When the going gets tough on President Obama you can count on him to revise decades of economic history.

[WSJ] President Barack Obama on Thursday said the U.S. has lost some of its competitive edge and gotten a “little soft.”

Mr. Obama, in an interview with WESH-TV in Orlando, said his administration has been tough on the country’s trading partners and tried to strengthen U.S. manufacturing.

“This is a great great country that had gotten a little soft and we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades,” Mr. Obama said in response to a question about the country’s economic future. “We need to get back on track.”

Mr. Obama has faced heavy criticism for his handling of the economy, and the high unemployment rate –9.1%– is threatening his re-election bid.

As a wise man once said, you’re entitled to your own opinions but not to your own facts. Obama’s context may have regarded the strength of trade and manufacturing, but don’t think for a second that he’s not attempting to portray our current economic plight as something that has been building for decades. It’s just not true. Every economic indicator of relevance shows increasing and steady improvement over the last 2-3 decades. Those who pine for the days of assembly-line factories also miss the point: Those losses were often due to technological advances or simply cheaper wages overseas (benefiting consumers with cheaper costs). It’s like crying a river for all of those railroad and telegraph jobs we no longer provide. It makes no sense. We’re an IT and service economy, and we’re better off for that transition.

Jim Geraghty sums it up nicely:

Er, rewind the tape. We didn’t have the competitive edge we needed over the last couple of decades? Which ones? The 1980s, when the free world outlasted the socialist model and triumphed over the Soviet Union without firing a shot? The 1990s, when our economy integrated the technological breakthroughs of the Internet age and our economy grew to new dazzling heights? Or the last decade, where we responded to the most devastating attack in our nation’s history, where our enemies unleashed mass death in our biggest cities, by toppling two brutal regimes, and we did it all with the unemployment rate between 4 and 6 percent?

The facts are easy to find. Let’s take a gander over at the federal government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA, Department of Commerce) and Department of Labor (DOL) web pages, for instance.

In the 1980s, gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an average of a whopping 7.8% per quarter (Thanks Reagan!); in the 1990s it grew at an average of 5.6% (another great average); and in  the 2000s (and let’s stop at Bush’s exit, 4th QTR 2008) it grew at an average of 4.4%. Obama’s GDP quarterly growth from 1st QTR 2009 until now? 2.7%

Um, who’s been less competitive?

You can do the same for unemployment too - and it’s truly where the rubber meets the road. The umemployment rate in the 1980s averaged 7.3%, and that’s coming off the late-70s energy crisis and President Carter’s ineptitude. By the time Reagan left office he had it down to 5.3%. In the 1990s, the unemployment rate averaged just 5.8%, and it dropped to 5.1% in the 2000s (again, I’m stopping at Bush’s exit). Indeed, even if you want it averaged by president (which is somewhat a misnomer since the Congress has massive control over an economy), it would read Reagan (7.5%), Bush Sr. (6.3%), Clinton (5.2%), Bush (5.3%) and Obama (9.3%).

Here’s Brian Riedl on why the economy is a mess. Hint: Bush tax cuts aren’t “spending.” (By the way, on that first myth, and this is highly relevant with the news that the Obama administration has turned to former Clinton era budget director Jacob Lew, let’s not forget that Clinton had the benefit of the “peace dividend,” or slashing the defense budget from the 6-7% of GDP it had been in the Cold War to barely 3% it became after the fall of the Soviet Union. That’s a ton of moolah!)

[MYTH #1] • The Bush tax cuts wiped out last decade’s budget surpluses. Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), for example, has long blamed the tax cuts for having “taken a $5.6 trillion surplus and turned it into deficits as far as the eye can see.” That $5.6 trillion surplus never existed. It was a projection by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in January 2001 to cover the next decade. It assumed that late-1990s economic growth and the stock-market bubble (which had already peaked) would continue forever and generate record-high tax revenues. It assumed no recessions, no terrorist attacks, no wars, no natural disasters, and that all discretionary spending would fall to 1930s levels.

