So, about this Syria business

Syria in 2013 looks in places like Berlin circa 1945, it's been carved up already by jihadist and Islamist rebels, instituting sharia wherever they command a preponderance of men and arms, the Alawite, Ba'athist "national government" is sustained by Russian and Iranian and Hezbollah intervention, and the body count has hit 70,000 and counting, per the United Nations which is useful for such jobs as counting corpses in the more godforsaken corners of the earth, and not a lot else.

So what's to be done about this Syria business. The short answer is, as of now and beyond the usual humanitarian assistance, nothing. There was a moment when an intervention on a small margin, supporting the rebels without a very direct involvement on our part, would have been advisable, at the outset of this Syrian civil war in '11 when there was a true national rebellion, led by elements of the Syrian armed forces, against the Alawite Ba'athist dictatorship and enemy to the United States and Israel.

But that moment came and went because Obama and his administration prefer to "lead from behind", which is to say, go golfing and hope things somehow work out in the end, or that no-one notices if things don't work out, or that somehow the decision is made for us, or that Britain or France or anyone else at all rides over the crest of the hill and spares us from getting our hands dirty. Plus which, Obama and his administration had committed themselves to the line that Bashar al-Assad was a "reformer", some sort of misunderstood moderate and great man worthy of the praise of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and his Ba'athist dictatorship worthy of the resumption of normal diplomatic relations with the United States. Bush and his administration had recalled the American ambassador to Syria in '05 after Syria's assassination of Rafik Hariri, twice the Prime Minister of Lebanon, so of course Obama and his administration had to go altogether in the contrary direction.

Obama's timing was impeccably awful to boot: he claimed a recess appointment to circumvent Senate confirmation of his nominee for ambassador to Damascus, rewarding Bashar al-Assad with normal diplomatic relations, not three months before the onset of this Syrian civil war, just in time for al-Assad to demonstrate beyond all doubting that he was a dictator and butcher of the first magnitude, with whom the United States ought to be in a state of cold war at the very best. And it was worse than even that: Obama was so loath to come down against the Butcher of Damascus, exposing himself as a fool and vindicating Bush's judgment on the al-Assad regime, that he watched five months of al-Assad's butchery before calling for his resignation, at long last, and even then, Obama couldn't bring himself to speak the words, preferring the medium of the presidential "written statement". So our moment passed, and with it our only good alternative.

Because before long, the national rebellion was hijacked by the international jihad, as in Libya not long before. So that by this point, per a memorable and frank New York Times report, "Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of."

Obviously the United States isn't great guns for getting in the middle of this Alawite-jihadi-Russian-Iranian-Hezbollah melee, although in the abstract, that would be the one unalloyed good alternative, to sort of descend on Syria like some Heavenly host bringing ruin to the wicked on all sides, then institute a democracy for the ordinary Syrians still drawing breath. But that's as comprehensively mooted a point as can be, inasmuch as it'll never happen, which leaves us with the binary choice of keeping clear of Syria, or intervening indirectly as in supporting one side over the other.

But to support one side over another would be to support our principal enemies and threats in the world, and without reason to believe the end would be anything other than awful for us and for the people of Syria both. If I may be forgiven for invoking that most overdone of wars a second time in one piece, this Syrian civil war has gotten to be something like a science-fiction parallel-universe theater of the Second World War, where for various reasons the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese wound up going at one another hammer-and-tongs, somehow at war against one another and not together against us. We'd have been fools to touch that with a pole, instead of letting it play out and letting the works of them bleed one another dry, while we followed the developments from afar and counted the blood and treasure expended on their side and husbanded on ours.

The peculiarities of this Syrian civil war have conspired to assemble our principal enemies and threats in the world, on opposing sides. Al-Qaeda, or the international jihad more generally, and Iran are more or less equivalent as menaces to the United States, and this Syrian business has set them one against the other, to the point where the reports are that Iran has expelled some of the al-Qaeda-ists it had made welcome before Syria made things awkward between them. Then Hezbollah which menaces Israel has come into it, and the Russians who are our geopolitical rivals and general ne'er-do-wells have been on the ground in support of the al-Assad regime as well, for reasons best known to themselves. And the Syrian regime, or rather whatever's left of the Alawite Ba'athist dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, is an enemy of longstanding to the United States and to Israel, and has been at the very least an enabler and ally to those people trying to blow us up. So given that those are the parties to this Syrian civil war, as of now, what justice may be claimed in helping any faction over any other, and what good may be expected, for us or for the people of Syria?

Of course the trouble with this is that in the meantime those people of Syria are dying by the tens of thousands, and indeed the last man standing in Syria, holding or inheriting whatever assets and armaments are left by that time, will be no friend to us. But that's the price of not intervening at the outset, when there were still white hats against the black hats, and when indirect intervention might have helped those white hats to victory inasmuch as the outside forces propping up the al-Assad regime had not yet come into it with both feet.

So there is no good alternative left to us, but there is one least bad alternative, namely, to keep our powder dry, do nothing for the time being apart from putting up some innocuous humanitarian assistance. But of course Barack Obama has just now commenced thumping his chest on Syria, days after being reduced to impotent observer while Israel acted in Syria boldly and deftly, Obama's chest-thumping coming complete with a gratuitous and unjust slight against President Bush and a declaration of "moral obligation" which Obama discovered only after two years and 70,000 dead bodies. And Obama's interventionism is of course to take the form of some unquantified new support for the rebels who are by now al-Qaeda-ists and Islamists and assorted jihadists. How we or the people of Syria would be better off for al-Qaeda's being propped up by the United States, so as to carry on the civil war with the aim ultimately of rendering Syria a terrorist squat and a colony of the new caliphate, is unknown to me, but that is the course set for us by our occasional Commander-in-Chief.

He does nothing at the moment when supporting the rebels might conceivably have tipped the balance, and when it'd have meant supporting worthy men against a common enemy and conceivably helping to replace a tyrant and a menace with friends and allies in a decent and democratic successor government; then when it's far too late for that and supporting the rebels amounts to aiding al-Qaeda and Islamists and the international jihad, Obama gives the order to support the rebels. The worst of all worlds, as ever.

Before Alberta puts its tarsands oil on a slow boat to China

Any Canadian wondering how it is that President Obama's job approval average for his third year rated second-from-bottom in the Gallup archives among presidential junior years, need wonder no longer. If a president of the United States cannot bring himself simply to permit a pipeline carrying cheaper, steadier fuel from a friendly neighbour, at no cost to the taxpayer and generating a modest boom to boot in economic activity and jobs, then all that's left is to hang on in there 'til he can be put out of our misery sometime around January 20th of 2013.
　
The average American pulled at random from a Tulsa, Oklahoma Walmart and made president-for-a-day not only would have approved the Keystone XL pipeline project, he'd have wondered why there was any question about it at all. The Keystone XL line is what is called a no-brainer, a win-win, as uncomplicated a proposition as any president can expect to have dumped on his desk. The reader will pardon me if these points have been rehearsed overmuch already, but they bear repeating:

The pipeline would have shifted some part of America's oil importation from the sort of characters who threaten to shut the Strait of Hormuz and precipitate a global energy crisis, half-way around the world, to a sort-of cousin-nation directly over the border. It would have taken the thumb that much off the windpipe, to invoke the old Suez formulation, and given America that much more insurance against a crisis. Besides which, this cousin-nation in question happens to carry on a deal of trade with the United States, so that not all of the exported dollars for that imported oil would have been lost to the American economy. 　

The pipeline would have helped depress the price of oil in America by the increase in supply and availability, and by cutting the transportation overhead. It's Obama policies like declining the pipeline or banning new offshore oil production for seven years -- announced once the November '10 elections were safely past, undoing an opening of the offshore to exploration announced eight months before the vote -- that have helped push the price of a gallon of gas to slightly more than double what Obama "inherited," to borrow his preferred usage. 　

The pipeline would have cost not a thin dime to the taxpayer, being one of those private enterprises which Obama daily damns and menaces and punishes. One almost wonders if that counts as a strike against it to Obama's way of thinking: two years ago Obama put up $2 billion that America didn't have for offshore drilling -- in Brazil -- so demonstrably he's got it in him to support big oil projects, at least where government money is involved and American oil is not.

