BloggeRhythms

 

 

It’s truly amazing how consistently the incumbent abjectly refutes facts in his incessant public ramblings.

 

According to Fox News.com, Thursday in Minnesota, a fundraiser capped off a day the incumbent spent with Rebekah Erler, a working mother who wrote the president to detail her financial struggle. ‘It moved me,’ Obama said of the letter, adding that he only went into politics to help people like her. Obama said he remembered what it felt like to be struggling to figure out ‘how you lead a good life and raise your kids, not looking to get wildly wealthy… trying to make ends meet. That’s what we should be talking about every day in Washington,’ he said. ‘We talk about everything else. .. We talk about phony scandals. We talk about Benghazi. and we talk about polls and we talk about the tea party and we talk about the latest controversy... We don’t talk about her.’”

 

Reading his comment that ‘It moved me,” and his blithely adding that “he only went into politics to help people like her,” caused me to repeat below from yesterday’s Breitbart.com report by William Bigelow saying that “University of Michigan researchers have released a study stating that the disparity between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of the country has grown because of the Great Recession and the slow recovery. According to the study, the top 5% of Americans averaged 24 times as much wealth as the wealth of the median American family in 2013; in 2007 they averaged 16.5 times as much.” 

 

What’s more: “Only 64.8% of Americans own homes, as opposed to 69.2% in 2004.” 

 

And even worse: “The study asserted that all households lost money during the recession and no group has fully regained what it lost. Still, the top 5% lost 16% of their net worth since 2007, while the median households lost a whopping 43%.”

 

So, if he only went into politics to help people like Ms Erler and the results he’s achieved are the complete and utter reverse, I guess it’s no wonder that the rest of his decisions have resulted in shambles.

 

And one of those shambles, foreign policy, is highlighted by Victor Davis Hanson of the the Hoover Institute who writes that, “Sometimes authoritarians sent their armies across national borders or were guilty of genocide; at other times, unhinged nation-states and free-lancing zealots sponsored or committed acts of international terrorism. In response, the U.S.—sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much—has gone to war or at least gone after the likes of Moammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Slobodan Milosevic, Ho Chi Minh, Manuel Noriega, Kim Il-sung, and the Taliban. Like it or not, only the United States can prevent the theocracy in Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the Assad dictatorship from gassing its own people, or al Qaeda from staging another 9/11 attack.

 

Unfortunately, it has not offered systematic defense of the world order it inherited. For all the grand talk of working with the United Nations, the Obama administration ignored it in Syria, vastly exceeded its no-fly-zone and humanitarian aid resolutions in Libya, and misled it when it asserted to the General Assembly that a video-maker had prompted the violence against U.S. facilities in Benghazi. Moreover, Obama’s foreign policy team has serially faulted the prior administration as unilateral, forgetting that it obtained UN resolutions to retaliate in Afghanistan, tried desperately to obtain them for the Iraq invasion, and then assembled a large and diverse group of allies.

 

The last line in the article says it all, “Americans did not fully appreciate the costly postwar global order that the United States had established over the last seventy years. Maybe they will start to as they witness it vanish.”

 

This very well-written short treatise on how, why and where the U.S. has influenced the world is well worth reading, so here’s a link: http://www.hoover.org/research/coming-world-disorder

 

Which brings us to today’s update on Bill Clinton and his wife, as reported in the Washington Post. 

 

“Comparing her and her husband to Mitt Romney, Clinton said their $155 million haul since 2001 did not make them “truly wealthy” because they shield less of their income from taxes than Romney and because they amassed the funds “through dint of hard work.” 

 

The writer then asks the question: “So what was all that hard labor?”

 

Which he answered, as follows: “Her husband talking to other rich people, mostly. Bill Clinton has been paid $104.9 million for 542 speeches around the world between January 2001, when he left the White House, and January 2013, when Hillary stepped down as secretary of state, according to a Washington Post review of the family’s federal financial disclosures. Although slightly more than half of his appearances were in the United States, the majority of his speaking income, $56.3 million, came from foreign speeches, many of them in China, Japan, Canada and the United Kingdom, the Post review found. The financial industry has been Clinton’s most frequent sponsor. The Post review showed that Wall Street banks and other financial services firms have hired Clinton for at least 102 appearances and paid him a total of $19.6 million.”

 

Thus, when you analyze the funds received you realize that the “hard work” was actually well-paid-for hot air, most of it spewed by Bill and not really very much from his quite spoiled wife at all.

 

That’s it for today folks.

 

Adios