The projected $5.6 trillion surplus between 2002 and 2011 will more likely be a $6.1 trillion deficit through September 2011. So what was the cause of this dizzying, $11.7 trillion swing? I’ve analyzed CBO’s 28 subsequent budget baseline updates since January 2001. These updates reveal that the much-maligned Bush tax cuts, at $1.7 trillion, caused just 14% of the swing from projected surpluses to actual deficits (and that is according to a “static” analysis, excluding any revenues recovered from faster economic growth induced by the cuts).

The bulk of the swing resulted from economic and technical revisions (33%), other new spending (32%), net interest on the debt (12%), the 2009 stimulus (6%) and other tax cuts (3%). Specifically, the tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 are responsible for just 4% of the swing. If there were no Bush tax cuts, runaway spending and economic factors would have guaranteed more than $4 trillion in deficits over the decade and kept the budget in deficit every year except 2007.

…

Over the past 50 years, tax revenues have deviated little from their 18% of gross domestic product (GDP) average. Despite a temporary recession-induced dip, CBO projects that even if all Bush tax cuts are extended and the AMT is patched, tax revenues will rebound to 18.2% of GDP by 2020—slightly above the historical average. They will continue growing afterwards.Spending—which has averaged 20.3% of GDP over the past 50 years—won’t remain as stable. Using the budget baseline deficit of $13 trillion for the next decade as described above, CBO figures show spending surging to a peacetime record 26.5% of GDP by 2020 and also rising steeply thereafter.

Putting this together, the budget deficit, historically 2.3% of GDP, is projected to leap to 8.3% of GDP by 2020 under current policies. This will result from Washington taxing at 0.2% of GDP above the historical average but spending 6.2% above its historical average.

Entitlements and other obligations are driving the deficits. Specifically, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and net interest costs are projected to rise by 5.4% of GDP between 2008 and 2020. The Bush tax cuts are a convenient scapegoat for past and future budget woes. But it is the dramatic upward arc of federal spending that is the root of the problem.

There are lies, there are damned lies, and there’s Barack Obama. His presidential address to the nation regarding the BP Deepwater Horizon oil leak was filled with some big fibs.

Starting with:

“But make no mistake:  We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes. .. And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.”

If the Obama administration is doing “whatever’s necessary,” then why has he not granted a waiver for the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, “a protectionist law that requires vessels working in US waters be built in the US and be crewed by US workers”? The federal head of the cleanup effort, National Incident Commander Admiral Thad Allen, has previously stated that there hasn’t been a need for this? Really? Tell that to the people of the Gulf coast. As Fox’s Brian Wilson explains, “But that [the foreign assistance currently used] is largely technology transferred to US vessels. Some of the best clean up ships – owned by Belgian, Dutch and the Norwegian firms are NOT being used.”

Even the typical cheerleader for liberal Democrats, Time Magazine, agreed that the refusal for help was bizarre. Also hurting Obama is that President George W. Bush waived the Jones Act during Katrina response, which perhaps explains why a recent poll of Louisianians found that Bush had higher ratings than Obama, including among 31% of Democrats polled.

It gets worse — the Dutch, for example, made a pair of offers of assistance. First to build the very sand berms along the Gulf coast like those Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindel requested from Obama. And second, sophisticated ships designed to filter oil from water via huge vacuum arms. Both offers were initially rejected. It’s, of course too late for the berms. The oil has arrived. But now, more than 50 days after the accident, the Obama administration has accepted the Dutch equipment, which works by sucking in oily water and pumping it back into the ocean after filtering.

What was the holdup? Apparently the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “regulations do not allow water with oil to be pumped back into the ocean. If all the oily water was retained in the tanker, the capacity of the system would be greatly diminished because most of what is pumped into the tanker is sea water.” Greg Yardale comments, “Get it? The EPA wouldn’t let them suck lots of oil out of the ocean because they would be returning small amounts of oil into the ocean.” Wow, and these bureaucratic types want to run your health care too!

And they said Bush was incompetent? Here are some numbers as to what the Dutch could have done on day 3 of the leak: “One ton of oil is about 7.3 barrels. 5,000 tons per day is 36,500 barrels per day. 4 skimmers have a capacity of 146,000 barrels per day. That is much greater than the high end estimate of the leak. The skimmers work best in calm water, which is the usual condition this time of year in the gulf.”

That’s just the first lie. Here’s the next:

Obama: “After all, oil is a finite resource.”