And then there are the jobs involved in building a pipeline so ambitious as to amount to a transcontinental highway of sorts. In the mind of Barack Obama, unemployment insurance is where the jobs are; not in any great private project to connect Alberta and Texas with the fuel to move and do things. Obama made the point explicit in December: "However many jobs might be generated by a Keystone pipeline, they're going to be a lot fewer than the jobs that are created by extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment insurance." There's the Age of Obama in a sentence, if ever I saw it. They ought to make a campaign slogan of it. "Obama - He's for the dole."

The story is of course that Obama's concern was for "health and safety," and something called "the Ogallala aquifer" in Nebraska, and that the three years of State Department study on the project were inadequate, and indeed that the Keystone pipeline now in operation wasn't proof enough of the "healthiness and safety" of the thing. There may even be people in the world who truly believe that was the reasoning. Some of the less credulous types have it that Obama's prohibitionism was a sop to the hard-Left environmentalist interest groups, which is fine as far as it goes, only it lets on that Obama is something apart from the hard-Left himself, when I think the inquiring mind will find that the larger part of Obama's deleterious policymaking is down to his own unworkable, alien, doctrinaire leftism.

At the risk of presuming to offer unsolicited advice to the prime minister and government of Canada, I'd say don't sign any papers on that east-west pipeline to serve China just yet. It happens that there's an election in America in a matter of months, and it happens also that the other side in this election are the sort who could conceivably approve the Keystone XL among their early orders of business.

I decline to say that America makes mistakes, but it does occasionally have accidents, and it had one of those one day in November of 2008. Now, it could conceivably be that America will vote for four more years of this, or anyway that the vote could be split by a serious third-party challenge allowing Obama to slip through to a second term with a plurality, but that very expression, "four more years of this," and the way it sounds to American ears, inclines against it. So before you put your tarsands oil on a slow boat to China, maybe see how that election turns out.

The Adoration of The Obama

I wouldn’t have felt compelled to add my own blot of ink to the metric tons already dumped on the subject of the killing of Osama bin Laden, except that we are now coming to Day Seven in one of the most unbecoming spectacles I’ve yet seen out of even Barack Obama.

Some part of me can’t blame Obama and the Obama-adulating old-line press for their interminable Glory Tour, because of course the hunt for Osama bin Laden is just about the only thing that’s not gone from bad to worse in the Age of Obama. Indeed, the fact they’re all making so very much of this, for so very long, is final proof that Obama has no other success to show for his two years and three months as president. By this point in his presidency, George W. Bush had led America in the tearing down of two of the very worst regimes on earth since the Second World War, and the implanting of decent, democratic systems in their place, making 50 million Muslims free citizens for the first times in their histories.

And that’s the trouble with this Adoration of The Obama, as much as anything else: the bin Laden operation was a sort-of SWAT team swoop on a man who hadn’t been out of the house in half a decade; the Afghan and Iraq wars were earth-quaking re-makings of ancient and malignant whole nations. There is no perspective in this bin Laden affair whatever, for the obvious reason that Obama and all that the press had invested in him are on course for a historic repudiation in 2012, and so he’s desperate for a shot in the arm.

America is today losing in Afghanistan, and the killing of Osama bin Laden does nothing to arrest or reverse even that, much less every other blessed thing that’s gone the wrong way. America is losing also in Libya, which is a war without a cause and which no-one even dreamt of until the moment we learned we were at war, Obama having decided to take us to war in that country the night before. And I will spare the reader a recapitulation of all those other troubles, and let it suffice to say only that the share of Americans on food stamps stands today AT 14 PERCENT.

One could go on, but it’s all been said ad nauseam already so I’ll endeavor to make a point or two that have been under-made or not made at all:

*There’s a reason some of us Bush-nostalgia-ists have lamented that Bush and his administration have not been more credited in the bin Laden mission, and it goes beyond the usual reasons -- the intelligence trail that ended at bin Laden’s bedroom a week ago, began with Bush's “enhanced interrogations” including at “black sites”, and progressed with the interrogation of al-Qaeda captured in Iraq; the CIA team on the ground in Pakistan that tracked bin Laden the rest of the way was instituted under President Bush; and the Navy SEALs team that did the deed in the end was part of the Joint Special Operations Command which had been denounced on the Left as “Dick Cheney’s assassination ring”; and so on. The deeper reason we whine that Obama is credited with the bin Laden operation single-handed, and Bush mocked, is that Obama damned all of this as senator and candidate, and then outlawed some part of it as president, and so one cannot but fear that the bin Laden operation was the cashing in of investments that have not been kept up since the day Barack Obama moved into the White House.

*The man most responsible for the 9/11 attacks and their success was in fact not Osama bin Laden but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and of course Obama wanted him granted the rights and protections of a U.S. citizen, in an open-ended civilian trial in New York City, in which the United States itself and especially the Bush Administration would have wound up in the dock at least as much as the enemy leader responsible for the worst attack on America in its history. Obama suspended for two years the military commission case against KSM, in which Mohammed had already pleaded guilty. If it had been up to Obama, that civilian trial would be ongoing even now, but blessedly it was not up to Obama, and the Congress intervened to deny funding for any such abominable thing.

*The Greeks and Romans were great ones for warning leaders and the sycophants who stroke them, and so it’s not for nothing that so many of the best words to describe Barack Obama generally and in this instance especially come to us from the classical languages: narcissism, hubris, vanity, etc. Had Obama been a man, and honorable and meek, he’d simply have authorized some functionary to break the news of bin Laden’s death, as for instance President Bush did on the occasion of the capture of Saddam Hussein, instead of calling a televised address for 10:30 Eastern on Sunday night to announce the news personally and peppered with the personal pronouns (for which Obama was an hour late, as ever, while the nation panicked at what emergency must be warranted by such an extraordinary development), and then giving a blockbuster, blow-by-blow interview for Sunday evening TV, staging an event at Ground Zero, accepting a presidential jersey at Fort Campbell, etc. Had Obama been the breed of man who truly does great and heroic things, he’d have gone about his business and let other folks talk about heroism and greatness if they cared to. But Barack Obama is not that kind of man; he is the kind of man who will fly very high and in the end be brought very low, like in those Greek myths and Roman cautions.

No way to fight a war

Seeing as how we’re at war in a Mideastern Muslim nation which to my knowledge we've not intervened in militarily for a quarter-century, it might be worth blowing the cobwebs off this blog, which was for its first three years a repository mostly of military news and analysis. This just seems to me to be no way to fight a war:

1. One day in March, we woke up with no conception that we’d be at war in some godforsaken, basket-case country called Libya; as of suppertime, we were at war. Up until the moment that the war vote came down in the United Nations Security Council, there was not the first hint that America was going to war.

The President and Commander-in-Chief who was ordering the United States Armed Forces into this new war had not given the faintest indication that he had been headed toward war, because until the moment he decided on war, he in fact wasn’t headed to war. If the silence had been to preserve some operational secrecy and element of surprise, that would be one thing, but the reason we had no inkling that we’d be at war on that day in March was that the Commander-in-Chief himself had no conception of it and had done none of those things that any other president of the United States would have done to prepare his forces and brace his nation for a military campaign.

2. To broadcast that we’ll bomb a bit for a few days and then quit is to tell the enemy to just hang in there. Anyone plucked at random from a Tulsa, Oklahoma Walmart would understand that implicitly, and yet Obama has made this same mistake twice now as commander-in-chief of the greatest armed force the world has ever seen, the first time being his declaration on the occasion of his Afghan faux-surge order, that he’d start hauling out come hell or high water 18 months later. The very Commandant of the Marine Corps reported that the date-certain for withdrawal was “giving sustenance” to the enemy, and yet here is Obama duplicating his mistake and announcing that his campaign will last “days, not weeks” -- i.e., just hang in there for a few days, Moammar; there’ll be some smoke and noise, but keep your head down and it’ll be over before you know it. The way to go about it is to set objectives and to declare that the campaign will last for as long as it takes to achieve those objectives.

