Great Job Brownie!

A second earthquake hit in the Western hemisphere this week. Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley in the special election held to fill Ted Kennedy’s old seat in Massachusetts, denying the Democrats a filibuster proof Senate and throwing the drive for Obama’s centerpiece project –health care reform—into disarray. Obama apparently remains in denial and has simply asserted that he has lost touch with the American people because he focused too much on policymaking and not enough on communicating directly with the American people. Actually, it is the policies. He communicated directly to the American people on health care reform, and the more he spoke the less they liked it. The Democrats are also blaming Coakley for running a poor campaign. Again, they are misreading the smoke signals. This race had nothing to do with Coakley. It had a lot to do with halting the biggest expansion of government in a couple of generations and importation Chicago style politics to Washington. After New Jersey, Virginian, the failed attempt to get the Olympics to Chicago and the debacle in Copenhagen, and now the loss of Kennedy’s old seat, if O doesn’t take a good hard look in the mirror, he’ll be in real trouble in November. The Democrats have explanations and rationalizations—the town hall tea parties are a bunch of kooks, a bad campaign by Coakley, not enough communication by Obama. But these excuses hide a harder truth. The American people aren’t buying what you’re selling. This massive attempt to turn us into a European semi-socialist state is running into stiff headwinds. It’s not where we want to go.

Early last year, I wrote that I was strangely nostalgic for the Clinton years. That’s because Clinton really did listen. When he lost the midterms in ’94, he adjusted course and became a better president for it. In contrast, Obama thus far seems tone deaf.

A successful leader must listen to his constituents. Obama’s voters gave him the office and gave him an agenda—job growth and ending the war in Iraq. And Obama has said, “I don’t care what your agenda is, America. I have mine.”

Until he adjusts his priorities to the country’s, his administration will continue to be punished at the polls.

Real Hope and Real Audacity

Although young people turned out in droves to support Barack Obama last fall, there is one that didn’t jump on the bandwagon. She often is in the position of defending her conservative views in the face of both other students and teachers committed to bending her anti-collectivist views. Like Ann, she is appalled by the taxing and spending of the current administration and the tendency of team Obama to provide terrorists with the same protections as shoplifters. While her brother is going through his collegiate anarchy phase (which we hope will end soon), my daughter Hope has been steadfast in her beliefs that people that work hard should not have to fork half of it over to the government, that our tax dollars shouldn’t pay for abortions, and that she shouldn’t be responsible for the enormous debt our government is now incurring. Unlike most kids her age, she didn’t swoon when Obama spoke last fall. We call her “little Ann Coulter” and with her quick wit and blond hair, and her favorite line about the Obama administration is, “You know it’s bad when a 16 year old high school kid actually cares.” She understands it at a gut level, “It wouldn’t be fair if I studied really hard for a test and got a 100 when the kid next to me goofed off and got a 50 if the teacher gave 20 points of mine to the other kid so he could pass.” That is it in a nutshell. She gets it. With kids like her, there is hope for us.
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I’m glad 2009 is in the books. As the year opened, we were reeling from the financial meltdown of 2008 and we elected the most left leaning president in my lifetime, armed with a bulletproof Congress. It was so bad, that Chief Justice John Roberts couldn’t even get the oath of office administered correctly. That was probably the Freudian slip of the century.

I was probably one of a handful of conservatives that actually read The Audacity of Hope to see how this Obama chap really thinks about the world. After reading his election manifesto, I can only conclude that while teaching in Hyde Park, he must have actively avoided all contact with those folks in the economics department (who, by the way, earned their Nobel Prizes through demonstrated achievement).

In keeping with the theme of Audacity, here is my 2009 list of “I SIMPLY CAN’T BELIEVE THEY SAID [OR DID] THIS WITH A COMPLETELY STRAIGHT FACE.” I think you’ll agree that 2009 was a year of real audacity for both Democrats and Republicans. Here is my top 10 list of jaw-dropping comments [or actions] from our public officials this year. I have attempted to be bipartisan, but since the Dems are the party in power, they inevitably produced more opportunities.

1. “I don’t know---not having been there and not seeing all the facts… the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.” Barack Obama describing the arrest of Henry Louis Gates.

Hard to believe this is a quote from a Harvard trained lawyer, and even more astonishing when a few months later, he urges us “not to jump to conclusions” after Major Hasan commits mass murder at Fort Hood. Along with his Nobel, Obama may be in line for an Olympic medal in conclusion jumping with this one.

2. “The system worked.” Janet Napolitano after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to bring down a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day.

This is technically true only if you consider alert, brave passengers to be part of the “system.”

3. Tom DeLay’s Dancing With the Stars Exhibition [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUqL3_uCD4Q]

Have you no dignity? This is what was helping to govern our country?

4. “This is why I have pledged that I will not sign a health insurance reform that adds even one dime to our deficit over the next decade. And I mean it. We have estimated that two-thirds of the cost of reform to bring health care security to every American can be paid for by reallocating money that is simply wasted in federal health care programs.” Barack Obama

Really? I stopped believing in Santa Claus over 40 years ago. Where do you even start with this whopper? He assumes that money is not fungible. The attack on waste and fraud has been attempted by Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and several others to no avail. Please don’t insult us. This is a big, expensive plan that will EXPLODE the deficit and we know it. But perhaps the most audacious part of this whole process was bribing recalcitrant members of their OWN PARTY with our money. This is taking the Chicago Way to a whole new level.

5. “The America I know and love is not one which my parents or my baby with Downs Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of ‘level of productivity in society’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.” Sarah Palin

Yes, Sarah, it would be evil. And you are correct to be wary that this is where the current proposal might eventually lead us. But this bill does not create ‘death panels’ and you are not helping the cause by hyperbolizing. Health care reform as written has plenty of evils. You don’t need to make anything up.

6. When asked about the bowling alley in the White House, Obama joked to Jay Leno that his score of 129 “was like the Special Olympics or something.”

After that crack, the left really has nothing to say about Republicans being mean-spirited or insensitive.

7. South Carolina governor Mark Sanford claiming to be hiking on the Appalachian Trial while having a tryst in Argentina and Tiger Woods claiming his wife tried to save him by bashing the window out of his SUV with a golf club.

C’mon guys. Haven’t you learned anything about career management after Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer?

8. Nomination of Van Jones as Green Jobs Czar.

Need anything be said about this one?

9. Obama’s decision to cave in to the Russians by deciding not to base missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic.

I thought Barack wanted to improve our image around the world. I’m not sure how throwing existing loyal friends under the bus accomplishes that.

10. And finally, the most audacious of them all--- Eric Holder’s decision to try KSM in New York in a civilian trial.

After years of excoriating the Bush Administration for helping Al Qaeda recruit because of its harsh treatment of their operatives, Holder decides that giving one of their top guys, and the guy that murdered 3,000 of our citizens a platform and a microphone just yards away from the site of his dastardly deed, along with a full complement of lawyers and full Constitutional protection. Perhaps he could go a step further and give him his own website and radio station. KSM’s reaction? He was overjoyed at the prospect of being able to explain himself. I guess this is the kind of decisionmaking you can expect from someone that blasted us as a “nation of cowards.” Someone make him watch the film “Glory”—please.

So, there you have it --- my 2009 list of Audaciousness. I can’t wait to see what they try to foist on us in 2010.