It is? Can he offer some proof? The truth is not only can no scientist prove that oil is finite, but scientists aren’t even sure regarding the source of oil. Decades ago some scientists theorized it came from billions of years of dead things, thus “fossil fuels.” But that’s been largely disproved, particularly through a NASA discovery that found a moon of Saturn, Titan, made up of LPG, or liquefied petroleum gas. Gee, were there dinosaurs on Titan too? Hardly, say the discoverers. Titan, after all, averages temperatures of negative 180-degrees Centigrade.

“We have determined that Titan’s methane is not of biological origin, so it must be replenished by geologic processes on Titan,” Hasso Niemann of the Goddard Space Flight Center told the NYT in 2005. If it’s geologic on Titan, it could be geologic on Earth as well. And if it’s geologic, that means oil could be perpetually produced for as long as the Earth’s core stays molten. (And even if it did come from dead things, are we to believe we used up 4+ billion years of dead things in just a century or so?)

No, rather the Peak Oil theory is based on the same scare-tactic politicization of science, central economic planning, and artificial scarcities as the  population disaster of Thomas Malthus, or the current Climate Change fearmongering.

Back to the Fibber in Chief:

Obama: “We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves.  And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean — because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water. “

This might be the most brazen of his lies, because the above statements are only true due to the direct interference by government and environmental extremists. The truth is we have no idea what our proven oil reserves are because the government and environmentalists forbid our energy companies the ability to explore and drill to the extent the market demands! The only reason these companies are attempting to drill 5,000 feet deep is because the government and environmentalists deny them the ability to drill in shallower water or on land. One word: ANWR!

More Obama: “For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.  And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires.  Time and again, the path forward has been blocked — not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.

Here’s where the Crony Corporate machine — the strange bedfellows of government and corporation — effectively lie to even liberals: Those who drool at the mouth to get off oil and coal in order to stick it to the petroleum companies don’t realize that those same companies are poised to make grand profits off of Cap-and-Trade and similar schemes designed to punish carbon output and push “renewable” energy.

Indeed, BP’s head, Lord Tony Hayward, wsa critical in formulating the Cap-and-Trade system. BP Chairman Lamar McKay supports it. As does Shell President Marvin Odum, and ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva (very Seinfeld, btw). As did former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, whose subordinates “buried a an Enron-funded study that dismissed the notion that calamity could come of global warming!” [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

But why?

Because, as Michael Morris, the CEO of the largest national coal-burning utility, American Electric Power, told Forbes Magazine (without shame), the way the carbon trading schemes are organized the company gets to pass the entire cost of the regulation on to the consumers, padded for additional profit through “administrative” fees. The more it costs them the more they make. And the more you pay. [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

Added Exelon’s John Rowe, “Exelon would gain simply because a price on carbon would raise the cost of production for fossil-fuel-powered electricity. Most of that would be passed on to customers, raising the wholesale price of power. Exelon’s revenues would rise, but its costs wouldn’t.” [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

Despicable, eh? All enabled by your president. It’s to be expected. The insurance companies helped craft his health care legislation, just as the “Trusts” of yesteryear co-authored legislation with Teddy Roosevelt regarding trust-busting and industrial regulation. They do this because the large companies can handle the costs while the nimble smaller companies must pack it in. You see, the one thing large corporations fear more than government is free-market competition. In this way, the federal government picks the winners and losers. By the way, the American consumer is always the loser.

Let’s wrap it up.

Obama:  “Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be right here in America.”

Ah, the Democrats are always such Chinaphiles, aren’t they? Actually, this is just a half-truth by Obama. The full truth is that we import most of our oil from Mexico and Canada. In other words, our neighbors are happy to drill and sell us oil in territories where we could be doing the same. The full truth is that China is importing massive quantities of oil from countries like Iraq. Chinese companies (i.e., state-owned) are also attempting to purchase European-owned oil facilities operating in the Gulf of Mexico. China intends to drill in the Gulf even if we don’t.

