Wallace: Sorry for the “flake” question

I’d have put this into the earlier thread, but given the massive response to Chris Wallace’s question this morning to Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), it seems fairer to give this a fresh look. Not long after Wallace asked Bachmann if she was a “flake” for making a few gaffes over the last few years, Wallace heard an earful from his audience. He faced the criticism head-on and apologized in a Fox News Sunday web video:http://hotair.com/archives/2011/06/26/wallace-sorry-for-the-flake-question/

Give the man some credit. Wallace didn’t offer a “sorry if you were offended by my genius” non-apology apology. He deduced — rightly — that having the question overshadow the answer in an interview is usually a mistake, and accepted it as such. Wallace is right that Bachmann’s perceived seriousness is a legitimate topic for an interview, considering her status as a presidential candidate, but at the very least Wallace should have provided better contextual basis for his question. Had he said, “So-and-so called you a flake,” or better yet, “So-and-so questioned your seriousness in light of these gaffes,” he would have opened the same topic but in a better and more fair manner for Bachmann to respond.

As Wallace says, every day is a learning experience. More than a few people in his position would be tempted to dig in and defend a poor choice. Kudos to Wallace for learning a lesson and admitting to it.

Still, when will the national media start questioning Obama’s seriousness if rhetorical gaffes are the determining factor, as they apparently are for Republicans such as Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and George W. Bush? That’s a question I ask almost every day in the Obamateurism feature.

Like Chauncey Gardiner, Obama is profoundly aloof

Which past leader does Barack Obama most closely resemble? His admirers, not all of them liberals, used to compare him with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

Well, Obama announced his candidacy in Lincoln's hometown two days before Abe's birthday, and he did expand the size and scope of government. But no one seriously compares him with Lincoln or FDR any more.

Conservative critics have taken to comparing him, as you might imagine, with Jimmy Carter. The more cruel among them, like the Weekly Standard's Jay Cost, say the comparison is not to Obama's advantage.

But there is another comparison I think more appropriate for a president who, according to one of his foreign-policy staffers, prefers to "lead from behind." The man I have in mind is Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 movie "Being There."

As you may remember, Gardiner is a clueless gardener who is mistaken for a Washington eminence and becomes a presidential adviser. Asked if you can stimulate growth through temporary incentives, Gardiner says, "As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well in the garden." "First comes the spring and summer," he explains, "but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again." The president is awed as Gardiner sums up, "There will be growth in the spring."

Kind of reminds you of Obama's approach to the federal budget, doesn't it?

In preparing his February budget, Obama totally ignored the recommendations of his own fiscal commission headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Others noticed: The Senate rejected the initial budget by a vote of 97-0.

Then, speaking in April at George Washington University, Obama said he was presenting a new budget with $4 trillion in long-term spending cuts. But there were no specifics.

Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf was asked last week if the CBO had prepared estimates of this budget. "We don't estimate speeches," Elmendorf, a Democrat, explained. "We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech for us to do our analysis."

Evidently "first we have the spring and summer" was not enough.

Then Obama deputized Vice President Biden and congressional leaders to handle negotiations over raising the debt ceiling. Biden apparently did a good job of letting everyone set out their positions and interact.

But last Thursday two influential Republicans, Eric Cantor and Jon Kyl, left the bargaining table and said that they wouldn't return until Democrats dropped demands for tax increases. After all, if the Democrats hadn't been able to raise taxes on high earners when they had large majorities in December's lame duck session, what makes anyone think this more Republican Congress will raise them now?

Cantor said it was impossible to make progress unless Obama got personally involved. Top Senate Democrat Harry Reid said the same thing. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, fresh from making a bipartisan compromise on public employee benefits, offered succinct advice: "First, the president can show up."

Well, Obama has agreed to do that Monday. But while Chauncey Gardiner, in his befuddlement, tried to answer questions squarely, Obama has seemed less interested in the substance of public policy than in framing issues for the next presidential campaign.

