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“The president’s tax shift is a gamble not unlike the one the first President Bush took in 1990 when he dropped his ‘no new taxes’ promise to reach a deficit-reduction deal with Congressional Democrats.”
Related: “Will Poor Harry Reid Get a Reaction Retraction?”
Update: “Read His Lips: Middle-Class Taxes!” Or as Michelle Malkin writes, “Don’t believe anything that passes his lips.”
Update: Related thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson, who writes, “The Truth Is a Precious Commodity:”
At some point — I think it was around mid-January — the public collectively shrugged and concluded of Obama, “I don’t trust anything that this guy says.” And when that happens in American politics, it is almost impossible to restore any modicum of credibility. All we are left with now is three more years of the president’s “Bush did it” mantra and a buffoonish Robert Gibbs, like some strutting carnival barker, showing off ink on his palm to a bored press corps.
Jim Geraghty posits, “Maybe Reporters Should Bring YouTube Clips to Obama Interviews”, given the number of The Won’s promises that have reached, as Jim would say, their expiration dates.
But that raises another issue: come November of 2010 and 2012, the public will have their own set of YouTube clips. And they’ll also have links and quotes from newspaper and magazine Website archives, of journalists who assured their readers that the candidate that pundit class feverishly supported would be the second coming of Lincoln, FDR, JFK and Gandhi all rolled into one.
Those same readers that journalists would then start insulting four months into 2009, to compound the problem. Steve Green cautions political junkies to watch out for whiplash between now and November — but I would imagine the cases inside the editorial bullpens of most newspapers, and the make-up rooms in the news departments of CNNABCCBSNBCPBSMSNBC must be even more severe.
If they had any shame, of course.
Let me be perfectly clear, one year was enough.Send him back to Kenya.
Didn’t see THAT one coming (rolling eyes in mock disbelief).
Has there ever been a one-term president who was considered “great?” Because, if not, isn’t Obama relegating himself to the scrap heap of history?
Yes. James K. Polk
I knew James K. Polk. Obama is no James K. Polk. Or something.
Of James K. Polk: “Scholars have ranked him favorably on the list of greatest presidents for his ability to set an agenda and achieve all of it.”
As you said, David, Obama’s no James K. Polk.
I just want to call him a few names… and for some reason it does seem like a grown up thing to do (at least I didn’t lie my a** off running for president!)…. but I’ll spare you all…
Man, everything he said in his campaign was BS…
You mean politicians… lie?? /shocked
He has already broken that promise. His cigarette TAX increase hits 10′s of millions of middle class Americans and as many or more below the middle class.
If you are a smoker you already know he’s broken that pledge. And if you are not a smoker you should still know he has broken that pledge.
Obama is agnostic about everything in life. And like religious agnostics he is just a moral and intellectual coward. Too afraid to admit they don’t believe in God and trying to hedge their bet “just in case” at the same time. Obama is the same way about everything, he wants to vote present and wait until there is a winner so he can claim he was “always” on that side of the issue.
When he breaks his tax pledge, it’ll be like every other promise he’s broken. And somehow it’s going to be our fault.
Obama’s attitude toward truth and responsibility has alway’s been like Otter’s in Animal House:
“Hey! You f*cked up! You trusted us!”
How long is it going to take for the people of this country to realize that what Obama SAYS has absolutely no relationship whatsoever to what he DOES. He only says what he says to fool enough rubes to be able to do what he wants to do. The only time Barack Obama tells the truth is in his unguarded moments, that’s when you learn what he really thinks. His prepared comments are so carefully scripted and telepromptered precisely because they are carefully constructed lies with the express intent to further his true agenda.
Seriously, how much does it take for people to see the nose in front of their faces?
Great one-term Presidents? How about Harding? And Coolidge? I love Coolidge, the way he thoroughly excoriated the Progressive movement.
Kennedy was a one-termer, so to speak. Then there was the guy who caught cold during his Inauguration speech and died three weeks later. These guys were better than Obama.
Even Grant was better. Well, maybe not. He was a corrupt drunk. Even Johnson was better. And Carter, even!
Of course, to my mind, the worst of all time was Wilson. He gave us WWI, the income tax, and the Federal Reserve. Kinda hard to do worse than that, although FDR tried really, really hard.
I can’t believe that people actually think Obama will lose in 2012.
He has 4 years in which to build an ACORN/SEIU apparatus, and lawyers on a trigger to sue anyone who questions this under a charge of ‘racism’.