This begs the question: If it’s good enough for one billion Chinese…

The Obama administration is feeling a lot of heat regarding their reaction to the continued oil leak in the Gulf. Rather than be the executives who, you know, execute action to solve a problem (hence, The Executive Branch) the Obama administration is instead focusing on “whose ass to kick” (i.e., lawsuits — and what else would one expect from lawyers) and shifting blame. This week the blame goes to the Tea Parties and fiscally responsible conservatives. Watch how deftly Obama misrepresents the arguments of those who advocate limited government (including thus by definition James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, et. al.).

Here’s Obama to The Politico’s Roger Simon:

In an interview with POLITICO, the president said: “I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending.”

The president also implied that anti-big government types such as tea party activists were being hypocritical on the issue.

“Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much,” Obama said. “Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.”

The president makes two fundamental errors in his argument, and we’ll look at them in reverse order to which he made them.

First, it’s ridiculous to compare a Federal response to the worst petroleum accident in the history of the country to daily Federal intrusions into our lives. Indeed, the very argument of those who advocate limited government is that national disasters are precisely when one should expect an overwhelming Federal response. No fiscal conservative or tea party I know is saying that government has no role (that would be the anarchists, the people who riot at world trade meetings, and hardly conservatives).

Conversely, the tea parties legitimately question, for example, daily government intrusions on your wallet and liberty vis-a-vis the type of light bulb you may place in your home, or how many gallons per flush your toilet may use, or how much money you must pay your after-school high-school employee to check out your customers at a register, not to mention Michelle Obama’s toe-dipping into the pool of the government determining what foods are or are not good for your family.

This is why Thomas Paine (of Common Sense) wrote that government “in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one”; and why Thomas Jefferson similarly argued never to misread the “General Welfare” clause: “They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare…. [G]iving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.”

The second fundamental error President Obama makes is his implied assumption that a lack of regulation enabled the BP oil leak. I have a hard time believing that when we’ve got a Federal agency called the Minerals Management Service (MMS) — an agency that the vast majority of Americans had probably never heard of six months ago — we really don’t have a plethora of federal, state and local regulations guiding the energy company. On top of that we’ve got the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and slew of other bureaucracies — again, federal, state, local — that must on a daily basis wade through no doubt pages of regulations that when stacked are higher than an oil rig. And that’s just the complexity that our government must interpret — imagine how much it costs BP, Chevron-Texaco, Exxon-Shell, etc., and thus how much that costs you and me at the pump. Remember, it was this same MMS that gave the Deepwater Horizon oil rig a safety award last year. So how would have giving the MMS, or another agency, more power prevented this accident? There’s not one shred of proof it would have.

Now, this isn’t an argument against regulation carte blanche. Rather, it’s an argument that the facts show that that oil leak was not a systemic problem — such as Obama argues — or caused from a lack of regulation, but rather caused by a series of human errors — the humans at BP and in the government did not follow the regulations, and indeed not even follow BP’s internal regulations or oil and gas industry common practices!

This understanding — that the problem was human, not systemic — is best explained, by the way, by a small Colorado oil and gas company president this weekend in the WSJ. In short, summarizes Terry Barr, the employees at BP and at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig chose to press forward despite a minimum of three “red flags” which any other company in the energy industry, argues Barr, would have halted operations.

“Draw a cartoon or write a novel offending Islam, and you must go into hiding; defame Jews and earn accolades.” — Victor Davis Hanson.

“The consequence of this moral and cultural relativism is that people are increasingly unable to make moral distinctions based on behavior. Such moral equivalence rapidly mutates into moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a “victim” group while those at the receiving end of their behavior are blamed simply because they belong to the “oppressive” majority. This is on repeated display over a wide range of domestic issues such as family breakdown, drug abuse and the various demands of the “victim culture,” including the response to examples of Muslim aggression. …There is a tendency to equate and then invert the behavior of the perpetrators of violence and that of their victims, so that self-defense is misrepresented as aggression while the original violence is viewed sympathetically as understandable and even justified.” — Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan.

Well said Victor and Melanie! Indeed, whenever the topic turns to Israel and Palestine one finds the masses of conventional “wisdom” become the harbingers of extreme irrationality.

