WASHINGTON -- Suppose someone -- say, the president of United States -- proposed the following: We are drowning in debt. More than $14 trillion right now. I've got a great idea for deficit reduction. It will yield a savings of $230 billion over the next 10 years: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion.
WASHINGTON -- The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the "climate of hate" created by Sarah Palin, the tea party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents and sundry other liberal betes noires.
WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 -- and House Democrats don't have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years -- which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat?
WASHINGTON -- In an increasingly desperate attempt to develop a narrative for the coming Democratic collapse, the Democrats have indulged themselves in what for half a century they've habitually attributed to the American right -- the paranoid style in American politics. The talk is of dark conspiracies -- secret money, foreign influence, big corporations, with Karl Rove and, yes, Ed Gillespie lurking ominously behind the scenes. The only thing missing is the Halliburton-Cheney angle.
WASHINGTON -- When facing a tsunami, what do you do? Pray, and tell yourself stories. I am not privy to the Democrats' private prayers, but I do hear the stories they're telling themselves. The new meme is that there's a civil war raging in the Republican Party. The tea party will wreck it from within and prove to be the Democrats' salvation.
WASHINGTON -- Tuesday in Delaware was a bad day not only for Republicans but for conservatives. Tea partier Christine O'Donnell scored a stunning victory over establishment Republican Mike Castle. Stunning but pyrrhic. The very people who have most alerted the country to the perils of President Obama's social democratic agenda may have just made it impossible for Republicans to retake the Senate and definitively stop that agenda.
WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama's considerable political capital, earned on Election Day 2008, is spent. Well spent, mind you, on the enactment of a highly ideological agenda of Obamacare, financial reform and a near trillion-dollar stimulus that will significantly transform the country. But spent nonetheless. There's nothing left with which to complete his social-democratic ambitions.
WASHINGTON -- In the political marketplace, there's now a run on Obama shares. The left is disappointed with the president. Independents are abandoning him in droves. And the right is already dancing on his political grave, salivating about November when, his own press secretary admitted Sunday, Democrats might lose the House.
WASHINGTON -- Remember NASA? It once represented to the world the apogee of American scientific and technological achievement. Here is President Obama's vision of NASA's mission, as explained by administrator Charles Bolden:
WASHINGTON -- President Obama was fully justified in dismissing Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The firing offense did not rise to the level of insubordination -- this was no MacArthur undermining the commander in chief's war strategy -- but it was a serious enough show of disrespect for the president and for the entire civilian leadership to justify relief from his post.