3. I am sympathetic to the argument from history and necessity that a president and commander-in-chief needn’t always seek and receive Congressional authorization for an act of war before the bombs start flying, but in those cases where he must act first and ask later, he had darn well better get that authorization after the fact, and of course Barack Obama has not so much as suggested that Congress authorize his new Libyan War. Oh, yes, and Obama lectured the last president on the Constitutional requirement for Congressional authorization of acts of war, despite that President Bush had authorizations for both of his wars from a Republican House and Democrat Senate.

4. There is not the faintest, nascent notion of a mission, beyond "protecting civilians" -- from tens of thousands of feet up. We’re lobbing some bombs for a few days. At what, who knows? To what end, who knows? And what next, who knows?

5. The time for no-fly zones was two to three weeks before the no-fly zone vote at the UN. I'd have supported a no-fly zone over Libya at that time, and I’m compelled to support it now, but now it’s a dollar short and a more than a day late. There was a time, a couple weeks before the intervention, when the Gaddafi regime had lost effective control over most of the nation to the rebels; at that time Gaddafi’s only prospect was importing mercenaries and outside help to prop himself up and try to push back the ascendant rebels. And at that time a no-fly zone and naval blockade would have gone a long way toward denying Gaddafi the means of saving himself.

Wars aren’t won by air power alone, but air power may in fact have been decisive at that stage of what became the Libyan Civil War, in guaranteeing rebel gains on the ground and in preempting Gaddafi’s counteroffensive.

But by the time the no-fly zone was agreed to at the UN Security Council and the first British and French warplanes lifted off to enforce it, Gaddafi already had his mercenaries and outside support, and had pushed the rebels back to not much more than Benghazi, which is Libya’s second city but nothing to compare with the rest of the country.

The British Prime Minister was calling for a no-fly zone at the time when it might have made the difference, and so indeed was Sarah Palin, but Obama was disengaged as ever on the rolling Arab revolts, caught flat-footed by each and every development and following the now-familiar pattern of silence, then flailing and incoherence, then calls for the inevitable and the faits-accompli, and finally self-congratulation. Four days before he went to war, Obama played the 61st golf game of his presidency and attended a Beltway soiree, and two days before he went to war he was filling out his March Madness "brackets" for ESPN. We had our chance to do this on the cheap and win the war for the rebels before the bloodshed started in earnest, and we missed it.

6. If we’re lobbing Tomahawks into Libya, then at least one of them had better have Moammar Gaddafi’s name on it, however it may be spelled. Libya is at this point as close to a one-man regime as you’re liable to find -- Gaddafi is dependent for his regime on mercenaries and outside help -- so hit Gaddafi and his regime may very well expire with him, the war may be ended blessedly quickly, the rebels may be spared and untold unlucky civilians besides, and there may just be some outside chance of a decent society emerging in that godforsaken country. There is no telling what atrocities have been committed already or are forming in the mind of a terrorist madman dictator who uses language like “cleanse” in describing what he means to do to a rebel-held city.

President Reagan tried hitting Gaddafi in ’87 because Gaddafi was by that time a known terror-sponsor with the blood of innocent Americans on his hands; today there’s all that plus the immediate humanitarian reasons to argue in favor of a hit on Gaddafi. But as of this writing, the United States government is expressly not targeting the actual culprit in all this, and I’m afraid they really mean it.

7. And another thing: when a commander-in-chief launches a war, the place for him is his White House, and on no account should he be swanning around Rio de Janeiro while the bombs fly. A president of the United States can cancel a prior engagement, and the Rio trip could have waited.

Clinton v. Obama, 2012

Though I'm not predicting it at this point, a Hillary Clinton insurgency against President Obama doesn't seem so outside the realm of possibility -- not in the Democratic Party. The speculation is occasioned by the remarkable Gallup poll of September '10 finding that just 52 percent -- of Democrats -- would vote to re-nominate Obama for president, to 37 percent for Clinton. In fact there've been quite a lot of one-termers and contested re-nominations on the Democrat side in the six decades since the Second World War.

Clinton of course won two terms, though it has to be said that he was the beneficiary in his first election especially of a strong third-party candidacy in Ross Perot, who split the anti-Clinton vote in '92 and '96 such that Clinton could pass through to the White House with 43 percent and 49 percent of the popular vote. And a third-party candidacy as substantial as Perot's is not a usual thing historically.

Carter was the object of a contested primary in '80 which might conceivably have gone to Ted Kennedy had Kennedy not fallen on his face in the 60 Minutes interview when he couldn't answer the question of why he was running, and of course the Chappaquiddick business didn't help. Carter was only weakened the more by the challenge and wound up losing the general election to Reagan so badly that he'd conceded before the polls were closed on the West Coast.

Johnson served out the last year of John Kennedy's term and then won a term of his own in '64, but he was eligible per the 22nd Amendment for re-election in the spring of '68 when the writing on the wall had become sufficiently plain that he announced, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president." Johnson had come within eight points of losing the New Hampshire primary to Eugene McCarthy, which result had brought Bobby Kennedy into the race. The Democratic National Convention that summer was a circus and the Democrat Party was radicalized and banished from the presidency for seven of the next ten elections.

Kennedy obviously was assassinated about three years into his only term, so his case can only be left out of consideration.

Which leaves Truman. Truman filled out all but a few months of Franklin Roosevelt's last term and then won a term of his own in '48 but was exempted from the 22nd Amendment and was on the ballot in the Democratic primaries of '52, until he lost New Hampshire to Estes Kefauver, 55-44 percent, whereupon he announced he'd not stand for re-election. The Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson later that year and again four years after that, to lose to Eisenhower.

So Bill Clinton is the only proper two-termer the Democrat Party has produced since FDR in the '30s and '40s, and even Clinton got a push across the finish line by a historically-anomalous third-party candidacy.

On the other side in that same period are Bush 43, Bush 41, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, and Eisenhower. Bush 43, Reagan, Nixon, and Eisenhower were all elected to two terms, though Nixon didn't finish out his second. Ford assumed the presidency to fill out that second Nixon term, was challenged seriously in the '76 Republican primaries by Reagan, and gave way to the Carter interregnum. But Ford doesn't exactly fit in this scheme on account of he was never elected. Which leaves George H. W. Bush, who was the object of a spirited primary challenge in '92 from Pat Buchanan among others, and a one-termer, though Bush 41 was hindered by the same 19-percent Perot phenomenon that aided Clinton.

And that's it: the one-termers and the contested re-nominations have tended to be on the Democrat side in the six decades since the Second World War, and in fact that kind of thing has been the rule rather than the exception with Democrat presidents.

I wrote when Obama clinched the Democrat nomination in June of '08 that "the Democrat Party has made a mistake". That must have looked foolish sometime that November when Obama won the presidency with supermajorities in both houses of Congress, but it was one of the shrewder assessments I've ever made. Obama was unqualified and unprepared for the presidency, his instincts are consistently and suicidally wrong, his ideas are unworkable and alien to the American nation, and he is unusually vain and bitter and arrogant even by the standards of the sort of men who presume to lead the world. Barack Hussein Obama is a plain bad president, and he could only ever have been a bad president.

Obama is already a marginalized, discredited, unheeded, and failed president. He fell further, faster than any president since the advent of polling. His campaign was a fraud, and the more he says and does -- the more he reveals himself truly -- the more abhorrent he is to the American people. I decline to say that the American people make mistakes, but they do sometimes have accidents, and November of 2008 was one for the ages. It will be put right at the first opportunity. The question is whether Obama marks the end of leftism in American national government, and the rebirth of First Principles, for a couple of election cycles, or for a generation.

So Obama is a one-term president, though the details have yet to be written. If he tells the American people that they can't fire him, he quits, or if he takes his chances on a re-election and the Democratic Party does to him as the mob does to a fellow who's outlived his usefulness, then the obvious alternate standard-bearer will be the the one they now know they ought to have nominated in the first place. Only, that assumes Hillary Clinton would want another run at the presidency, but my assumption has always been that Clinton would never run unless she could be confident of winning, and in 2012 she would of course lose: if a party can't re-elect a sitting president, it won't elect a runner-up pleading that she's one of the good ones.