Example number one came from Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who in the wake of activist aggression resulting in 9 dead labeled it “Turkey’s 9-11.” Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up. Sure, numb skull, it’s just like 9-11, except 3,000 or so less dead and instead of hijacked airplanes flown into buildings it was a lawful attempt to search for terrorist supplies. After all, when it comes to terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas have used Red Crescent ambulances to ferry arms and militants and international commercial shipping to deliver weapons. No other country but Israel would be expected to put up with such nonsense. But nonsense is precisely what we get from closet anti-Semites in Turkey.

Throughout Europe the typical cry that Israel acted “disproportionately” continues. It makes one wonder what the heck Europe would consider “proportionate.” This is the same world community that, as Victor Hanson above retorts, said virtually nothing when North Korea sunk a South Korean ship (an act of war) a few weeks ago, or when Russia put its boot on the neck of Grozny, or nowhere near “the scale of violence, given what we see hourly in Pakistan, Darfur, and the Congo.”

How’s this for proportionate:

Israel (foolishly) withdrew from Gaza years ago, ceding control to Hamas, which proceeded to launch thousands of rockets into Israel. Israel then enacted this blockade for self defense, simultaneously pitying the residents of Gaza from their elected terrorist leaders by delivering food and supplies, “including [from just January to March alone] 48,000 tons of food products; 40,000 tons of wheat; 2,760 tons of rice; 1,987 tons of clothes and footwear; and 553 tons of milk powder and baby food” to the very Palestinians trying to kill them and destroy their state.

As columnist Mona Charen reminded, Israel (1) asked the flotilla organizers to deliver to a predetermined port first for inspection, but were refused, (2) ignored Israeli Navy requests to change course, (3) and boarded with only the minimally-defensive weaponry, including a single pistol for each soldier, the primary weapon being a paintball gun. In return (4) the “activists,” which included members of a group with known ties to Hamas and other global jihad terrorist groups, and who seemed fully prepared and preordained for violence and martyrdom, complete with chanted references to a massacre of Jews in Arabia by Muhammad, (5) began to beat the Israelis with metal rods, knifes, tossed stun grenades, and possibly fired guns.

Were it not obvious enough that the intentions had nothing to do with “relief” for Palestinians, today (6) refused the supplies Israel detained from the blockade, our NATO “ally” Turkey appears to have officially sealed a “strategic alliance between Turkey, Iran, and Syria,” notably detailed by Seth Cropsey. There’s a reason why Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan told his parliament that “today is a turning point in history. Nothing will ever be the same again.” (7) This wasn’t a reaction by Turkey to Israel, it was a proactive decision. Their plan was to provoke a response, and that’s exactly what they got.

One day, however, Turkey might wish it hadn’t made a deal with the devil in Iran.

Here’s Bill Kristol on Joe Biden’s queer historical revisionism:

Vice President Biden — who was for the Iraq war before he was against it, and who then argued that the surge could never work before he decided (in retrospect) that it did — said this to Larry King on Wednesday night:

“I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government. . . . I’ve been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.”

Iraq is “one of the great achievements of this administration”? Well, any port in a political storm — even if it means taking credit for the success of policies of the previous administration, policies you opposed. In politics, after all, success acquires many fathers. And that’s fine, if it means the Obama administration is careful over the next couple of years not to toss away American troops’ achievements in Iraq.

Gore Vidal is so washed up and irrelevant it’s kind of a waste of time to further comment on his angry contradictory ramblings. But I’m posting this because to me it’s a typical attitude of the Sixties hard-core leftist to project their shortcomings onto others — in this case, that America will decline into a “military dictatorship” even as Vidal recommends President Obama rely on just that to pass his health care agenda because the American public is too stupid to know what educated Leftists know: that socialist medicine is what’s best for you dumb lemmings.

[Vidal:] Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.”

You got that? “The country wanted it.” Just ignore those latest polls showing by 56% to 41% Americans oppose Obama’s federal option. Those 56% are just the Republicans, I suppose, or what Vidal terms “Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred.” Continue reading the article. The only one professing hatred is Vidal himself. In this case, Vidal seems to be suggesting that the way to solve healthcare is for Obama to use the same brute force that Abraham Lincoln found necessary to exercise during the American Civil War. Because, you know, Americans who oppose state-run health care is the same thing as 11 states seceding from the Union.

Vidal continues:

Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.