That was plainly the case in the decisions on Afghanistan he announced Wednesday night. Regardless of conditions on the ground, the president promised that the last of the surge troops will be removed by September 2012, the month Democrats hold their national convention.

As for Libya, Obama pretends we're not involved in "hostilities" and has been content to "lead from behind." Another sop to the antiwar left.

Sometimes it seems he's president of the AFL-CIO, not the USA. The man who said he wanted to double exports in five years has nothing to say about his National Labor Relations Board appointee's attempt to shut down a $1 billion plant being built by the nation's No. 1 exporter.

And don't forget the enviro types. Obama is releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but his appointees are barring drilling in the Gulf and Alaska and refusing approval for a natural gas pipeline from Canada.

On all these issues Obama seems oddly disengaged, aloof from the hard work of government, hesitant about making choices.

That doesn't sound like Lincoln. Or Roosevelt. Or even Carter. More like "then we have fall and winter."

Michael Barone,The Examiner's senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Wednesday and Sunday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.

MO


Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/06/chauncey-gardiner-obama-profoundly-aloof#ixzz1QPa4TSur

Great moments in journalism: “Are you a flake?”

I can understand why Chris Wallace asked this question. Given his guest’s propensity for gaffes, such as picking the name of a dead hero as a live Medal of Honor winner, botching a toast to Queen Elizabeth II, discussing the high points of the Austrian language, and several references to a military medic as a “corpseman,” it might be hard to take the person seriously.

Oh, wait — Wallace wasn’t interviewing Barack Obama after all:

Jim Hoft calls this “awful,” but it’s just the same old double standard applied to Republicans. We have yet to hear any serious coverage from the national media of Obama’s hundreds of gaffes while in the White House, just as we heard little of his “57 or 58 states” remark and other gaffes on the campaign trail, such as the six-month string that produced these doozies:

• The Selma March in 1965 did not contribute to his birth in 1961.
• Kansas tornadoes in May 2007 killed 12 people, not “ten thousand”.
• Afghans do not speak Arabic.
• Within 24 hours, Obama reversed his assertion that Iran did not pose a “serious threat” to the US to an assertion that the threat is “grave”.
• Declaring that Memorial Day honors an “unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today“
• Saying that his uncle liberated Auschwitz
• Asserted that the Nuremberg tribunals offered habeas corpus and appeal rights
• Referred to “the bomb that fell on Pearl Harbor“

Did any of the national media ask Barack Obama in the summer of 2008 if he was a “flake”? Bachmann has not been without her gaffes, although she has improved her media interactions substantially since the “anti-American” comment in November 2008. But given Obama’s track record both before and after his election to the presidency, it would take a superhuman effort to vault into his league. And the media still mainly ignores Obama’s gaffes, which have grown into the hundreds, without a single outlet ever asking Obama if he is a “flake” on that same basis.

It could be that Wallace was giving Bachmann an opening to push back against the “flake” meme, but the fact that Bachmann’s having to respond to this rather than the gaffemaster in the White House is the real problem.

Gilead Shalit's family protest is misdirected: Hamas rejects all bargains

Five years after the Israeli soldier Gilead Shalit was kidnapped by Hamas in a cross-border raid from Gaza, members of his family Saturday, June 25, chained themselves to the fence outside the Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's residence in support of their desperate demand to pay any price for his release.

debkafile's sourcesreport that their protest is entirely misdirected: Even if Israel bowed to every Hamas demand, this Palestinian terrorist organization, backed by Iran and Syria, would come back with a new condition because they have no intention of letting this prime asset out of their hands.
Netanyahu's predecessors and Israel defense ministers have run foul of this cruel reality. One well-intentioned mediator after another - German, Norwegian, Palestinian, Egyptian and French – has run into this same blank wall.

