

Hey! Let’s bring on another Great Depression!

The First Great Depression was so much fun! Let’s bring on Great Depression II!

If we close our domestic market to foreign goods, we’ll spark a trade war that will insure that this recession turns into another Great Depression that will last for a generation. Folks, we’ve done this before, and exactly this way!

Smells like Smoot-Hawley
by Ed Morrissey 

“As if the Democratic Porkfest Bill didn’t do enough damage on its own to the long-term prospects for the American economy, the Washington Post reports that it could set off a trade war that would bring the global economy crashing, too.  Democratic protectionists loaded up the bill with “Buy American” clauses that shut out foreign producers of steel and iron.  Just as in the Depression, however, that will force other nations to close their markets — which will virtually recreate the Smoot-Hawley fiasco that made the Depression exponentially worse…”

…

“If we touch off a trade war, which this will almost certainly do as it violates all of our WTO and bilateral trade agreements, other markets will close their doors to American products, such as cars and technology.  Instead of closing our trade gap, we will explode it, and even those oil imports could get retaliatory tariffs from our two closest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, our two largest foreign suppliers of crude.”
…

“America doesn’t need a trade war at this moment in time.  We need to ensure our access to as many foreign markets as possible.  Protectionism now will take us down a primrose path that we have traveled before, and the end result will be bread lines and 25% unemployment, and worldwide misery.”

Read more here.

I hope you’ve got your food storage, folks, because I think you’re going to need it.

It isn’t easy being a saint.

It isn’t easy being a saint.
by Victor Davis Hanson

“You readers remember that sometime around mid 2007, Obama made a Faustian bargain. Without much national name, without a legislative record in Illinois or the US Senate, but with quite a lot of Chicago baggage, Obama gambled on the hope and change new persona (soon to be followed with the soaring FDR/MLK/JFK prose, Latinate seal, Greek architraves, Victory Column /Sermon on the Mount speeches, Father Abraham’s arrival to DC by slow-moving rail car (after flying back to Illinois by jet)). For much of the campaign, he either hoped that Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger and the other assorted Dailey/Blago baggage would not surface, or, if it did, he could hope and change them all away. And he did—brilliantly . And now they are history and those who dredge them up little more cranky sore-losing has-beens.

But as President, no matter how historic a candidacy (more astounding than any in American history), no matter how calm in the face of continuous pressure, no matter how brilliant in prepared and set oratory, one can’t get away with that disconnect forever. There is a reason why a plodding Ike and blunt Harry Truman were greater Presidents than even JFK—and why in 2-3 years even George Bush will begin to seem in retropect honest, sober, and straight-talking rather than word-mangling.”

…

“Again, the backtracking on the issues, the tough centrist appointments, and the seeming continuance of a Bush (III?) foreign policy, once demonized now quietly embraced, are fine for Bill Clinton, Al Gore or Harry Reid, but in aggregate ever so insidiously they become finally problematic for the redeemer. As stated, even the Left-wing media won’t like looking foolish twice. And even the smug Europeans will turn on those who prod them to be reasonable and honest after serenading them with prose set to Mozart. Yes, he can halt the messiah act and we will forgive him for not being a messiah—or continue it in lieu of honest governance and I assure you in time even Newsweek and NPR will turn on him, in fear that they are not merely gullible, but looking ridiculous.

So even now, Obama need not play any longer the hypocrite and can recover if he mans up to the past hypnosis of the campaign, cools the Lincoln talk, reads about Nemesis, and admits that he is a mere mortal, an inexperienced one at that, matches his deeds with honest words, and seeks to govern in human rather than divine fashion from on high. That way a William Lynn or Timothy Geithner are just political landmines that one steps over rather than proof that the Wizard turns out to be a little man with levers and dials behind the curtain.

Americans can and will forgive almost anything other than hypocrisy.”

Read the whole thing here.

The emperor has no clothes.

I hope this fellow is wrong, but I fear he is correct.

“It is frightening to think there is a real possibility that the entire world economy could go into complete meltdown and famine kill millions. Yet Western – and British – commentators are cocooned in a warm comfort zone of infatuation with America’s answer to Neil Kinnock. We should be long past applauding politicians of any hue: they got us into this mess. The best deserve a probationary opportunity to prove themselves, the worst should be in jail.

It is questionable whether the present political system can survive the coming crisis. Whatever the solution, teenage swooning sentimentality over a celebrity cult has no part in it. The most powerful nation on earth is confronting its worst economic crisis under the leadership of its most extremely liberal politician, who has virtually no experience of federal politics. That is not an opportunity but a catastrophe.”

Read more here.

Gerald Warner is an author, broadcaster, columnist and polemical commentator who writes about politics, religion, history, culture and society in general.