National Review's Jim Geraghty and Radio America's Greg Corombos discuss current events. Today's topics: Republicans look to roll back Obama regulations, the impending drudgery of the State of the Union speech, and Michael Moore slams "American Sniper."
SOTU: Semi-retired troll ready to bring his troll A-game
Prepare yourself at 9 p.m. ET for the magic that only a seventh-year State of the Union speech can create. Every SOTU is a political Groundhog Day but tonight's looks to be more repetitive than usual - tax hikes on the rich, some whining about the Citizens United decision, a few studiously vague sentences on "progress" made in negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, etc. Seventh verse, same as the first. What's novel is the new reality in Congress and Obama's reaction to it.
Having just seen Democrats obliterated in an election which he himself sold as a referendum on his policies, The One is going to greet the Senate's Republican majority by…doubling down on the policies that got obliterated. He calls that "playing offense." Conservative commentators, recognizing that Obama's proposals are going nowhere legislatively, aptly call it trolling. The more he irritates the GOP by pushing bills they want nothing to do with, the greater the chance that they'll engage him in a war of words, supplying media oxygen for those bills. Better to have them preoccupied with rejecting his proposals than pushing popular ones on him, like Keystone approval, that he'll be forced to reject.
So that's what you're in for tonight, a solid 60-75 minutes of the most powerful man in the world essentially trying to irritate his opponents because he now lacks the votes he needs to actually get his agenda passed. David Frum asks an interesting question, though: What if the GOP isn't Obama's only target tonight? When you look at the redistribution ideas he's offering, like funding "free" community college by taxing the 529 savings accounts that middle-class Americans are using to pay their kids' college tuition, it's hard to imagine the public turning against the GOP for opposing him. But it might set a progressive benchmark that a certain not-so-progressive Democratic frontrunner might be reluctant to defy...
Also read:
5 good reasons to blow off Obama's speech
Kyle Derangement Syndrome
National Review's Jim Geraghty and Radio America's Greg Corombos discuss current events. Today's topics: Hawaii Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard hammers the Obama administration for obfuscating on radical Islam, Obama preps more tax hikes, and a deflation scandal threatens the New England Patriots.
Surprise: Obama Prepares 'Defiant' State of the Union
At times, one can only sit back and marvel at the fact that this man successfully marketed himself to the electorate as a pragmatist at heart and a would-be healer of sundry societal and political divisions. Barack Obama's background, associations and voting record (such as it existed at the time) clearly demonstrated that he'd lived his adult life as an entrenched ideologue -- the type of person of whom voters are typically suspicious. So he molded his message to elide and disguise his core character. He did so with the complicity of much of the media and has proceeded to allowed the mask to slip further and further as his presidency wears on. As the president prepares to address the nation in his first State of the Union Address since the midterms' landslide Republican victories, White House sources say he'll adopt a "defiant" posture:
President Barack Obama will strike a defiant tone for dealing with the new Republican-led Congress when he addresses Americans next week in his State of the Union speech, laying out areas for potential compromise but ceding little ground to his opponents. Obama's speech at 9 p.m. EST next Tuesday will be the clearest statement yet of his vision for his final two years in office, with both houses of Congress controlled by Republicans for the first time since he took power six years ago...But much like a White House meeting Obama held on Tuesday with congressional leaders, he is not expected to offer major concessions, in keeping with his pledge to act where he can on his own through executive actions and identify areas where the two sides can work together."
The GOP won a sweeping victory in November following a heated campaign in which Obama played a starring role...as the antagonist. The president has reacted to the people's decisive verdict by inaccurately suggesting that the election results don't reflect broader public sentiment, and by telling aides that he finally feels "liberated" to aggressively pursue the liberal agenda explicitly rejected by voters. So a combative national address is par for the course. Obama will reportedly roll out a series of tax increases on "the rich" in order to redistribute their wealth via tax credits and "free" programs for others.
The president has raised taxes throughout his presidency (with Obamacare acting as a key vehicle); in 2013, he exploited the prospect of automatic and massive across-the-board increases to corner Republicans into agreeing to $600 billion in tax hikes on wealthy Americans as part of the fiscal cliff deal. Now he's coming back for more, hyping gimmicks such as the expansion of the death tax on certain families, as well as taxing college savings accounts. Americans for Tax Reform tabulates the total of this round of requested tax increases at $320 billion.
