"Another Failed Presidency" by Dr. Jeffrey P. Hunt

The following article was published in the American Thinker and written by Dr. Hunt. Enjoy:

Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson. In the modern era, we've seen several failed presidencies--led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ. Failed presidents have one strong common trait-- they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party. Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to China 20.

But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big. Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.

But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president riding in on a wave of unprecedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his tenure and become a lame duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free fall. In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point advantage. This truly is unbelievable. What's going on?

No narrative. Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us. He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us. All successful presidents have a narrative about the American character that intersects with their own where they display a command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives not only touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are. Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose politics don't align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, and Reagan.

But not this president. It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, and is historically illiterate and woefully small minded for the size of the task--all contributory of course. It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience.

In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us--financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job. Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: "For those of you I offended, I apologize. For those of you who were not offended, you just didn't give me enough time; if only I'd had a second term, I could have offended you too."

Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a useful remedy for such a desperate state--staggered terms for both houses of the legislature and the executive. An equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year. With a new Congress, there's always hope of legislative gridlock until we vote for president again two short years after that.

Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them. The coyotes howl but the wagon train keeps rolling along.

Dr. Hunt is a social and cultural anthropologist. He has had nearly 30 years experience in planning, conducting, and managing research in the field of youth studies, and drug and alcohol research. Currently Dr. Hunt is a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Scientific Analysis and the Principal Investigator on three National Institutes on Health projects. He is also a writer for American Thinker.

Margaret Thatcher Said: "The trouble with Socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people's money."

James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union Said: "When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both."

"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus

"A Liberal is a person who will give away everything he doesn't own." - Unknown

Education: The New Black For Liberals

University of Massachusetts will have Raymond Luc Levasseur, the former leader of the revolutionary group United Freedom Front, speak at its campus on November 12th. United Freedom Front is responsible for plotting a series of bombings and bank robberies along the East Coast between 1976 and 1984. Levasseur was the former leader of this group which also fatally shot a New Jersey state trooper and attempted to kill two Massachusetts state troopers.

Levasseur is one of three people scheduled to speak at the Amherst Libraries’ fifth annual Colloquium on Social Change. Citing "academic freedom," the school is allowing Levasseur to speak despite possible protests.

In 2007, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to speak at Columbia University. Despite protests, Ahmadinejad's speech spewed many of his traditional beliefs such as his claims that the Holocaust should be viewed as a "theory" rather than fact. He also defended his belief that Iran cannot recognize Israel "because it is based on ethnic discrimination, occupation and usurpation, and it consistently threatens its neighbors." Many of his statements were met with accelerated applause from a portion of the audience, the rest being anti-Ahmadinejad.

William Ayers is the unrepentant former SDS Weather Underground bomber of the 1960s. Ayers participated in the bombings of New York City Police Department headquarters in 1970, the United States Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972. He is currently a Professor of Education at the University of Chicago at Illinois and an elementary education theorist.

At the University of Chicago, Ayers instructs future school teachers in the areas of social justice, urban educational reform, narrative and interpretive research, children in trouble with the law, and related issues. He was elected by the American Education Research Association (AERA) as vice president and head of its division of curriculum studies in 2008. The AERA defines itself as "the most prominent international professional organization with the primary goal of advancing educational research and its practical application."

Ward Churchill was a University of Colorado at Boulder professor from 1990 to 2007. He famously wrote an essay post- 9/11 called "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" in which he describes President Bush as the world's reigning terrorist, and those businessmen and women who lost their lives on September 11th as "Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who organized Nazi plans to exterminate Europe's Jews.

In that essay, Churchill wrote, "As to those in the World Trade Center ... true enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire." He also referred to President Bush saying, "He absolutely thumbs his nose at the rule of law. He's the head of a rogue state by definition, and it's a rogue state which dispenses carnage on people presumed to be inferior in some set of terms."

In May 2007, Churchill spoke at UC Irvine's Muslim Student Union (MSU) in which he characterized Israel as a terrorist state and then urged MSU students to go to the pro-Israel booth near the lecture hall, take a slice of cake, and eat Israel symbolically. Churchill was removed from his tenured teaching position citing academic misconduct and plagiarism in 2007. He later filed a First Amendment Lawsuit, seeking reinstatement and an unspecified amount of money.

Interestingly enough, 66% of young voters, ages 18-29, voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 elections. With "social justice" and "academic freedom" reducing the patriotic standard of our educational elite to such a lowly position as to invite the president of a Holocaust-denying nation to speak and home-grown terrorists to hold tenured teaching positions at some of our "finest" educational institutions, it is no surprise that socialism, tolerance and anti-American propaganda is the new black.

As you educate the young, so goes their belief system, so goes their vote, and so goes our nation.

Orgy Of Self-Seeking Reveals GOP Void Of Statesmanship

Profound article recently written by Alan Keyes:

With the withdrawal of Dede Scozzafava from contention in the special election in NY's 23rd Congressional District, we see a clear result of implementing Michael Steele's infamous 80/20 approach to candidate selection. Grassroots conservatives still hampered by their allegiance to the Republican Party need to consider the lessons to be drawn from the Republican party's disappearance from that race. Scozzafava was a candidate typical of the predilections of GOP Party bosses and the majority of its big money fundraisers. They believe that the Party's formula for political victory requires people who oppose or just give lip service to conservative stands on the issues of moral principle, like respect for the unalienable right to life and defense of the natural family, but embrace conservative positions on other fronts, especially when it comes to money issues.