Unless he loses by more than 3 million popular votes, he will be President until 2016. But 3 million fake votes will certainly be created.
He gave us WWI, the income tax, and the Federal Reserve.
I would agree, except :
a) ALL developed countries have an income tax, so it would have happened in America anyway. Once you let women vote, this is inevitable.
b) Come on, the US entered WWI quite late. Wilson certainly didn’t ‘give’ it to us.
What we need to get this economy back on its feet is a war, maybe even two to pump money into the defense industry and produce jobs! We could invade a couple of useless nations say, I dunno, in the middle-east or some other dirt-poor place where god-fearing Christians don’t live. This will generate both much-needed jobs and revenue for our energy and military industries.
Oh wait. What do you mean we already tried that?
Monger, as someone you obviously admire once said, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
You have never seen war, or anything like it. When it comes, you will remember your light-hearted and careless words, and regret them.
Great single-termers?
President Grant was a two-termer. His economic and foreign policies were basically sound, and although his administration was riddled with corruption, I am not aware of any student of the era who believes that Grant himself ever stole a dime. In that respect he was like Harding, another enormously popular President with notoriously crooked friends.
President Truman was an almost two-termer. He was only elected to the Presidency once. His Presidential reputation has been increasing in recent years, and I suspect will continue to grow for a while yet.
Polk was, of course, one of our more remarkable and accomplished Chief Executives, and a famous one-termer.
Grover Cleveland had his moments. He served two terms, though they weren’t contiguous.
Hoover may have been the smartest man to sit in the Oval Office in the 20th century. A one-termer, of course. He’s the evidence that intellectual horsepower isn’t enough for that particular job…as we should have learned from the administration of another one-termer, the elder John Adams.
TTT: I would agree, except:
a) ALL developed countries have an income tax, so it would have happened in America anyway. Once you let women vote, this is inevitable.
b) Come on, the US entered WWI quite late. Wilson certainly didn’t ‘give’ it to us.
Me: The Progressive Income Tax was one of the cornerstones of the early Progressive movement. The latter movement was basically Neo-Marxist with the main difference between the two movements being differences in the means to the end. The Marxist ‘revolutionary approach’ was replaced with the gentler Progressive ‘Evolutionary approach’…however, the ends to both were identical and straight out of Marx/Hegel’s.
Your commentary on the success of the Woman’s Suffrage Movement is one that might require an entire thesis as a response.
Wilson focused his 1916 re-election campaign around the slogan “he kept us out of the war”. He was inaugurated on March 5, 1917 and took the US into WWI on April 2, 1917. His entire campaign theme was thereby drastically violated in less than 30 days after his inauguration…remind you one anyone else lately?
America may be a divided nation on many issues, but on one issue there is substantial agreement: Americans are not ready to be serfs — we are not prepared to accept a massive increase in government’s power do dictate the details of how we live our lives.
Yet that is precisely what Obama has pushed for. His “cap and trade” bill seeks to dictate to Americans how much energy they can use, in what form, how much they’ll have to pay for that energy and how much of their income they must surrender in order to finance the totally unrealistic fantasy of converting to “green energy”.
His stimulus bill is his decision to ignore American’s desire to save more and tighten their belts in economic hard times — so he simply spends our money for us, against our will and against our better judgment.
Likewise, his bailouts were simply a case of taking our money to support failed businesses — like GM — that we would not support voluntarily.
And his healthcare bill is an effort to extend the reach of government into virtually every detail of our lives — for once government controls everyone’s healthcare, then government will have an excuse to control, to monitor, to dictate the private details of everyone’s life, since even minor choices, it can be argued, can affect our health.
Americans are not ready to march to serfdom — we are not ready to offer a common neck over which Obama can slip the noose of government control.
Hence the pushback and the protests. We can only hope this wannabe dictator and his fellow power-lusters in congress get a severe knee-capping in November of this year. Our nation remains in grave peril.
I’m laughing at the Superior Intellect
What we hear is “no new taxes” but what they’re saying is “know new taxes”.
Thank you, comatus. Well said.
Someone asked if there were any decent one term Presidents, John Adams was a one termer and he wasn’t so bad. I hope to God Obama is only a one term President. I don’t think future generations will be saying, “he wasn’t so bad”.