Less a "historic victory" than a Pyrrhic one

President Obama and his Democratic Congress have made history, only not the kind they have in mind. They have become the only president and Congress to enact a leviathan social program altering the life of every American -- against the wishes of those American people, over the threatened opposition of three-fourths of the state legislatures, with not a solitary vote from the minority opposition, and by arcane parliamentary maneuver.
　
When it comes to pass that a Republican unknown wins the special election for U.S. Senate in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, to replace Ted Kennedy, no less, and after vowing daily to be the 41st vote to kill the Democrats' health-care bills, then it may well and truly be said that the American people do not want this "comprehensive health-care reform."
　
A month after the Massachusetts comeuppance, the CNN poll found just 25 percent of Americans supported the Democrats' health-care bills, to 73 percent who wanted Congress to either start from scratch or quit health-care altogether. And yet within a month of that, House Democrats voted to make the 2,700-page Senate bill the law of the land, and passed a "reconciliation" bill which actually builds on the Senate monstrosity and annexes the entirety of the student loan system to the federal government while they're at it.
　
Three days before the House vote, Obama's job approval rating went net negative in the Gallup poll for the first time, and Congress' approval hit 16 percent, just two points up from the lowest recorded in 36 years of Gallup polling on the question. The day before the vote, the Rasmussen poll of likely voters put Obama's job approval rating at 43 percent; it took five years for George W. Bush to fall so low.

By the time the House vote was called, 38 of the 50 state legislatures had indicated an intent to challenge the new law. And on the day of the vote, the only bipartisanship was in opposition to the new law: 34 House Democrats joined every Republican in voting "nay."

That looks less like a "historic victory" than a Pyrrhic one.
　
The undeniable good that is done by this "reform" could have been written up in a relative few pages and passed with wide margins and popular support the best part of a year ago, and the legitimate, hard-case uninsured could have been accommodated for a fraction of the $1.2 trillion that Obama and his Congress blew on their worse-than-useless stimulus and omnibus bills alone, without upsetting the system for the 80 percent who call themselves satisfied with their health-care as-is. This "comprehensive health-care reform" is something quite apart from help for folks who've fallen through the cracks and a curbing of the odd insurance industry abuse.
　
Obama's own chief actuary for Medicare and Medicaid Services had to report that the Senate bill would raise the price of health-care in America by $234 billion in ten years, that its savings "may be unrealistic," and that there was "a very serious risk" of its new insurance scheme becoming "unsustainable."
　
The Congressional Budget Office ruled the Senate bill would drive the cost of health-insurance premiums "10 percent to 13 percent higher in 2016 than...under current law," that it would lead employers to dump 5 million Americans net from their current coverage, and that even a decade after passage, it would leave 16 million Americans uninsured still, plus 8 million uninsured illegals.
　
The new law includes something called the "individual mandate" -- a legal requirement to buy federally-approved, comprehensive health-insurance, enforceable by the IRS -- which is probably unconstitutional and certainly unpopular, and which Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for proposing in the Democratic presidential primaries.
　
The new law establishes 159 new bureaucracies of all sorts, and hires 16,500 new IRS agents to police the new regime of taxes, regulations, and mandates.
　
The new law is supposed to be paid for by something like $500 billion in new taxes over ten years, plus another $500 billion in cuts to Medicare. And the accounting of the bills is as fraudulent as Enron's. Over $200 billion in spending was moved out of the bills, to be passed separately in what is called the "doctor fix," so as not to be counted in the official Congressional Budget Office scorings, and ten years of tax increases and spending cuts are counted against six years of benefits.
　
And nowhere in those thousands of pages is there any attempt at the obvious, common-sense reforms like opening the health-insurance companies to competition from out of state, enabling bare-bones insurance policies, or restraining the tort lawyers who make practicing medicine in America a legal hazard.

House Democrats passed the Senate bill only on the understanding that their "reconciliation" bill would then be passed in the Senate by 50-percent-plus-one budget reconciliation, to circumvent the Senate's 60-percent threshold, which is without precedent for legislation of this nature and scale, and which is the sort of thing Obama and his party denounced as affront to American democracy until they came to see it as a neat trick for getting their way.
　
It's not until 2014 and later that the new law goes fully into effect; there will be national elections this November and in November of 2012. By having it all their own way, against the national will and around the legislative rules, Obama and his Congress have only hastened the day when a very different government sits in Washington. The Left in America may never be entrusted with such unchecked power again for a generation.

--A slightly earlier version of this published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

More indulgence and incompetence of the Canadian Press Washington bureau (and Chronicle-Herald)

(There aren't enough hours in the day for my duties as self-appointed watchdog of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, so this post will have to be a shorter one.)

Any parody I could come up with could hardly be any more caricaturish than the actual dispatches of Lee-Anne Goodman, the lone American correspondent of the lone Canadian newswire service. March 9, top story, national news, Halifax Chronicle-Herald: "Palin's family sought medical care in Canada; Gosh darnit: Ex-governor's claim about 1960s prompts scrutiny, ridicule."

By the time that dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau appeared in The Herald, it had long since been mooted thoroughly. The Associated Press had interviewed Sarah Palin's father for a report on the subject the day before, and explained everything: "There was no road out of there [Skagway, Alaska, where Palin lived at the time].... The ferry schedule was very erratic. ... The plane schedule was very erratic. ... We had no doctor in Skagway. ... We much preferred to use our facilities because my insurance didn't cover anything in Whitehorse. And even though they have socialized medicine, I still had to pay the bill, being an American citizen."

So the scandal was a faux-scandal and the story was a non-story, and had been demonstrated as such long before it got into print, in news and opinion outlets including the very Associated Press, which is sluiced through the Canadian Press under an absolutely typical Canadian scheme whereby the Upper Canadian monopoly headquartered in Toronto is granted exclusive rights to distribute the superior American product to its hostage market in the provincial hinterlands like Nova Scotia. But that AP report with the facts of the story from Palin's father never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.

To print the Associated Press report would have been to repudiate not only the Canadian Press Washington bureau, but The Chronicle-Herald which promoted the CP story to the top of its national news and joined in on the sneering ("gosh darnit"), and whose editorial cartoonist rendered the junk as his latest anti-Palin cartoon the following day. The Canadian Press Washington bureau story was sustainable only in the absence of the facts. Palin had only related the anecdote to demonstrate her closeness to Canada, there was not the slightest hypocrisy in it, and to make a top-story scandal out of it necessitated an obliviousness to the facts, if not also a smugness, elite prejudice, and an inordinate and obsessive malice for Sarah Palin.

It's one of the features of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, documented here many times before, that it is typically familiar with only the leftist line on any given story, and quite oblivious to the other half of the story. So for instance, when the Left picks up on a hoax that a Palin rally attendee called out "Kill him" when the subject of Barack Obama was raised, the Canadian Press Washington bureau will credulously repeat that hoax, even seven months after it's been comprehensively debunked by the Secret Service. That's perfectly fine in a person who just doesn't much care to be confronted by conservatism, and a leftist does have the luxury in the 21st Century of passing her life without ever really being exposed to conservatism except as a caricature and object of scorn, while we conservatives are confronted by leftism when we go through our public schools and our universities, or every time we try to sign into our online e-mail accounts and are greeted with an unsolicited "In the News" box of selected "mainstream" headlines, or when we try to watch Comedy Central with its daily recitations of Democrat Party talking points delivered in the style of glib, too-cool-for-school, pop comics. But the obliviousness to the conservative side of the story does become a problem in a person who's elevated to the post of lone American correspondent for the lone Canadian newswire service, covering what is after all a profoundly conservative country.


The junk reporting on Sarah Palin came just four days after the latest Canadian Press Washington bureau effort in its service as defender of the president of the United States against unkindnesses. The March 5 dispatch was headlined in The Chronicle-Herald, "Senior Republican: Obama like The Joker." That "senior Republican" was some "finance director" of the Repulican National Committee whom I'd never heard of, and his supposed outrage was an internal RNC Powerpoint presentation which used the ubiquitous Obama-as-The-Joker photo.