The Shalit familyknows the truth. So why do they maintain the pretense that the prime minister has the power to rescue their son from captivity - if he wished - and let themselves to be exploited by a flock of "artists," political hacks and other attention-seekers who show solidarity by chaining themselves to fences outside their own high-end homes ready for photo-ops?
Why don't they focus their agonizing protests on the perpetrators of their tragedy and stage demonstrations outside Islamic and Arab institutions around the world which support the Palestinian fundamentalists ruling the Gaza Strip. They might at least raise enough international pressure to alleviate the inhumanity of the conditions in which Gilead Shalit's is held –no access to Red Cross or human rights organizations, no communication with the outside world including his family and no sign of life – violations of every standard of international law and decency from the word go.
Shalit was never a prisoner of war in any legal sense. He was not captured in battle but kidnapped by a terrorist gang made up of Hamas and Iranian and Hizballah agents, which raided Israel in a coordinated cross-border surprise attack from the Gaza Strip.
Even if Hamas' military chief Mohammed al-Jabry decided to let him go, he would be obliged to obtain permission from Iran, Syria and Hizballah.

Netanyahu's predecessor Ehud Olmert missed the only real chance of breaking the missing soldier out of prison by military means. In the third week of January, at the end of Israel's Cast Lead operation against Hamas missile attacks, a group of commanders asked for a 48- hour extension in order to capture Hamas leaders and hold them as ransom for Shalit – or least as chips for serious bargaining. Olmert and the chief of staff at the time, Lt. Gen. Gaby Ashkenazi, refused the request.
From the start, Hamas itself has never presented a uniform front on the fate of Shalit. It is not as though the Palestinian terrorist group has ever agreed to negotiate with Israel or even maintain an orderly bargaining channel. In some cases, as the various mediators discovered, a Hamas representation would come forward with a proposal, only to disappear later. They would all claim they had no idea who is holding the Israeli soldier and were just messengers. In the past five years, new Israeli offers have mostly been greeted with long silence.
Hamas leaders only come to life when a new political opportunity presents itself.
A month ago, for instance, elements of Egyptian intelligence announced they had brokered a unity pact between the rival Palestinian Fatah and Hamas factions, following which they opened the Rafah crossing between Sinai and the Gaza Strip on May 28. Cairo then informed Washington and Jerusalem that the release of Gilead Shalit was one of Egypt's the conditions for continuing the process. Hamas' Damascus-based leader Khaled Meshaal had been so informed, they said, and accepted this condition.
In less than two weeks, the unity pact had dissolved along with all the promises which accompanied it, including the Israeli soldier's release.

His parents Noam and Malka Shalit refuse to be concerned by any setbacks, maintaining that their government is responsible for its soldiers and therefore responsible for recovering their son. They also present a horrific picture of his incarceration in a dark underground cell, which no intelligence source has been able to confirm.
Since all avenues of negotiations have been blocked, the only way left to rescue the soldier would seem to be a military operation. Here, it must be admitted, that Israeli intelligence has failed to discover his place of confinement.
Still, a series of commando raids could be mounted to capture Hamas's political and military leaders and carry them into Israel as hostages against Shalit's release.
Such operations are never smooth going: They would entail the loss of Israeli soldiers' lives and casualties among Palestinian civilians with no guarantee of success. And finally, no one can be sure how Gilead Shalit would be treated or come out of such a raid.

That is the only option open today to the Israeli prime minister – not whether or not to release 1,000 or more Palestinian terrorists. That is not on the table. Netanyahu can either send the army into the Gaza Strip for an operation which the captive soldier may or may not survive or let the propaganda machine manipulating his desperate family continue to misrepresent him as refusing to pay the price for releasing their son.

If a drunk driver crashed his speeding rental car into your house and killed your spouse, you would be outraged if law enforcers took bribes and refused to give the driver a blood test. If the judge then gave the killer a small fine and ordered you to pay the fine and pay for all the damages, you'd be outraged. If the government then handed the drunk-driver keys to a bigger faster rental car, handed the drunk driver an even bigger bottle of whiskey, and then gave you the rental bill; you'd storm Washington, blizzard elected officials with protests and organize friends and associates to vote these malefactors, the elected officials that betrayed your trust, out of office.

