More yet on Obama vs. Ryan

From National Review:
Mark Steyn: Cometh the Hour, Punteth the Man  "There’s something sad about a man so carelessly revealing himself as entirely inadequate to the moment. Government spending is an existential threat to the United States. Whether or not anyone at the White House knows this, the viziers decided to shove the sultan out on stage with a pitifully unserious speech retreating to all his lamest tropes..."

Victor Davis Hanson  Obama vs. Obama  "These weird about-faces raise interesting questions that transcend the current politics of the deficit:" To wit:...

 Andrew Stiles  ‘Excessively Partisan, Dramatically Inaccurate and Hopelessly Inadequate’  "I imagine being forced to sit through a smug lecture explaining how the serious plan you’ve just proposed to save America from a debt crisis is actually, in fact, fundamentally un-American, is not a very pleasant experience."

From Pajamas Media

President Boring  "But what is it about Obama that makes him so boring? I submit it is something quite simple — he has nothing to say. He is a boring person, the quintessential “hollow man” in the T.S. Eliot sense. He is kind of a socialist, kind of a liberal, kind of a multi-culturalist, kind of an environmentalist, kind of globalist, kind of a budget cutter — but none of them with any real commitment." Roger Simon.

From Patterico's Pontifications
Fisking the President’s Speech on the Deficit  "So let’s go through it together, shall we?"  Then Mr. Patterico dissects the speech phrase-by-phrase.

http://townhall.com/political-cartoons/glennmccoy

Comments on That Speech: Remember who Obama's stated enemies are: not Muslim radicals, but private enterprise

We have attempted to get a balanced group of commentaries where we include opinions from both those who are  critical of MTV President Obama's policies and those who consider him a disaster and an economic jughead. 

Several posts from Neal Boortz:
 Highlights From Presbo's Speech "Tax the rich? Yeah … that’s the way out of this mess. But Obama isn’t looking for a way out … he’s looking for a way IN. He’s looking for keys to the White House for another four years, and he knows that ramping up wealth envy and engaging in class warfare is the surest way into the hearts and minds of his core constituency."....
"Like I said, it was a campaign speech, not a serious policy speech."
    Then this: Obama's Plan  "Yeah .. and these high-achievers won’t change their economic behavior one bit as a result of your tax hikes, will they, Mr. Community Organizer?
   And this: It was a campaign speech.  "It was exactly what you would expect from someone with no real world private sector experience and a penchant for flowery campaign rhetoric … little of which has any basis in reality."
   Finally this: Paul Ryan's reaction  "Exploiting people’s emotions of fear, envy, and anxiety is not hope. It’s not change. It’s partisanship. We don’t need partisanship. We don’t need demagoguery. We need solutions. And we don’t need to keep punting to other people to make tough decisions. If we don’t make tough decisions today, our children are going to have to make much, much tougher decisions tomorrow."

http://townhall.com/political-cartoons/michaelramirez






Fox’s Neil Cavuto Conducts The Most Fiery Deficit Reduction Interview Ever  "...we’re extremely grateful to Fox News’ Neil Cavuto for injecting some much-needed passion into the discussion. And by “passion,” we of course mean “an excuse to break out the popcorn and jujubes and yell ‘Jerry! Jerry!’ at our TV screen.”"

"Cavuto brought on Texas’ Democratic Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson   to weigh in on the deficit talks and, suffice to say, these two probably won’t be grabbing frappuccinos together at any point soon."

Obama is a big problem, but not THE problem. What I fear is the shallowness and ignorance of those who support this man. One Obama approval poll I'd like to see would be broken up into two groups: those who can explain supply and demand versus those who think it's some sort of capitalist plot. The Tunnel Dweller

http://townhall.com/political-cartoons/henrypayne

This from no less a figure than Andy McCarthy: Re: Radio Free Boehner  "As Obama’s speech yesterday shows, small government conservatives are going to be viciously demagogued no matter how earnestly they struggle to preserve entitlement programs while bringing them into line with economic reality."

From Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion :  Hand-to-Hand Combat Has Started   "Yesterday's speech was a calculated move by someone who doesn't care about the deficit to pretend to care so that he could use the issue in political hand-to-hand combat.
"If you don't think 2012 is the make-or-break political year for this country, then you haven't been paying attention."