That's news at the Washington bureau of the Canadian Press and in The Chronicle-Herald of Halifax, Nova Scotia, which counted the story as "World" news. But here is some of what was not counted as news -- a partial list of developments dominating American politics in the day or two before that report ran:

-Suspicion by even House Democrats that Obama's promise, and the Senate Democrats' assurance, that the Senate health-care bill would be "fixed" through budget reconciliation if it's passed as-is by the House, would become just another of Obama's broken promises, that he would simply sign the bill into law and declare victory, and the Senate Democrats would conveniently discover some compelling reason against reconciliation which somehow never occurred to them earlier.
-Suspicion that Obama's appointment of Scott Matheson to a federal appellate court was influenced by the fact that Matheson's brother Jim is a Democrat Congressman who voted "no" on the health-care bill in November, and who Obama was at that moment inviting to the White House to be persuaded to change his vote to "yes".
-The recalling of quotes by Candidate Obama and Senator Obama denouncing the sort of thing he's now proposing as president, to enact his health-care monstrosity against the will of the people by 50-percent-plus-one parliamentary device.
-Charlie Rangel, the Democrat Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, forced to surrender his chairmanship in light of Ethics Committee findings in its investigation of him for corruption; Democrat Congressman Pete Stark lasts just a day as replacement chairman, on account of his being a hateful, deranged radical, most recently famous for telling a conservative constituent at a town hall meeting that he wasn't "worth wasting the urine." (That incident also unreported in the CP and Herald.)
-Democrat Congressman Eric Massa announces his retirement after the Ethics Committee is informed of allegations he had "made unwanted advances toward a junior male staffer."
-Democrat Congressman Bill Delahunt becomes the lastest in a long parade of veteran Democrats announcing their retirement as of the end of this Congress, avoiding a re-election campaign in what promises to be a very unkind November for Democrats.

But none of that qualified as news at the Canadian Press Washington bureau or The Chronicle-Herald. Instead we were given a report scrutinizing some unknown finance director of the Republican National Committee for an internal committee Powerpoint presentation. All those serious stories, involving the governing party and government policies, in just the day or two before the Canadian Press Washington bureau passed them over for its unknown-Republican-functionary-calls-Obama-The-Joker story. The Eric Massa story exploded to a new order of magnitude on March 8 and was the biggest thing in American politics on the 8th and 9th, and has carried over into the 10th, but still the name "Eric Massa" appears nowhere in The Chronicle-Herald. The Massa story combines a Democrat sexual harassment scandal with Democrat allegations of abuse of power against fellow Democrats. And yet when some unknown back-bencher from the Republican minority opposition called out "You lie" during Obama's partisan, hectoring health-care address to a joint session of Congress, which was itself a gratuitous abuse of the office of president, The Herald ran half a dozen reports calling the powerless Republican nobody to task, one of them from the CP Washington bureau.

The dispatches of the Canadian Press Washington bureau ought to make the CP's "Editor-in-Chief" cringe. But he presides over a monopoly: there is no alternative newswire service in Canada, and the CP's network of client news outlets are a captive market that'll take what they're given. And the journalistic offenses of his Washington bureau only flatter the prejudices of a Toronto elite: all the junk reporting, all the scrutiny of the powerless and stroking of the powerful, all the conspicuous neglect of big stories and disproportionate elevation of trifles in their place, all the obliviousness to at least half the story -- the effect of it all is uniformly to scorn conservatives and congratulate leftists, so it must be very difficult indeed for any Toronto bigwig to see the problem in it. And anyway, if the Canadian Press truly were "serious about the news", it would never have posted a hysterically-partisan glorified gossip columnist to Washington as its sole American correspondent in the first place.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, here, here, and here.)

The revolt against "remaking the nation"

"No peace in health reform; Obama vows to continue despite Republicans," a Chronicle-Herald headline read. But President Obama's problem isn't the Republican Party so much as the American people: Not two days before that Associated Press report ran, a CNN poll was released showing just 25 percent of Americans supported the Democrats' health-care bills, to 73 percent who wanted Congress to either start from scratch or quit health-care altogether.

And when it comes to pass that a Republican unknown wins the special election for U.S. Senate in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, to replace Ted Kennedy, no less, and after vowing daily to be the 41st vote to kill the Democrats' health-care bills, then it may well and truly be said that the American people do not want this "comprehensive health-care reform," which was the centrepiece of Obama's project to "remake the nation."

Obama's problem isn't "misinformation," or "the venal tone of the arguments against reform," as the Canadian Press reported matter-of-factly in this newspaper. It isn't that "Republicans continue health care scare tactics," as the Herald headline on one Associated Press story had it. And the public outrage isn't "town hall nonsense," as another Herald headline editorialized on one of many contemptuous Canadian Press reports (like "U.S. racists direct hateful messages at Obama," painting the "teabagging protests" as crypto-racist) scrutinizing the powerless minority opposition, and the American people saying their piece in the town squares and town halls, instead of the unchecked president and his super-majorities.

Even after the health-care bills had been repudiated by Ted Kennedy's old voters, the Canadian Press in this paper persisted in describing them as "legislation that would have provided millions of Americans with health insurance," but surely if that was all there was to it, then the bills would have become law long since with wide margins and popular support. Obama's problem is that his "comprehensive health-care reform" is comprehensively abominable, and the people plain don't want it.

After the Massachusetts comeuppance, Obama himself briefly conceded, "some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge" that "if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making." So those "Republican scare tactics" weren't so "misinformed" after all.

The very "chief actuary" for Medicare and Medicaid Services had to report in December that the Senate bill would raise the price of health-care in America by $234 billion in ten years, that its supposed savings "may be unrealistic," and that there was "a very serious risk" of its proposed new insurance scheme becoming "unsustainable."

The health-care bills include something called the "individual mandate" -- a legal requirement to buy government-approved, comprehensive health insurance, enforceable by the IRS -- which is probably unconstitutional and certainly unpopular, and which Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for proposing in the Democratic presidential primaries.

The bills are supposed to be paid for by something like $500 billion in new taxes over ten years, plus another $500 billion in cuts to Medicare. And the accounting of the bills is as fraudulent as Enron's. Over $200 billion in spending was moved out of the bills, to be passed separately in what is called the "doctor fix," so as not to be counted in the official Congressional Budget Office scorings of the bills, and ten years of tax increases and spending cuts are counted against six years of benefits.

The bills are as bad for what they don't do as for what they do. Nowhere in those 2,000-plus pages each do they institute the obvious, common-sense reforms like opening the health insurance companies to competition from out of state, enabling bare-bones insurance policies, or restraining the tort lawyers who make practicing medicine in America a legal hazard.

Not to mention that the "50 million uninsured" boil down to something closer to 15 million legitimate, hard cases, which could have been accommodated for a fraction of the $1.2 trillion that Obama and his Congress blew on their worse-than-useless stimulus and omnibus bills alone, without upsetting the system for the other 289 million Americans. Indeed, 80 percent of Americans in a September Gallup poll were satisfied with their health-care as-is, which makes a good start on explaining the resistance to any system-wide overhaul.

Democrats now propose to enact the 2,700-page Senate bill without putting it to a vote in the House, "deeming" it passed by "self-executing rule." It is absolutely without precedent for legislation of this scale, if not also an Article I, Section 7 violation of the Constitution. The understanding is that the monstrosity would then be "fixed" in the Senate by 50-percent-plus-one budget reconciliation, to circumvent the Senate's 60-percent threshold -- also without precedent for legislation of this scale. So to bring their Frankenstein's monster to life, Obama and his Congress are perfectly prepared not only to spurn the express will of the American people, but also to suspend the legislative process of American democracy.

Fourteen months into this "Age of Obama," Obama and his Congress have been reduced to "remaking the nation" by arcane parliamentary maneuver. It's been apparent for the better part of a year now, outside the alternative universe of the elite, monopolistic newswires and newspapers: Obama and his Congress are in collapse, and the American people are in revolt.

The Chronicle-Herald editorial's Barack Obama problem

(UPDATE, Jan. 5, '10: Expanded.)

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald's editorial has been a more reliable rubber-stamp for the doings of the Obama Administration even than a lot of Congressional Democrats, and it's past time someone said peep about it. I've declined to write publicly on the Herald editorial in all these years because I'm barely acquainted with a fellow on the editorial board and because Herald editorials have in past been mostly fair and responsible, even when I haven't much agreed with them.