Yet, we've remained largely silent in the face of the same sort of behavior by Wall Street and Washington. Bonus-seeking bankers crashed into Main Street's economy and ran control frauds within banks that would have failed without taxpayer bailouts. Bureaucrats and elected officials bailed them out without demanding consequences. Bankers are revving their engines again in credit derivatives, currency derivatives, and commodities trades. "Financial reform" addresses none of the latter problems.

Isn't it time to ask the simple question: Are not the government folks the actual crooks?

There are times I wonder. Janet then goes on to raise a couple of other excellent points:

When it comes to the type of violent crime referred to by the Superintendent, he has his cause and effects all wrong, and he made it all about racism. He equated gun laws to "government sponsored racism."

If criminals didn't have guns, they would use knives. The killings in our African American communities have nothing to do with racism. These are black-on-black crimes perpetrated by criminals with no respect for authority and no self-respect. They victimize and terrorize decent members of the black community struggling to survive a devastating economic crisis. The Chicago Police Superintendent's pandering and misinformation doesn't make it easy for anyone to respect authority.

Well, actually, gun laws are government-sponsored racism, but not in the way he intimated - it's exactly the opposite.

You see, gun laws were originally all about keeping black people from having the ability to shoot members of the KKK who intended to string them up (often after burning their house down.) It's damn hard to lynch a man who has a rifle and is willing to use it. It's much easier if you first make it illegal for him to have the rifle, and being a law-abiding citizen he doesn't go acquire one illegally....

The same, incidentally, is true of marriage laws. They didn't exist at the founding of America. They were, however, very convenient when it came time to prevent "miscagenation" - that is, black men from marrying white women. Why that's scandalous - and easy to prevent if the couple-to-be has to present themselves and seek permission from the State for what is supposed to be a religious and sacramental event!

Janet also brings up another excellent point: If the Catholic Church is going to enjoy tax exempt status as a religious institution, what is it doing holding political rallies that reinforce a viewpoint that is in fact bigoted and intended to victimize people of color while lying about both the history and current impact of said leftist political positions?

Hmmmmm....

Public Unions Reject Sweetheart Deal in Connecticut, 7,500 Layoffs Coming Up

I am constantly in awe of the blatant stupidity of rank-and-file public union workers. In Connecticut, AFSCME and other public unions voted down a proposal negotiated over many months that contained a "no layoff" clause for 4 years in return for a pay freeze for 2 years.

That was an amazingly generous offer. The state was silly to offer it. Nonetheless, Union Deal Shot Down; Malloy Pledges To Cut Close To 7,500 State Workers

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said Friday that he was moving "full steam ahead'' with plans to lay off 7,500 state employees, as leaders of the AFSCME union announced that their members had officially rejected a savings and concession deal that would have given them layoff protection for four years.

The administration has ruled out a renegotiation with the unions because the multi-faceted agreement took months of intense negotiations and compromises to complete. Malloy said he and his budget team intend to release layoff notices "as soon as possible" to balance the budget.

"I have a big job to do, and we're going to do it," Malloy told reporters Friday. "Listen, I don't want to be laying off 7,500 people or more. I think it's bad for the economy. I think it's bad public policy."

Reflections on Good Public Policy

Malloy was elected governor primarily on the back of votes from labor unions. That explains the sweetheart deal offer. Union stupidity explains why the deal was rejected.

A good deal for taxpayers in Connecticut would be to get rid of unions, not guarantee no layoffs for 4 years.

Malloy says "Listen, I don't want to be laying off 7,500 people or more. I think it's bad for the economy. I think it's bad public policy."

Mish says laying off 7,500 public union workers is good public policy and good for the economy. Indeed, firing 100% of them would be the ultimate in good public policy.