I really can’t understand how he could run a pretty brilliant campaign and turn his actual presidency into such a mess. You’d expect some bumps along the way, but it seems to me they are just flailing about. I think we need to be prepared that Obama could still get it together. We need to recognize that if it should happen and adjust accordingly. Bush SR. was ran out of office for breaking his no new tax pledge, seem democrats are more likely given a pass on broken promises.
Obamalamadingdong will be remembered as the disaster that reset the Democrat Party status to struggling minority for ten years.
Obamalamadingdong will be rememebred as the terrorist’s friend, setting up the USA for its next major black eye.
Obamalamadingdong will be remebered for being Iran’s nuclear enabler.
Hoover, by the by, had pushed depression-relief programs through Congress before hsi defeat by FDR. FDR, or course, embarked upon a tax-and-spend program that, if not interrupted by WW2, would have prolonged recovery for a generation. It is that case now with Obamalamadingdong. We will be impoverished by these clowns if they can do what he says must be done…TAX, TAX, TAX.
Just as he has broken his word on so any projects,lets try to get him out of office before the end of his term,breaking another precedent that says he has to have a 4 year term.The successor is marginally stupid and the witch that would follow is right from Shakespere`s MacBeth.
We are in for it!!
CNN,ABC,MSNBC,CBS,NPR,PBS, etc would all rather be shut down and cease to exist rather than hire conservatives. Ratings and solvency are not the motivators behind those businesses only pushing their agenda matters. I’m only surprised at those that advertise on the shows thinking they will get any sales from it.
i nearly spit out my coffee (thegeezer). I love reading these comments. you guys oughta start an act…
If “The Self-Anointed One” committed no mistakes (cough, gasp, choke) in the next three years, it has already screwed up this nation to the point that a new scale of incompetency needs be made to accommodate its ranking; maybe using negative exponents?
I think you vastly overrate the backlash the media will participate in, against the president. Remember, they (the big media folks, the academics, the government employees, the unions, ad nauseum, which are part of this transnational Left elite) are trying to amass power for themselves and their class. It goes against their class interest to take down Obama, because he is the sharp edge of their vanguard.
Even if he screws up, the media will hide it, shrug it off, divert attention, and do other magicians’ tricks of misdirection to keep your eye off their steady advancement in controlling the levers of power.
The only possible reason for a media backlash would be if Obama loses his usefulness, and he needs to be airbrushed out of the pictures, as Stalin did with subordinates who no longer fulfilled their function.
“Let me be perfectly clear, one year was enough.Send him back to Kenya.”
I agree. He epitomizes the reason, you are to be natural born, and not an Indonesian citizen. When he goes to Indonesia, I hope he doesn’t return. His being American, is another lie, we are supposed to believe and tolerate. That is the one statement out of his mouth, we are told to believe, yes, right.
Marc Malone writes:
“Kennedy was a one-termer, so to speak. Then there was the guy who caught cold during his Inauguration speech and died three weeks later. These guys were better than Obama.”
..William Henry Harrison, who delivered the longest inaugural speech (two hours) on a bitter, wet March 4th, 1841, caught cold, pneumonia, and pleurisy and died 31 days later.
Tangentially, if one goes back to video clips from the Carter years — even his most awkward and painful moments — one finds a person who at least exhibited some level of competency and genuine concern for his office and responsibilities.
Say what we will about Carter, he was not a raging narcissist nor did he have the ego problems our current Pantload-in-Chief suffers with. I still rank Carter as the second-most abysmal failure as a president but Obama has rocketed past him into the sub-basement of this category in little over one year. This is no mean feat, believe me.
..and we have just over 1,000 horrible, dreary days remaining.
Maybe people should start archiving all those youtube clips in case youtube decides to conveniently “lose them” as we get closer to 2012.
might want to start archiving all those youtube clips so they don’t conveniently get lost before 2012
Steveo,
Great point. Between Download Helper for Firefox and Replay Media Catcher, most video clips are fairly easily captured. (If all else fails, you can always stick a camcorder in front of your computer screen, as I did to capture this infamous CNN moment in 2008.)
Ed
you mean it hasn’t been four years yet?
I heard Obama does not lie to his children.In my view he is a regular “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”while campaigning he appeared to be a nice guy,then came the inaugaration.Now he has started making GW Bush look like a Sunday-school teacher.
smarock10@yahoo.com
“…come November of 2010 and 2012, the public will have their own set of YouTube clips.”
This is the single most trenchant line I’ve read in ages.