Personal Aside: Obama Oh-So-Slightly Tacks Center—But Not Nearly Enough…Arizona Gives Us the Chance to Dump McCain: Hallelujah!

 Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas*

         

                                        Rhetoric Closer but No Cigar.

            In his State of the Union last night President Obama moved rhetorically, not practically, oh-so-slightly toward the political center—but missed by a country mile to accommodate the views of a nation which by polls and election returns has shown it has moved to the farthest reaches of center-right.

            In an 80-minute speech which was well delivered but far too long, Obama ceded very few points to the Right when analyzed cogently…but here were some faint inducements:

• He endorsed nuclear energy.  Long a bugaboo with the frenetic Left, he made a passing reference to our building more nuclear plants but left the details…including goofy regulations which can make such plant-building unprofitable…unspecified.

• He endorsed a $38 billion tax break for small business—probably the first formal recognition in concrete policy that recovery depends upon inducements given to job-creating business to expand.

           To counter these inducements to the right, he tossed out red-meat to the Left which constitutes his political base…including these things:

• For possibly the first time in U. S. history he denounced a Supreme Court ruling while members of the Court sat directly in front of the House rostrum. This was, to me, an old State of the Union watcher who in 1958 watched from the House gallery Dwight Eisenhower address the Congress during the height of the Cold War, by all odds the most electrifying point in the speech.

         I thought his Dutch Uncle talk to a co-equal branch of     government by leering at their faces from his vantage-point on the podium was the most electrifying… but at the same time most offensive… part of the speech—the most violative of separation of powers since FDR lambasted his Court by calling it “the nine old men” and launched a failed drive to pack the Court (yet liberalized the Court by his threat to pack it which produced a shift in its ideology, known as “the switch in time that saved Nine.” 

         Obama’s brazen attack on the independent Judiciary was prompted by the Court’s vote last week (5 to 4) which allowed corporations to utilize 1^st amendment rights to express their political views to the American people—not by corporate contributions but by ratifying their right to free speech which liberals feel is discriminatory, not withstanding that labor unions have long exercised that very right.   Of course, media corporations have always exercised that right—General Electric which runs NBC for instance as well as the giant newspapers.  It’s just the non-media ones have been deprived by acceptance of the view that free speech should be curtailed by non-media corporations—a fallacious theory that the Court decided fails the test of the Constitution. 

Staring down at them from High Up in a mode of imperial autocracy,

Obama urged the Congress to pass a statute which would rectify the decision—a blunt challenge to the Court as the jurists sat impassively.  Given the new zest for opposition to Obama’s leftward proposals in the country, I imagine that the battle to pass the legislation which prior to Massachusetts should have been easy to pass, now will be difficult given the rightward temper of the country. 

           Then Obama courted one-by-one the exotic components of liberaldom, including the gays by

• Calling for the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military, a cardinal overture to the Left. 

• Calling for yet another “stimulus package” describing the first one, amounting to $787 billion, a “success” even though three members of his administration appeared on TV talk shows Sunday…Axelrod, Jarrett and Gibbs…and none could agree onthe number of jobs purportedly created or “saved”—blowing a kiss to labor and the statist Left…despite the fact that this would further jeopardize the economy and add to the deficit.       

•   Calling for tougher lobbyist restrictions on what he called “the Special Interests” which clearly means big corporations whom he pummeled relentlessly in demagogic populism to appeal to the craving of the Left since to the Left the constitutional right to seek redress of grievance should be outlawed to business but available to labor unions and exotic liberal groups.        

• Resorting to the old bromide that dates back to William Jennings Bryan of 1896 in Chicago by calling for higher taxes on the “rich” heedless of the fact that penalizing the rich direly affects their ability to improvise with entrepreneurial investments, massaging the anti-corporate Left which so freely ignores lobbying registration anyhow, viewing their activities a “the people’s work.”  

• Pleaded again for passage of his mammoth health care bill, repeating the old nostrum that it will cut the deficit at the same time bringing full and complete health care to everyone in the nation which is an economic possibility to even an 8-year-old but not apparent to an orator in full swing turning to multiple teleprompters.

                                             The Same Old Obama.

             In essence it was the same old Obama Leftist nonsense only slightly repositioned to make a posture that it was more moderate.  He hasn’t learned a single thing from the drastic change in political climate…the elections of Republican governors in heavily blue New Jersey, in somewhat purple Virginia and the sweep of a Republican senator in liberal sacrosanct Massachusetts.

                        Surprising Snub of Obama by Emanuel.