From Heritage:  Playing Politics Isn’t the Answer, Mr. President  "In a new poll from the Associated Press, voters say they prefer spending cuts to tax hikes by a 62-29 margin. President Obama would do well to step out from behind the podium and hear some common sense from the American people. Spending is the problem, cutting it is the solution. Higher taxes, decimating our defense and playing partisan politics are not the answers."

From Fred Barnes:   Obama Sinks to the Occasion ; No hope, no change. "President Obama always lets you down. Just when you think he’s ready to deliver a lofty speech chocked with specifics on handling the spending and debt emergency, he offers up a hyper-partisan attack on the leading Republican proposal, gives practically no details of his own plan, and then sanctimoniously puts himself on the side of preserving “the American dream for future generations.”"

http://townhall.com/political-cartoons/jerryholbert

History...or politics?

http://townhall.com/political-cartoons/danasummers

Obama's toxic speech and even worse plan for deficits and debt..

Wall Street Journal  "Mr. Obama ludicrously claimed that Mr. Ryan favors "a fundamentally different America than the one we've known throughout most of our history." Nothing is likelier to bring that future about than the President's political indifference in the midst of a fiscal crisis."
Yet the man is still a favorite of TV daytime talk shows and those dependent on government.
And  Muammar Gaddafi.

Rich Terrell, who means this in a nice way, I'm sure.

 

On This Aborted Fetus, The Democrats Plant Their Flag

Ann Coulter  "And then, totally by accident, Republicans stumbled onto the Democrats' Achilles heel. Among their specific defunding proposals, Republicans had suggested taking mere peanuts away from Planned Parenthood.
"The Democrats responded: NO! WE'LL CUT 40 BILLION! JUST DON'T TOUCH PLANNED PARENTHOOD!
"All the Republicans had to do was threaten to cut federal funding for abortion, and they won $40 billion in spending cuts overnight."
"I don't think Republicans did it deliberately. I'm pretty sure they just wanted to cut funding for Planned Parenthood. But, holy cow, did they find the Democrats' weak spot!"

Obama Goes in for the Kill; that Wednesday morning demagogic speech

Atlas Shrugs " Today Obama went in for the kill. He went after the producers, the country's only hope.
"Ayn Rand said, "The political expression of altruism is collectivism or statism, which holds that man’s life and work belong to the state—to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation—and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.""

Krauthammer’s take on Obama’s budget address: ‘I thought it was a disgrace’  "“I rarely heard a speech by a president so shallow, so hyper-partisan and so intellectually dishonest, outside the last couple of weeks of a presidential election where you are allowed to call your opponent anything short of a traitor."
....
"“I’m going to give you one example of how dishonest it was – he went on and on how the Republicans want to steal from your grandma to lower taxes on the rich,” Krauthammer continued."
....
"Obama did this knowing that this is a way to play to his base. It was a speech that was quite remarkable in how demagogic it was and I say that with all due respect.”"

Neal Boortz's comment before the speech

Destroying One Koran or Many Christians; Which is Worse?

Raymond Ibrahim  "Such is the surreal and increasingly irrational world we live in, where irate Muslims and groveling Westerners obsess over the destruction of one book while ignoring the destruction of many human lives; where a guaranteed and hard-earned American right — freedom of expression — receives a lot of condemnatory huffing and puffing from those charged with protecting it, while murderous and barbarous — in a word, evil — behavior is devoutly ignored."

(Updated) The response to Pres. Obama’s debt speech

Rep. Paul Ryan Reacts to Obama’s Demagoguery "The Irishman’s ire. “We need leadership.”" (Video)

Dissecting the liberal assault on the House Republican budget.."One point of a document as subversive as Paul Ryan's 2012 budget is to provoke debate, and has it ever. But amid the thoughtful musings about starving orphans and grandma in a snowbank, could his critics at least get their facts right?
"Let's unpack the distortions."

Hot Air   "The bigger picture here is that Obama would not have even formed the Bowles-Simpson commission, had it not been for the right and the Tea Party raising the political temperature on the debt. Obama did so merely to try to punt the issue past the 2010 midterms. However, creating the commission validated the debt as a serious issue in the establishment’s echo chamber. And Obama’s silence on the issue created a vacuum that was filled by the GOP and the Tea Party, first in the results of the midterms and now in Rep. Paul Ryan’s long-term budget plan."