There is not a damn thing that public unions workers can do cheaper or better than private industry. Taxpayers foot the bill for the difference.

Turkey renews strategic ties with Israel ahead of showdown with Syria

After more than a year of strained relations, Turkey has decided to restore military and intelligence collaboration in the eastern Mediterranean with Israel as Ankara heads for a military showdown with Syria, according to debkafile's exclusive military sources. The deal worked out between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu also gives Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan a role in Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy and a chance to bring Hamas into the process.
The deal was discussed in a telephone conversation that took place between the US president and Turkish prime minister last Tuesday June 21, hours after Assad's hardnosed speech at Damascus University. The last ends were tied up when Israel's Deputy Prime Minister, Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon, visited Ankara secretly last week and met Erdogan and Fidan Hakan, the head of Turkish intelligence MIT.

Obama and Erdogan agreed that Bashar Assad's reign was over although both their intelligence agencies gave him another four to six months to hang on. To hasten his end, they decided on a two-part campaign: the US and Europe would step up sanctions on Syria and Turkey would raise the military heat.
This decision prompted US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to comment for the first time on a possible Turkish-Syrian military clash: "…we're going to see an escalation of conflict in the area," she said.

Saturday, June 25, Turkey began setting up a big new camp to accommodate a further influx of 12,000 to 15,000 Syrian refugees at Apaydin 10 kilometers from the border, on the opposite side of which Syria's crack 4^th Division is massing tanks under the command of Syrian Republican Guard commander Gen. Maher Assad, the president's brother.
The numbers of refugees continued to swell after soldiers again opened fire on tens of thousands of demonstrators who poured into the streets after Friday prayers, killing at least nineteen.
As Syrian-Turkish military tensions continue to escalate, Ankara saw the necessity of coordinating its air and naval operations with the United States and Israel in case the Syrian ruler responded to a border flare-up by launching surface missiles against Turkish military targets and US bases in Turkey. Obama urged Erdogan and Hakan to get together with the Israeli minister Yaalon to work things out, a move that would call up the old close strategic bonds between Turkey and Israel before they the rupture over Israel's 2009 Cast Lead operation against Hamas in Gaza, the Turkish flotilla episode of May 2010 and other incidents.

Calling off Turkey's critical participation in the next big flotilla scheduled for this month to breaking Israel's Gaza blockade indicated the ice was melting.

For the sake of opening a new chapter between Jerusalem and Turkey, our sources disclose that Netanyahu gave in to Obama's request to give Erdogan another chance to promote Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy – this time by bringing Hamas aboard. The Turkish prime minister believes he has a fair chance of altering Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal's inflexible resistance to recognizing Israel.
After meeting Meshaal's rival, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, in Ankara Friday, June 24, Erdogan said "Turkey would mobilize support to help the Palestinians achieve recognition and form their own state." Abbas replied: "There will be no turning back from the road to reconciliation [with Hamas]."

Abbas and Meshaal were both in the Turkish capital at the same time, although they denied meeting.
Confirmation that the Turkish prime minister had returned to the role of Israel-Palestinian broker, which he resigned in anger after Israel's Gaza operation in 2009, came from Jerusalem: Thursday, June 23, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told a visiting group of Turkish journalists: "We also accept and respect the fact that Turkey is a regional power with a great historic role."

As to Ankara's bid to broker reconciliation between Abbas and Meshaal and get them to sign a power-sharing accord, the Israeli official commented: "It is also in our interests that the Palestinians have unity. We know once they sign, they sign for everybody and we don't have to worry about this."

debkafile's political sources: Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman have obviously recognized that if the price for Israel-Turkish reconciliation and a return strategic collaboration is accepting Hamas' presence on the Palestinian side of the negotiating table, it is worth paying. They have apparently conceded the long-held principle not to deal with a Palestinian terrorist group dedicated to Israel's destruction without seeking cabinet endorsement.