There can be no excuse for Mr. Obama's 2012 budget. It is a disaster. Worse, it is a distraction. With it, Mr. Obama has abdicated one of the most serious duties of his office, to lead the government at the head of which he sits.
Mr. Obama is leading the American people into depths way over our heads, and way over his.
With his 2012 budget proposal, Mr. Obama will consign 100 million American children to lives of perpetual servitude, selling them into slavery with his debt.
He's requesting the authority to spend $45,000 from our three children's pockets, just this year. Over the course of his remaining presidency, he will charge more on their good credit than we have spent on them their entire lives to date. Worse, he's spent and borrowed that much already and now want's to double down.
Truly, has he no honor?
We owe it to our children and their children to stop his insanity.
Now.
As I forecast on Monday, when push came to shove it was Mr. Mubarak who did the pushing and shoving.
Just hours after Mr. Obama told us that today was an historic day in Egypt, and just hours after our intelligence chiefs announced to us, and apparently Mr. Obama, that Mubarak was resigning: Surprise!
In just ten days Mr. Obama has reinforced for the entire world to see three truths:
In the current contest of wills between Hosni Mubarak and Barack Obama, who will come out on top?
Leaving aside the almost daily uncertainty over the Obama administration's position, which seems to cycle more frequently and extremely than the tides at Fundy, my money is on Mr. Mubarak. As the entire world's people, especially in the Middle East but mysteriously not including Americans, now knows, Mr. Obama is at his best verbally belittling our friends and bolstering our enemies. For better or worse, however, Mr. Obama's comfort with tools, whether foreign or domestic, extends only to the words he speaks.
On the other hand, Mr. Mubarak has an array of very tangible tools with which to affect his own destiny and a will proven fully capable of their exercise. He has armed forces, political favors, economic largess, the domestic press and a plethora of embedded special interests to use as needed and during his 30 years in office, some tumultuous, he's displayed a willingness to use them all.
Given the combination of America's purse and its bumbling in the area, it's reasonable to think that U. S. capabilities and leadership have been a special focus for Egyptian intelligence and the Mubarak administration. After all, the U. S. has sent Egypt's government more than $50 billion to keep Mr. Mubarak's in office for three decades. He's going to know everything there is to know that's important about the people making the decisions so critical to him.
Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has made no significant effort to understand Egypt, its people, the demonstrators, the opposition or Mr. Mubarak. The administration has stumbled and bumbled through the first week of demonstrations, taking nearly every conceivable position in rapid sequence. It has spoken in private and public, in whispers and shouts, through far too many contradictory voices.
Mr. Obama has few tools in hand, none of them determinative. He has retreated to his tendency to vote "present" at each juncture rather than engage and remain so.
Mr. Obama is our weakest President in more than a century. Mr. Mubarak knows this and is operating from a position of strength.
What's amazing is that Mr. Mubarak's position is far better for Egyptians than the one envisioned in the White House.
