Sultan Knish ^ | March 01, 2013 | Daniel Greenfield
Posted on Saturday, March 02, 2013 6:28:16 AM by expat1000
DENIAL IS CONFIRMATION
Politicians often seem to deny that one quality about them that everyone knows is true. Obama's "I Am Not a Dictator" deserves to join "I Am Not a Crook" in the annals of political denials.
Obama is finding a dozen different ways to say that he doesn't wield absolute power. "I am not a dictator". "I can't mind-meld Congress into making a deal." "Even though I have been doing anything I want with respect to everything else, when it comes to the sequester I can't take control of it, even though the Senate has offered me that opportunity."
I am not a dictator, except when I want to be.
CHOPPING THE BRANCHES WILL NOT CHOP DOWN THE TREE
Terrorism can never be defeated by fighting terrorists. Combine massive wealth in some parts of the Middle East with staggering poverty in other parts and the supply of mercenaries is nearly endless. Syrian Jihadists are being paid $150 a month by Qatar; a good salary for an unskilled laborer in a region where life is cheap and every family has plenty of surplus sons and mouths to feed. A barrel of oil can buy the services of a killer for a month and Qatar pumps out millions of barrels a day.
Terrorism is cheap for the sponsors, profitable for the participants and hideously expensive for the targets. A soldier in a First World nation can cost six figures. For that same amount, a backward oil tyranny can field a hundred men. When those hundred men kill a soldier, then his nation will be heartbroken and question the costs of war. When those hundred men die, their mothers will ceremonially wail and cry out for more martyrs to avenge them. And the terror will go on.
Islam makes the process easier. Like Palestinian nationalism, it is a war machine whose ideas lubricate the recruitment, rampages and replenishment of fresh cannon fodder for the wars of the old rich men of the region.
from my article this week, Terrorism Without End
AGENDA IS EVERYTHING, PROCESS IS NOTHING
Obama understands that the ability to set the agenda is what counts. He does not view the battle as procedural and cares very little for process even when it is enshrined in the Constitution. As a former community organizer, he understands that it is the power to set the agenda in the mind of the public that counts and that once that is done, legal procedures become a formality that can be swept aside. So long as he can determine what the urgent task that needs doing now is, all else becomes irrelevant.
The Republican Congress of 1994 understood that setting the public agenda mattered more than anything else. They were eventually outmaneuvered by Clinton, but only at the cost of making their agenda his. Our Republican Congress is determined to pull off the opposite maneuver; adopting Obama’s agenda and then trying to claim credit for it. Not only are their odds of getting centrist credit for amnesty or higher taxes utterly hopeless, but wanting credit for either one is not a brilliant political maneuver; it’s a symptom of political decline.
Can Obama be stopped? He can, but it requires taking control of the public agenda.