But The Herald is today a monopoly. Its unsigned editorials are the editorials of the largest newspaper in Canada's four Atlantic provinces, the sole province-wide paper in Nova Scotia, and now the only paper in the largest city north of Boston and east of Quebec City. And not long after The Herald saw off its only competition in Halifax, it fell head-over-heels in love with a man called Barack.

I suppose it was November when it was confirmed for me that the Herald editorial's Obama-boosting was something pathological. The occasion was the mad Obama decision to grant the rights and protections of an American citizen to the enemy leader responsible for the worst attack in American history. Of course the Herald editorial ruled emphatically that Obama had taken "the correct course", as if this was some long-overdue, desperately-needed, obvious measure, instead of a gratuitous prostration before the enemy, absolutely without precedent anywhere on earth, that came out of the clear blue sky one day and had never occurred to anyone before sometime in 2009. The editorial also dismissed the naysayers, who happen to be the great majority, with a fair bit of ignorance of the issue thrown in for good measure, as is typically the case when the Herald editorial wades into American affairs. But that much was all in a day's work for The Chronicle-Herald -- the least reliable outlet in the English-speaking world for news having anything at all to do with Barack Obama; it was the rest of the editorial that crossed into a demonstration of blindest love for Barack Obama.

At the same time as the Obama Administration decided to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-conspirators in civilian court like any American accused of a common crime, they also ruled that five much lesser terrorist figures be tried by the military commissions crafted by the Bush Administration and Democratic Congress, and approved by the very Supreme Court. Now, among those five sent to the military tribunals happened to be one Omar Khadr, who has some legalistic link to Canada and became an instant cause celebre among the entirety of the Canadian elite and left, if there's a distinction. In Canada Khadr is near-universally assumed to be a pitiful, blameless waif clutching a Mickey Mouse (literally), particularly among the kind of Canadians who are also head-over-heels for Barack Obama. So I just assumed the Herald editorial would at least register some polite complaint that the terror leader was being given the rights and protections of an American citizen, while the supposed Canadian innocent was busted down to military court. But no. The Herald editorial actually contorted itself to stalwartly defend both contradictory decisions -- to treat the enemy leader as a U.S. citizen, and to deny that same treatment to the pip-squeak kid believed by Canadians to have done nothing at all.

Now, there is no sensible way of reconciling those two extremes. It's as capricious a decision as has ever been made by any democratic government, and is the kind of arbitrariness one finds in rulers who claim a divine right. The Obama Administration's only given rationale was that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was responsible for an attack on civilians, so he was being tried in civilian court, while the others were alleged to be responsible for military attacks and so were being tried in the military system, but of course a civilian massacre is if anything many times worse than an attack on armed forces in a war zone, and anyway, Khalid Sheik Mohammed's 9/11 attacks were also against the Pentagon, the very headquarters of the United States Armed Forces. So that day, in that editorial of The Chronicle-Herald, it finally became beyond dispute that the sole organizing principle in Herald editorials concerning Barack Obama was their irrational allegiance to Obama, in absolutely all he does, all he says, and all that is done and said under the name of his administration.

And so when Obama announced his "surgelet" for Afghanistan, as when he has announced anything at all of any import, the only question was how obsequious the Herald editorial on the subject would be. Of course the editorial would take the view that Obama was responsible and wise, plotting just the right course in just the right measure. Well, where other observers found Obama to be hesitatingly hedging his bets in search of a third way between the hard realities, the Herald editorial pronounced him "courageous". Where other commentators found Obama's speech dispiriting when it needed to be rousing, the Herald editorial decided he was duly "sombre".

As if that weren't enough, a little later in another installment on the same subject, the Herald editorial went one better, actually going so far as to explicitly compare Obama to the greatest president of them all, the man who was prepared to rend the nation and precipitate the bloodiest war in its history, and spill the blood of 600,000 Americans to do what was right. These are the actual words of the December 13 Chronicle-Herald editorial: "Like Abraham Lincoln, President Obama is clearly among the latter. He serves the cause of world peace by using force against those who are bound to violence." Ugh. You see why I say the Herald editorial is in love. And it's always so unbecoming when comfortable middle-aged men fall head-over-heels. Of course, for anyone who has a clue about Lincoln as he was -- and not as he's conveniently recalled by a latter-day elite Canadian newspaper editorialist with his head in the clouds singing, "Obama: say it softly, it's almost like praying" -- the very fact that the Herald editorial glorifies Barack Obama unto the heavens is the first clue that Obama is no Lincoln. The Halifax elite of Lincoln's day were as anti-Lincoln as any Confederate raider; their inheritors today are the ones invoking Lincoln to justify the elite conventional wisdom of their time. If Obama were remotely like Lincoln, the Herald editorial would presently be denouncing him as a warmonger and shredder of civil liberties and "all international law".

If the case for the Herald editorial's Barack Obama problem hasn't been made sufficiently, the December 30 editorial on the attempted Christmas Day terror bombing may clear up any lingering doubt. The sole reference to Obama was in praise of him: "U.S. president Barack Obama has wisely asked for a thorough review...." Now, by December 30 there had accumulated a pile of indictments against Obama and his administration on this score, and yet the Herald editorial was actually applauding Obama for his "wisdom" in requesting a review.

That "wisely" really was gratuitous; even if the editorial found it necessary to document that Obama had requested a review, just how much "wisdom" does it take for a politician to do the most usual, unimaginitive, cheap, and reactive thing possible, ordering a "review" after his government has made a complete pig's breakfast of things? "Wisdom" would have been revoking the would-be bomber's visa and monitoring him after he became known to the U.S. government as a jihadi; not upholding the visa, letting the man onto a U.S.-bound flight with a bomb in his pants, then when the fuse misfired and the civilian passengers detained him, turning him over to domestic law enforcement and granting him a lawyer on the taxpayer's tab without pumping him for information on other planned attacks, while your administration assures the people that "the system worked."

It gets worse when one appreciates that even openly pro-Obama American newspaper editorials were absolutely scathing of Obama on this same point. From the same day and on the same subject as that Herald editorial, the editorial of the New York Daily News: "What the public was left with was a never-to-be-repeated case study in crisis management. It's time to get a grip, Mr. President. ... Obama's description of Abdumutallab as an 'isolated extremist' was remarkable and disturbing. The radicalized young Nigerian is nothing of the sort. ... In a similarly distant fashion, the President ordered up a 'review'...." Again, that was the editorial of a pro-Obama American paper, on the same day and subject as the Herald editorial blindly and pathetically claiming "wisdom" in Obama's handling of the attempted bombing.

Yes, blinder love hath no man than The Chronicle-Herald's editorial for Barack Obama. It's about to the point that if Obama announced his intention to destroy America's nuclear arsenal by detonating it over Halifax, the Herald editorial could be expected to applaud in its accustomed judicious tone that "this is the correct course". But what upset my stomach was a casual cynicism in defense of Obama in the editorial on Obama's Afghan surgelet. I determined there was no virtue in holding my fire any longer on an editorial board capable of that kind of rationalizing.

That Herald editorial of December 3 concocted an argument out of thinnest air, excusing Obama for his withdrawal date, which the same editorial acknowledged in the same paragraph was "wholly unrealistic". The editorial calls it "triangulation", which would be bad enough, but that's a misuse of the old Dick Morris term of art from the 1990s, which is a point that demands a greater understanding of American politics and history than is found in the average Canadian newspaper editorial board. In fact the editorial is clearly implying this is something worse than "triangulation": a lie.

The editorial calls Obama's withdrawal date "wholly unrealistic", then proceeds to argue that this unrealism is necessary to "give the war-weary American public something to look forward to." You can almost see the Herald editorialist patting the heads of those "war-weary American public". Give 'em "something to look forward to" -- something "wholly unrealistic". That'll hold 'em. What do you call it when something "wholly unrealistic" is promised, to give people "something to look forward to"? Not Dick Morris' "triangulation".