The White House knows full well that these ideas stand zero chance of passage. Republicans didn't just get elected en masse to raise taxes and play along with Obama's cynical class warfare games -- which is precisely what they are:
Also read:
Even Obama's allies in the press are calling his tax hike proposals a political ploy
Obama's New Tax Plan: Destructive Social Engineering
Cory Remsburg, The War Hero Obama Honored During The State Of The Union, Has An Incredible Story
Remsburg joined the Army on his 18th birthday. He wanted to join at 17, but his father, a retired U.S. Air Force Reserve firefighter, refused to sign the papers.
Remsburg was first deployed in 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq, according to the Arizona Republic.
He's been on 10 deployments total to Iraq and Afghanistan and has spent 39 months in combat as an elite infantryman. Remsburg was made leader of his company's heavy weapons squad during his time serving.
In 2009, a roadside bomb blast left Remsburg nearly dead, face down in a canal with shrapnel lodged in his brain. The IED went off while Remsburg and other Rangers were on their way to clear a landing zone for transport helicopters, according to the Republic. Other Rangers were also injured in the blast.
The explosion left him in a coma for three months, barely able to speak or move, with a traumatic brain injury. Remsburg lost sight in his right eye and his left arm became paralyzed, according to the Army Times.
He's been through dozens of surgeries and completes six hours of occupational, physical, and speech therapy every day. And his hard work is paying off — he's now able speak, stand, and walk.
After years in hospitals and rehab centers, Remsburg moved into his own home, where he has a full-time caregiver. His recovery is still progressing, and he is now awaiting a retina transplant for his right eye, according to The Times.
Remsburg has been awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart, among other honors, for his dedicated service. He's 30 years old and lives in Phoenix.
It occurred to me last night while watching the tribute to Remsburg that it was a good way to end the SOTU and that it would probably be the most memorable thing about the whole evening. It was certainly the most inspiring. It also seemed that Obama was subtly trying to associate his struggles with those of Cory Remsburg.
So it came as no surprise this morning when I noticed people talking about this:
Last night's speech also ended on an emotional -- and upbeat -- note when Obama recognized Army Ranger Cory Remsburg, who was almost killed in Afghanistan and continues to recuperate from a brain injury. "My fellow Americans, men and women like Cory remind us that America has never come easy," the president said. "Our freedom, our democracy, has never been easy. Sometimes we stumble, we make mistakes; we get frustrated or discouraged. But for more than 200 years, we have put those things aside and placed our collective shoulder to the wheel of progress." That story could also apply to Obama himself: Nothing in his seven years on the national political stage (2007-2014) has come easy. The 2008 race for the Democratic nomination. Even that general election. The health-care law. The re-election campaign. And now the president's current situation in which he finds himself bloodied and bruised after the botched health-care rollout. Perseverance is an important quality for any president. Bill Clinton was usually able to talk his way out of sticky situations. But Obama's M.O. is to grind it out. That, more than anything else, was the message he wanted to send last night -- both he and the country are grinding it out.
Got that? Dear Leader has been "bloodied and bruised"...just like Cory Remsburg. Murray is admitting that Obama was literally using Remsburg as a prop in order to highlight Obama's heroic struggle!
Go back and read again the extensive injuries that Remsburg has suffered on the battlefield and keep it in mind as you deal with the deeply disrespectful perversity of Dear Leader's fanboy douchebags.
Favreau is a former Obama speechwriter who apparently thinks he's Sam Seaborn. And as for Murray, well...this probably won't come as a big surprise:
Naturally this nonsense quickly became the target of much mockery and derision:
But then Murray doubled down by actually defending his point:
And this is how we deal with bullshit like this...
On the nauseating spectacle that is the State of the Union address
The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.
It's the most nauseating display in American public life — and I write that as someone who has just returned from a pornographers’ convention.
It's worse than the Oscars.
The national self-debasement begins well before the speech is under way. Members of Congress — supposedly free men and women serving as the elected representatives of the citizens of a self-governing republic — arrive hours early, camping out like spotty-faced adolescents waiting for Justin Bieber tickets, in the hope of staking out some prime center-aisle real estate that they might be seen on television, if only for a second or two, being greeted by the national pontifex maximus as he makes his stately procession into the chamber.
Also read: The Sleepiness of a Hollow Legend: The State of the Union is a grand tradition...but only if people are listening