Tobytoons Via Big Government.com

Obama Speech Today

Neal Boortz  "Remember; this is all about the 2012 elections. The Democrats want the house back. They want their chance to work even harder to increase dependency on government. They took huge steps with ObamaCare .. but it wasn’t enough. The disappearance of self-reliance and an increase of government dependency mean more power for Democrats. That’s the game plan, pure and simple."

http://townhall.com/political-cartoons/chipbok

See here for post-speech comments

How do conservatives have a chance when every voice they hear on the air is against them?

CBS Validates and Rationalizes Obama's Strategy to Defeat 'Controversial' Ryan Plan By: Brent Baker  "Indeed, Reid contended the White House saw “an irresistible opportunity to portray Republicans as callous and extreme.”"

MSNBC's Matthews Rants: Paul Ryan's Plan Will 'Kill Half the People Who Watch This Show' "Matthews, along with liberal guests Howard Fineman and Richard Wolffe of Newsweek, dismissed Ryan's reform goals. Fineman hyperventilated, "The good thing for the President is the Paul Ryan Medicare plan, because it makes people angry. And, first of all, it scares seniors." Matthews lobbied, "Yes. Well, it should."" Emphasis in the original.

Meet the Press Panel: Obama 'Above the Fray' in Budget Fight  ""I think the President appears to be a mediator, and I think he, he rightfully gets some credit for averting the show – shutdown." CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer declared: "I think the President came out very much above this week, above the fray." New York Times White House correspondent Helene Cooper proclaimed: "[Obama] was trying very much to appear above the – above the fray....definitely did the political calculus that he has to appear above it all, presidential.""  The liberal equation: voting present=above the fray. Isn't that also our strategy for Libya as well?

Letting Obama Claim Credit On the Budget  "Is President Obama really the Deficit-Cutter-in-Chief? After racking up massive deficits through his various Stimulus programs and facing continued losses from Obamacare, the White House is now trying to portray Obama as taking a leading role in solving the problem."
Well, Ronald Reagan once said there was no limit to what you can get done when you don't care who gets the credit.

Behar Claims Poor Whites [and] Blacks Are ‘Oppressed by the Right Wing’   "These were rich Southern men who not only oppressed black people, they oppressed poor white people who made up most of the population. And so the idea that we’re empowering the people represented today want to go back to this time where they were more oppressed is a perfect representation of the Republican Party agenda today."

http://terrellaftermath.com/

Bill Maher Tells Rachel Maddow He Hates Republicans as Much as She Does   "Bill Maher Tuesday made a statement on MSNBC that would be truly embarrassing for the so-called news network if any of its executives cared at all about being an impartial disseminator of information."

We’re There to Help/ And they’re there to kill us.



Islamic Rage Boy, professional protester


 Andrew C. McCarthy  "You’ve got to hand it to Allah: All that smiting and instilling terror works. General Petraeus is so terrified of what rampaging Afghan Muslims might do next that he could not bring himself to utter a word of criticism for their barbarity. Instead, as he offered condolences to the victims’ families, his wrath was targeted at Terry Jones.

"Jones is the pastor of an obscure Christian congregation in Gainseville, Fla., where he ceremonially burned a Koran last month. Mind you, it is standard practice to torch Bibles in Muslim countries, where apostasy from Islam is a capital offense and where proselytism of any creed other than Islam is forbidden. About that noxious practice, General Petreaus hasn’t made a peep — which goes a long way toward explaining why our military itself actually confiscated and destroyed Bibles in Afghanistan last year."

‘Coming Apart at the Seams’; America’s deepening class divide

Rich Lowry; National Review Online:  “The American Constitution is remarkable for its simplicity; but it can only suffice a people habitually correct in their actions, and would be utterly inadequate to the wants of a different nation. Change the domestic habits of the Americans, their religious devotion, and their high respect for morality, and it will not be necessary to change a single letter of the Constitution in order to vary the whole form of their government.” Quoting 19th-century observer of American life Francis Grund