It is patronizing, skin-crawlingly cynical, and unworthy of an argument in defense of the war. If this anonymous Herald editorialist and his readers are so very clever as to plainly see that Obama's withdrawal date is "wholly unrealistic", then why shouldn't the American people be capable of seeing the very same thing? The implication is that the American people lack the editorialist's level of understanding, and can be told a little white lie to hold them for a while. And this is supposed to be in support of the war effort. Well, like the anonymous Herald editorial-writer, I am a supporter of the war, but apparently unlike that masked man, I also respect and revere the American people, and it does seem to me that if you mean to ask the American people to sustain a war effort, you owe it to them to tell them what you know to be true, as far as you can know it.

Following is the offending passage:

Anonymous Chronicle-Herald editorial-writer: "Where Mr. Obama was less
convincing was in imposing a strict timetable on the deployment, subject, of
course, to the situation on the ground at that time. The president envisions
U.S. troops beginning to withdraw by July 2011, which is even before Canada’s
firm pullout date of December 2011. At this rate, we could hitch a ride home
early.
"While the deadline is wholly unrealistic, it is the kind of triangulation Mr. Obama feels he must engage in. First, he must give the war-weary American public something to look forward to. Second, he must impose a benchmark for self-sufficiency on the corrupt Afghan government. Third, he must give his generals a sense of urgency."

Now take that last point, or rather that last imagining. That is both an unearned credit to Obama and an undeserved offense to the generals prosecuting Obama's war. The editorial of the largest newspaper on Canada's east coast is actually arguing that Obama offered a "wholly unrealistic" withdrawal date to "give his generals a sense of urgency". For a start, if it's plain even to Herald editorial-writer that Obama's deadline is "wholly unrealistic", then isn't it just possible that the generals would know that better than anyone? And I know all too well that The Chronicle-Herald guards its gates against news and opinion that may be upsetting to elite Canadian Obama-adulators, but surely even the Herald editorial board got the news that Obama took three months to order three-quarters of the reinforcements requested by his hand-picked general, in order to do the job Obama gave him in March. During which time, 116 American soldiers died in Afghanistan. It is Obama who's been lacking the "sense of urgency", not the generals on the ground who are daily prosecuting his war without the men they tell him they need for the job.

And if the anonymous editorial-writer wanted to come up with three rationales to justify this Obama withdrawal date which even the editorialist couldn't support, then how about the most obvious one, namely that Obama's own majority party is against his surgelet. If you're fishing for justifications for setting a withdrawal date just a year after your reinforcements get into place, why not that the majority party is against sending them at all, and may be more inclined to let it pass if there's reason to think it'll be reversed before long? That most obvious point was not made in the Herald editorial, while two cynical, patronizing, and frankly imaginary rationales did make it into the final draft.

Now, as one who's been reading Herald editorials for many years, I recall that the Herald editorial takes a very dim view of Rush Limbaugh, and as those people who take a dim view of Rush Limbaugh are invariably people who never listen to him, I'd bet good money that the Herald editorialist didn't hear Limbaugh's definitive argument against Obama's announced withdrawal date, so I will paraphrase it here.

The Limbaugh argument imagines that it had been an al Qaeda or Taliban leader speaking on Afghanistan, instead of Obama. The speech goes on at some length about the al Qaeda/Taliban plans for sending thousands of reinforcements into Afghanistan, the necessity of the mission, etc., etc. Then this al Qaeda/Taliban leader announces that after 18 months, they'll start their withdrawal. Now how do you suppose we would take that? Would we dwell on the first bit, or the bit about the withdrawal starting in 18 months? Of course, we'd take that as an admission of defeat, and buck ourselves up that if we can just hang on in there for another 18 months, we'll have seen the enemy off.

Well, then, now we have some idea of how the enemy will have taken Obama's Afghanistan address, with its talk of withdrawals in 18 months. It took Rush Limbaugh to make that point, but Herald editorialists would not be so abased as to hear so "boorish" an observer.

What's more, I think the Herald editorial has the wrong end of the stick altogether on Obama's withdrawal date. The editorial assumes he's just saying it; that Obama has set this date purely for public consumption, knowing full well it's unrealistic, and will push on after that time if that's what's called for. That kind of deliberate dishonesty would be a scandal of the first order, but it assumes Obama will prosecute this war come hell or high water. I suppose we won't know for sure until we get there, but what possible reason has Obama given for assuming such a thing? If Obama is as committed to this fight as the Herald editorial imagines him to be, then why is he sending 30,000 reinforcements when he was asked for 40,000, and why did it take him three months to sign off on even that many?

Obama has been a true-believing leftist all his life, as far to the left as any man who's even gotten onto a major-party presidential ticket in the United States. His associations are all far-left. His voting record in his brief time as U.S. senator earned him the "most liberal" ranking of the 100 senators -- one of whom is a self-described "socialist". His entire candidacy in the Democratic primaries was built on his being the least unelectable of the anti-war radicals. He talks even now of nuclear disarmament, referring not to Iran, but the United States. And in this very Afghanistan address in which he used "I" some 45 times, he uttered the word "victory" not once.

If America is going to win this Afghan War, it won't be made easier by half-measures -- sending 30,000 reinforcements when the generals ask for 40,000, restricting the rules of engagement, taking three months to order reinforcements, then announcing they'll be withdrawn starting one year after they've arrived, etc. My prayer is that American troops are allowed and enabled to do their job in Afghanistan, that the Pakistani government sees our common enemy as an urgent threat to itself and fully does its part in the war against them, and that the casualties are held down not only to spare the lives of good men, but to hold off the majority Democrats in their natural retreat, until the American people have the chance to turf them out of office and give power to the men with the stomachs to win wars.

It does seem to me that the editorial board of The Chronicle-Herald, like the rest of Canada's elite, fell head-over-heels for Barack Obama at some point in 2008, and hasn't seen him clearly since. They imagine him to be everything and anything they wish for him to be, and freely ascribe to him rationales and intents and characteristics that can only be divined by smitten adulators. And they take it as their purpose to defend and advocate for whatever contorted, convoluted decree happens to be arrived at by any functionary coming under the banner of Obama's administration. When Germany's Der Spiegel produces the most comprehensive and damning indictment of Obama's Afghan War policy, while the Herald editorial persists in its love affair, even unto the point of inventing imaginary rationales to justify what it acknowledges is "wholly unrealistic" and making Obama out to be the Lincoln of our times, then Joseph Howe must be turning in his grave.

I can only hope for the day when The Chronicle-Herald's editorial becomes capable of any dissention from Barack Obama's every deed and utterance, or The Herald's monopoly over us is broken. Nothing was ever improved by becoming a monopoly, and since it became last man standing in the newspaper business, The Herald has gone too far along the way to a miserable wad of glorified toilet paper.

Obama's mad Mohammed decision

The 9/11 attacks killed 2,973 innocents, and were intended to kill many times more. Those two quarter-mile-high World Trade Center towers during working hours amounted to the densest concentration of humanity anywhere on earth -- 50,000 people stacked in two buildings just a couple hundred feet per side each. The third plane which smashed into the Pentagon was meant to decapitate the United States military, and the fourth plane which was crashed by its passengers was bound for either the White House or the Capitol, to decapitate the United States government.

It takes a special kind of madness to extend the rights and protections of American citizens to the enemy leader who planned those attacks, more murderous than even the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the worst in American history.

Within days of the Obama Administration's decision to bring the professed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to a New York City civilian courtroom for "his day in court," a CNN poll found the American people were against it, 64 percent to 34 percent. The pollster called the decision "universally unpopular -- even a majority of Democrats and liberals say that he should be tried by military authorities." Then Obama's job approval rating fell below the 50-percent waterline for the first time in the Quinnipiac and Gallup polls.

Those real people from the real world understand the fundamental thing, that the 9/11 attacks were no "crime." A "crime" is smashing a storefront window, or mugging and stabbing a passerby who takes a wrong turn down a dark alley. The 9/11 attacks were an act of war and a terror atrocity.

And though you'd never guess it from the Mohammed decision, the Obama Administration does occasionally show signs they know there's a war on. This same Obama Administration has if anything increased the unmanned aerial strikes on enemy targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If information comes over the transom that some worthwhile enemy is holed up in an open spot, then a drone gets airborne, locates the target, and unceremoniously drops a Hellfire missile or a JDAM on his head.