                I think I detected something after his speech that I haven’t seen commented on.  After the president left the rostrum he did what every president does, shake hands with his administration leaders sitting at the foot of the podium.  When he got to Rahm Emanuel, Emanuel seemed to turn away frostily and Obama moved on.   Did you see that as well?  This seems to confirm a few weird actions circulating about Emanuel in the last few days.  

               One was the surprise leak…or at any event disclosure…last week in a Washington Post gossip column that Emanuel was thinking of the possibility of returning to Chicago to run for mayor!  It was so impolitic that it almost smacked of political suicide.  If Rich Daley decides not to run which is highly-highly unlikely, I can guarantee you that this fulminating little vituperative sleaze-ball famed for spraying the “f” word to every man and woman with whom he comes in contact is not going to have any chance of being considered as successor. Daley ignored response and a day or so later Emanuel was obsequious in his praise of Daley as the greatest individual of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.  

               Okay, so maybe Emanuel just got into some bad ice at a cocktail party and blurted it to the wrong person.  I’d have let it go at that except that the other day on Katie Couric he appeared and said that the Massachusetts defeat need not have happened—it was preventable.  An amazing statement that led Couric rightly to follow up and ask who was responsible—“was it you?”  Emanuel drew himself up in self-righteous anger and said: “Was it me?”  She clarified and said, well wasn’t it the White House?  It was clear Emanuel was not about to take the rap for the loss.  But he has been blamed for the defeat, mainly by Celinda Lake, Coakley’s pollster.  

              Actually, Emanuel deserves major blame for Obama’s plummeting stature—but, make no mistake, the central part of the blame should fall on Obama who is himself a Far Left president, certainly the most ideologically port-side president ever to have been elected. But Emanuel was responsible for misreading of the 2008 election as a mandate to pile the plate heapingly high with every exotic wish of the Left.  His own statement that an emergency should not be wasted was key to that.  My feeling is that what we’re seeing is the soon-to-occur departure of Rahm Emanuel as the goat for Massachusetts and everything else bad that’s happened to Obama. 

                                       Dumping McCain.

              The best book of the 2008 campaign is Game Change.  If you go to page 272 you’ll find Candidate John McCain in full flower…shouting at the top of his lungs the “f” word repeatedly.  McCain was probably the best candidate Republicans could have found in 2008.  No Republican could have been elected during a highly unpopular war and in the midst of the worst economic meltdown since 1929.  Given this fact, McCain did better than almost everyone else and brilliantly added a component that stimulated the grassroots, the nomination of Sarah Palin.

                Still, it’s time to get rid of the Maverick and let him retire at age 74 as the war hero he indubitably is.  He should get off the stage.   He has been a very mixed quantity for many years, having foisted on the country the McCain-Feingold Act that had no business being passed, was based on liberal prejudice and now has been vitiated by the Supreme Court. He has been such a recalcitrant old explosive tyrant to live with that he has turned off his wife Cindy and his daughter Meghan. Make  no mistake, they’re embracing same-sex marriage at the same time Old John is trying to rebuild his frayed relations with the Right is an attempt to torpedo this little Short Fuse.   

      J. C. Hayworth is running against McCain in the Republican primary.  Here’s hoping we can send him off the scene of political battle where one day he embraces the Right, one day the Left and with his distressed family caused by his own selfishness and overbearing.  For the family’s sake let’s give John a farewell salute and a one-way ticket to Phoenix or any of his six other houses Cindy has supplied him with and which he cannot quite remember. 

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    *: Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas [AD 1225-1274].. I was named Thomas after my maternal grandfather Thomas F. Cleary whose name was bequeathed from Irish who cherished Thomas the Apostle, the Doubter. But of course ever since I walked into Ernie’s class on the first day, Sept.14, 1946, I heard about Aquinas and have grown to love his postulates…listing a Thesis e.g. “It has been maintained that government is a good.”  Then follows a series of objections.  Followed by Thomas’ reason: “On the contrary, I aver that…” How I loved Ernie’s portrayal of those postulates which went on largely for four straight years until 1950. We believed in fact that Ernie, as he swept by our student chairs, reciting from memory the arguments, that Ernie WAS in fact Aquinas.  Aquinas was born near Aquino, Italy and was sent…believe it or not…at the age of five to the Benedictine monastery at Mount Cassino as an oblate to begin his education.

      In 1239 they thought he was coming home an educated man at age 14 but alas to their discomfiture he wanted to continue his studies and went to Naples to continue his education…and, Ernie said, unfortunately, to join of all things THE DOMINICANS!  His family was so angered that members kidnapped him and held him captive for 14 months hoping he would change his mind. He was immovable so he rejoined the Dominicans and continued his studies at the University of Paris.  Thus began formally the matriculation of one of the greatest minds ever to serve the West and
Catholicism received its greatest and most towering intellect.