Conservative Patriot

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama says the weekend ouster of Honduran leader Manuel Zelaya was a “not legal” coup and that he remains the country’s president.

Obama spoke to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday after meetings with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. Obama said he wanted to be very clear that President Zelaya is the democratically elected president.

Obama pledged the U.S. to “stand on the side of democracy” and to work with other nations and international entities to resolve the matter peacefully.

A couple things come to mind here. Number one: Earth to Obama - come back to reality. You may think you have a mandate here in the US for your soft tyranny, but you sure as hell don’t anywhere else in the world. If I was Roberto Micheletti (interim leader), not to mention the Honduran Supreme Court, I would make a very public statement reminding President Obama that he is not the “king of the world” that he appears to perceive himself to be. I love how he just declares that the coup was “not legal”.  I’m so glad that President Obama has taken the time to study and memorize the Constitution and laws of a small Caribbean nation, and yet seems to be utterly ignorant of the Constitutional bounds set upon him in his own country (read: General Motors).

In the case of this incident, the Honduran military was specifically authorized by a court order to arrest a President that was judged to be out of control. This court order was then upheld by the Honduran Supreme Court, so the decision is really final, regardless of our President’s feelings on the matter. Obama needs to remember that just because the American military would never be so authorized does not mean that legal authorizations for military interventions into politics might exist in other countries’ constitutional structures. I guess that’s “above Obama’s pay grade” though, so we can’t expect him to be up to speed on these sorts of trivialities.

Number two: I can’t help but chuckle at (again) the hypocrisy here. Obama jumps right in and condemns the completely legal action in Honduras, not hesitating in the least to start making demands on another nation that he has no authority over, while just a week earlier, he made the milquetoast decision to sit back, have a frozen custard and wait to see how the volatile election fraud situation shook out in Iran, stating that we have no business getting involved in Iran’s affairs.

Let’s see…

Iran: Nuclear-aspiring nation whose leaders deny the holocaust and have expressed interest in wiping both Israel and the US off the map, violators of numerous toothless UN Security Council Resolutions (is Iraq ringing a bell here?).

Honduras: Small non-nuclear (with no hope or intention of becoming so) nation in the caribbean, mostly known for its scuba diving and beautiful beaches.

Let me try to think here, what on Earth would the reason be for this Administration to jump into the Honduras affair and not the Iranian one…hmm…. Oh wait, I’ve got it! Honduras’ recently ousted President, Manuel Zelaya is a protege of every Leftist Liberal’s favorite dictator - Hugo Chavez, and Zelaya was ousted because of his attempt to illegally extend his power in an imitation of his mentor in Venezuela. We certainly can’t have that - we must support these dictatorial, socialist regimes wherever they might arise, and deem illegal any action taken to thwart them.

I sincerely hope that the Honduran government reminds Obama of his position in the world and recommends that he shut his custard-filled piehole.

During a heated exchange on Tuesday of this week regarding unrepaired levees in New Orleans, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), asked Army Corps of Engineers division leader, Brigadier General Michael Walsh to stop calling her Ma’am, and instead address her as “Senator”. She went to to qualify the request with “It’s just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title. I’d appreciate it.”

First of all, “worked hard”? Puhlease… you were elected Ma’am - you didn’t get to this position of power you’re in through any amount of hard work. You got there through political influence and by spending the millions of dollars you made by investing heavily in the very energy companies you accused of manipulating the market and overcharging consumers during the last California energy crisis.

The person who earned his title, Ma’am, is Brigadier General Walsh. With over 30 years serving this great nation, HE has earned his title. Secondly, if you knew a thing about the military you so revile and castigate on a daily basis, you’d know that as a military officer, his training requires him to address women as “ma’am” and men as “sir”. This isn’t about sexism or a lack of respect, so get over yourself - he was actually treating you with respect by calling you ma’am.

By the way, displaying the professionalism that our armed forces are known for, the general responded with, “Yes, Senator.” I give him credit - I probably wouldn’t have entertained her request.

I remember discussing with my wife during Obama’s campaign the utter conniving, political brilliance of Obama’s clever use of the phrase “save or create 3 to 4 million jobs in the next two years”. From his Feb 9 press conference:

Question: The American people have seen hundreds of billions of dollars spent already, and still the economy continues to free-fall. Beyond avoiding the national catastrophe that you’ve warned about, once all the legs of your stool are in place, how can the American people gauge whether or not your programs are working? Can they — should they be looking at the metric of the stock market, home foreclosures, unemployment? What metric should they use? When? And how will they know if it’s working, or whether or not we need to go to a plan B?

Answer: I think my initial measure of success is creating or saving 4 million jobs. That’s bottom line No. 1, because if people are working, then they’ve got enough confidence to make purchases, to make investments. Businesses start seeing that consumers are out there with a little more confidence, and they start making investments, which means they start hiring workers. So step No. 1, job creation.

Looking past the fact that if Obama is going to keep that campaign promise, he’d better stop having Broadway date nights and get cracking - the concept of “saving” jobs is complete poppycock. Let’s be clear, there is no metric collected anywhere, not from the Labor Department, the GAO, the Bureau of Labor Statistics nor the Treasury that would allow one to discern the number of jobs “saved”. This is the best scenario Obama could possibly hope to be in. He and Turbotax-cheat Geithner can come up with absolutely any cockamamie “study” they like that shows some enormous projection of how many jobs would likely be lost given a set of current policies, and then as long as that number is sufficiently large enough that the number of jobs actually lost (read: a real metric) is less than the “potential”, The Messiah has done the impossible, he has “saved” jobs. It is complete and utter garbage, and the media is complicit in letting him continue to spew this malarkey and treat it as actual economics. Can you imagine if the Bush administration had tried to use this as the basis for their monetary policy? Forget it - you need not strain yourself any further.

Luckily, there are a few intelligent folks in the media still who are willing to report the truth occasionally. William McGurn’s piece today in the Wall Street Journal covers the situation, and in fact includes a quote from Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus (who is a Democrat, btw) challengind Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner directly on the formula:

“You created a situation where you cannot be wrong,” said the Montana Democrat. “If the economy loses two million jobs over the next few years, you can say yes, but it would’ve lost 5.5 million jobs. If we create a million jobs, you can say, well, it would have lost 2.5 million jobs. You’ve given yourself complete leverage where you cannot be wrong, because you can take any scenario and make yourself look correct.”

Bottom line, the statement that this administration has created 150,000 jobs in an economy where we have demonstrably lost more than 10x that number of jobs (again, with actual data behind it) is a complete fabrication and the American people should be ashamed of themselves for allowing both Obama to get away with this, and for allowing the MSM to refuse to challenge him on it.

Cheney is looking very Presidential, I must say. He is providing actual examples of events, rather than hyperbole and false indignation by Obama. I was surprised to see this morning that Cheney’s personal poll numbers were increasing rapidly, and given this speech he’s giving right now, I can see why.