But the problem with candidates like Scozzafava is the priorities they represent. Her eager endorsement of the Obama faction Democrat in the race points to the truth. In principal, politicians like her are in tune with the moral and intellectual culture of the leftist Democrats. Their election stands on money issues are a matter of cynical political calculation. In this respect they are exactly what the left has always accused Republicans of being- people willing to sacrifice issues of human life and dignity to win power.

They put money ahead of every other consideration. Then in order to prove that they aren't just promoters of heartless greed and selfishness, they pander to politically correct notions of "tolerance" and "sensitivity" with their stands on issues that involve respect for human nature and moral responsibility. Newt Gingrich cited her stands on the money issues in the statement reported in an article at politico.com "warning conservative activists that their support for a third-party candidate in a key upcoming New York Special election is a "mistake." The former Georgia congressman then rattled off a list of Scozzafava's conservative credentials. "She has signed a no tax increase pledge. She is endorsed by the National Rifle Association. She has come out against cap and trade…She is opposed to the Obama health care plan. She will vote for John Boehner instead of Nancy Pelosi," Gingrich said. "All of those things together make her – it seems to me – a legitimate, authentic, Republican nominee.'"

Former U.S. House speaker Gingrich wants to make it crystal clear that conservative stands on issues of moral principle are not an essential part of the Republican identity. So long as a candidate is right on the issues of money and power, that's all that matters. In a CNN interview the present Minority Leader in the House, John Boehner, took pains to make a similar point. "Clearly she would be on the left side of our party," said Boehner, who had financially supported the campaign of the New York assemblywoman. "...We accept moderates in our party and we want moderates in our party." He then went on to reject the notion that Scozzafava's failure had anything to do with "pressure by the conservative "Tea Party" movement, citing his participation at rallies in Bakersfield, Calif., and Ohio…. I've work with these people, and what they're concerned about is the growing size of government. They want someone who's really going to actively reduce spending and reduce control here in Washington."

Even as their nominee falls prey to the revulsion caused by her denial of the moral principles of liberty, these GOP leaders want to pretend that the angry uprising caused by the Obama faction's betrayal of American values has nothing to do with moral concerns. They desperately want the votes and power that angry uprising may deliver. But they don't want to represent Americans who know in their hearts that the Obama threat isn't just about money or the usual Washington power grab. It represents a profound destruction of the whole American way of life, destruction rooted in Obama's rejection of the moral idea of God-given individual rights, and constitutional government based on the consent of the people.

The battle with the Obama faction is in the end a struggle to determine whether this moral concept of humanity will continue to be the basis for American government, or whether it will be replaced by a moral vision that discards the whole idea of a distinctive human nature so that human beings can be treated simply as objects for manipulation by an all powerful administrative state. At the grassroots many Americans, regardless of political labels, instinctively grasp what is at stake. They long for leaders who also understand, and will rise to defend the moral idea of America, from which so many have gained inspiration and hope, and for which so many have risked or given their lives.

An appreciation for this longing has been a hallmark of American statesmanship when leaders arose in response to the crises of the past. The Republican Party's founding President, Abraham Lincoln, understood and spoke to it as he represented and articulated the moral causes of the American Civil War. But GOP leaders today not only lack the depth for such statesmanship, they appear utterly devoid of any sense of the compassionate concern for humanity from which it arises.

Their preference for so-called "moderates" proves the point. What is moderate about rejecting the natural right of human family life in order to accept a paradigm of human sexuality freed from the responsible discipline of human procreation? What is moderate about rejecting the idea of natural, and therefore inherent, human rights in order to accept a so-called "right" to murder our offspring? This disregard for the natural obligation that binds one generation to the next is precisely what leads to the disgusting orgy of self-seeking that is piling a Mount Everest of debt onto the backs of our posterity with no regard for the national servitude it represents.

Why should we expect people who claim the right to avoid their present responsibilities by killing their living offspring to care about the harm they do to the generations yet unborn? Why should we expect people encouraged to justify such murder with arguments about the inferior "quality" of the life they destroy to stop at similarly discarding the elderly when age takes the shine from their physical existence? If the idea of humanity doesn't prevent murder in the womb, all the more reason it should not prevail against the murder of those whose life declines toward death.

The idea of "moderation" touted by the GOP leadership orphans the very idea of humanity, and with it the fellow feeling (compassion) that should stay the hand from murder and neglect, especially when the victims include our offspring or the parents who engendered our lives. It rejects the disciplined understanding of liberty that made successful constitutional self-government possible in the United States.

By accepting an idea of right that limited and disciplined our choice, we became a people capable of doing what the scoffing philosophers thought impossible- establishing a government of, by and for the people that promotes order and prosperous decency rather than licentious self-destruction. This is true moderation. Real moderates, therefore, will not support people like Scozzafava, or the covert Scozzafavas the cynical, self-seeking GOP leadership insists on foisting off as "conservatives." They will instead seek out representatives who work to conserve the American idea of right. This is the heart and soul of the conservative cause, which in the end is just the cause of lasting liberty.