Is that what Franklin said? Really? And was this a country founded on “holding things together”? Funny, but I thought it was a country founded on the notion of individual liberty — the right to choose a health care plan on the open market, for example. Oh, never you mind. Don’t attempt to understand the ramblings of the enlightened Sixties radical.

Here’s a little more projection from Vidal, and it sure is a educating paragraph:

Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims.

Yeah, what was it Obama’s buddy Bill Ayers said: ”I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Birds of a feather, all.

The liberal media pile-on over the Sanford and Ensign extra-marital affairs aren’t just a collaboration of double standards, they’re off base too.

Consider the New York Times’ Gail Collins:

I’m thinking it’s time for the Republicans to apologize for putting us through the Clinton impeachment. We seem to have pretty well established that sexual stone-throwing is a dangerous sport.

Gov. Sanford and Sen. John Ensign (R, NV) may be cheating idiots who didn’t have the decency to divorce their spouses first, but they weren’t found guilty by a federal judge for perjury and then use their office to obstruct justice — as did Clinton.

That’s the point: despite the historic revisionism by the liberal base the rationale behind the Clinton impeachment wasn’t that he was an immoral anathema to family values, but that he lied during a sworn deposition in which his prosecutors were establishing a pattern of abuse during a sexual harassment case. Once more the “feminists” at the NYTs and their ilk show they are only feminists when it’s politically convenient for them.

Here’s another point: the brazen double-standard liberals follow in cases of politicians sexual misconduct. This shouldn’t be “The Long Winter” for Republicans, as today’s Washington Post puts the outing of Sanford and Ensign. Family values and such topics are no more dead today than the day before. It’s not Republicans who are smeared, but Sanford and Ensign, as they should be. The difference is that these men are officially outcasts in the eyes of fellow Republicans, whereas Democrats who do the same are excused by their apologists in the liberal base — who instead just hope and pray for the next Republican to foul up in order to even the score.

Whether the party plank is family values, free-market economics, limited government (this being Gail Collin’s biggest beef with Mark Sanford), or other, when our Republican leaders let us down the answer isn’t to disqualify the issue, it’s to purge the offending politician from the ranks.

You really should read this entire commentary by Charles Krauthammer reprimanding Barack Obama for a display of moral equivilance that is truly infantile. That’s not hyperbole either. For an American president to got to the heart of the Islamic world and say these things not only is silly but actually undermines the persecuted pro-democracy minority.

Here’s Krauthammer’s best example:

Obama offered Muslims a careful admonition about women’s rights, noting how denying women education impoverishes a country — balanced, of course, with this: “Issues of women’s equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam.” Example? “The struggle for women’s equality continues in many aspects of American life.”

Well, yes. On the one hand, there certainly is some American university where the women’s softbal team has received insufficient Title IX funds — while, on the other hand, Saudi women showing ankle are beaten in the street, Afghan school girls have acid thrown in their faces, and Iranian women are publicly stoned to death for adultery. (Gays, as well — but then again we have Prop 8.) We all have our shortcomings, our national foibles. Who’s to judge?

That’s the problem with Obama’s transcultural evenhandedness. It gives the veneer of professoria sophistication to the most simple-minded observation: Of course there are rights and wrongs in al human affairs. Our species is a fallen one. But that doesn’t mean that these rights and wrongs are of equal weight.

Signs of Bizarro World: Using terms like “perverse” and “disingenuous,” Uber-liberal journalist Robert Scheer defends — yes defends — the economic record of Ronald Reagan against accusations from NYT’s uber-liberal Paul Krugman that the former president is most to blame for the credit crisis and mortgage meltdown:

It is disingenuous to ignore the fact that the derivatives scams at the heart of the economic meltdown didn’t exist in President Reagan’s time.

… Ronald Reagan’s signing off on legislation easing mortgage requirements back in 1982 pales in comparison to the damage wrought fifteen years later by a cabal of powerful Democrats and Republicans who enabled the wave of newfangled financial gimmicks that resulted in the economic collapse. Reagan didn’t do it, but Clinton-era Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, now a top economic adviser in the Obama White House, did. They, along with then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and Republican congressional leaders James Leach and Phil Gramm, blocked any effective regulation of the over-the-counter derivatives that turned into the toxic assets now being paid for with tax dollars.

Read the rest.