Those enemy belligerents are not arrested and read their rights under the Constitution and laws of the United States, then flown to New York for their taxpayer-funded legal representation and their day in court. They're summarily blown to kingdom come, along with any poor innocent souls unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, because this is war, not some law enforcement operation. And in war, when an enemy is captured and given trial, there is a centuries-old mechanism for dealing with him: military tribunal.

All the way back in 2001, the Bush Administration created a system of military commissions precisely to deal with the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but the commissions were immediately challenged in court by leftist legal activists who've never met an enemy of the United States they didn't like. The activists managed to obstruct the commissions in their good work until 2008, when after two Supreme Court rulings, the Bush Administration and the Democratic Congress finalized a military commissions system which passed muster with the Supreme Court and the notions of the decadent 21st Century.

The Obama Administration and its hardier water-carriers who imagine that civilian trials for the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are only right and proper, insist that of course Mohammed will be found guilty and put to death, and on the off-chance he isn't, why, we'll just re-arrest him on the spot, come up with some new charge, and try, try again until we get the verdict we want. But if this trial is so predetermined, and the system may simply be gamed until we have our way, then why on earth can we not dispense with the pretense and leave Mohammed's case with the special military commissions, where he was on course to plead guilty and have his "martyrdom" by execution until Obama suspended the process?

How might American civilian law have to be compromised in order for this Mohammed case to be heard at all in a civilian courtroom? Until now, it never occurred to U.S. agents to treat Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as they would an American citizen accused of a cooking up illicit whiskey or some such thing: he wasn't read his rights, for a start, and he happens to have been the primary subject of that practice called waterboarding. Unless some exception is made, those kinds of things would be grounds for tossing the case out in the civilian system. And how might national security be compromised if and when Mohammed demands discovery -- placing the raw military intelligence to do with his case in his hands?

Of course the United States can defend its greatest city against terror attacks made more likely by a high-profile trial of the 9/11 mastermind just blocks from Ground Zero, but why should it have to? Why should New Yorkers be given new reason to fear? Why should the Armed Forces and law enforcement be given a new threat to defend against? Why should the American taxpayer have to put up $75 million for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's "day in court," and endure his harangues for however long it takes to come to the end of this ghastly process?

This is not the will of the American people. There's a reckoning coming, and Obama's mad Mohammed decision is just another milestone along the road to it.

Still more problems with the Canadian Press Washington bureau

The way Obama's Afghan policy is being reported, anyone might think this was September of 2008 rather than September '09, when Barack Obama was Candidate Obama rather than President Obama, and an observer and critic of U.S. war policy rather than the commander-in-chief who ordered it.

The Chronicle-Herald's top World News story for September 17 was from the Canadian Press Washington bureau and credulously headlined "Obama: U.S. needs clear strategy for Afghan mission."

Lee-Anne Goodman: "President Barack Obama said Thursday the U.S. has yet to decide on the best strategy for the ongoing conflict and won't send any more soldiers there until it does."

That is undoubtedly what Obama said in September. But he had said something else entirely just a month earlier, on August 17.

Obama, August 2009: "I announced a new, comprehensive strategy in March. ... This strategy acknowledges that military power alone will not win this war."

"Our new strategy has a clear mission and defined goals: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies."

"In the months since, we have begun to put this comprehensive strategy into action."

So Obama announced a new Afghan War "strategy", ordered 21,000 new troops to Afghanistan in aid of that strategy, and things got worse than they've yet been. Obama then pretended the current failing strategy wasn't his and that he'd never order troops into battle without a proper plan, and hoped no-one would notice. And sure enough, no-one at the Canadian Press Washington bureau or The Chronicle-Herald did notice.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau repeated Obama's claims credulously, without so much as a hint that they were belied by Obama's own words of just weeks before, on that "new strategy" of his, with its "clear mission" and "defined goals", and which had been "put into action" "in the months since" March.

Obama, September 2009, quoted in the Canadian Press: "'We have lacked as clear of a strategy and a mission as is necessary in order to meet our overriding objective, which is to dismantle and disrupt and destroy al-Qaida,' Obama said."

"'There is no immediate decision pending on resources, because one of the things I'm absolutely clear about is you have to get the strategy right and then make determinations about resources,' he said.

'You don't make determinations about sending young men and women into battle without having absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be.'"

And this was fully half a year after Obama had proclaimed, "Today, I am announcing a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. This marks the conclusion of a careful policy review that I ordered as soon as I took office."

Lee-Anne Goodman: "The original goal of the mission - to seek out and destroy the forces behind the 9-11 attacks eight years ago - is all but a distant memory, thanks in part to the absence of a clear course of action, Obama suggested."

If that's the case, then who, pray tell, may be responsible for this "absence of a clear course of action," considering again that Obama was only the month before championing his "clear mission" and "defined goals" which had been "put into action" "in the months since" March?

The Canadian Press Washington bureau worked in two references to Obama's popularity -- in Canada.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "a president who remains wildly popular in Canada" and "a president who enjoys unprecedented popularity in Canada."

No doubt. But then, Canadians don't live under Obama's administration and Congress, and don't get a vote on them. So two unquantified assertions of Obama's great popularity in Canada, and not one mention of his standing in the only country where that matters. (In case you're wondering, it's not good. The September Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found Obama falling to 41% job approval among independents.)

The people cannot afford a press whose object is to flatter Obama and taunt his opponents, oblivious to his actual policies and their actual consequences, happily obliging of his political tricks, and enabling him to say and do as he pleases without the fear of being called to account to keep him honest.

The press is now colluding with Obama in his shrugging off of responsibility for his very war policy, pretending with him that his policies aren't his if they aren't working, and allowing him a license and blamelessness.

When it comes to the current president of the United States and his Congressional supermajorities, The Chronicle-Herald and the Canadian Press aren't so much news outlets as a kind of support group for leftist elites -- an imaginary "world as it ought to be" according to leftist elites, where they play make-believe that the "good guys" can do no wrong and everything's OK.

Reality is at least beginning to intrude among some of the more serious on the Left. By September 22, the leftist Guardian newspaper in England was running an opinion piece headlined "Obama the impotent," and the leftist New Republic magazine in the States published an important piece titled "Job One: The only way Obama can pull his presidency back from the brink."

But reality was still safely at bay in The Chronicle-Herald and the Canadian Press. On that same day, the top of The Herald's World News read "Obama a talk show pro." Another dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, featuring a large color photo of Obama laughing it up with David Letterman. As even two of the most pro-Obama outlets in America and Britain were worrying aloud about Obama's collapse, The Herald and the CP were still running the most unserious, frivolous fluff as if the honeymoon had never ended, oblivious to the disaster gathering all around.

(The Canadian Press Washington bureau in that piece identified Fox News as "notoriously right-wing." Well, then, America must like its cable news "notoriously right-wing": As of September, Fox News was drawing nearly twice as many viewers as CNN and MSNBC combined. All 10 of the top 10 shows on cable news, and 13 of the top 15, were Fox News shows. Even FNC's 3 AM Eastern "Red Eye" drew more viewers than MSNBC's breakfast show. Fox News is "notorious" and "right-wing" to Canadian leftist elites; to the American people, it's the last outpost of the Fourth Estate in television news.)

Further down on that same September 22 World News page, The Herald did manage to scrutinize the president of the United States -- the last one -- and a now-canceled U.S. policy: "Study: CIA's harsh methods counterproductive," an Associated Press story on a "paper which scrutinizes the techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administration through the lens of neurobiology."

On or about that same day, the same Associated Press which came up with the "neurobiological study" story put up a couple pieces allowing some of the bad news reality into its Obama coverage -- "SPIN METER: $2 trillion in health savings? Where?" and "Tough political realities quiet youth 'Obamamania'" -- but for some reason those never made it into The Chronicle-Herald.

Not Herald News section material, really. There's scarcely any less news to be had on the Opinions page, and there's a sight more honesty there.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, and here.)

Another problem with the Canadian Press Washington bureau

Here's the latest entry, reproduced in The Chronicle-Herald "World News" section under the subheadline, "Frank talk skewers town hall nonsense." Such is the license of a Herald "World News" editor, that they may insert their elite prejudices into the very newswire copy headlines.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "The ever-outspoken Barney Franks, the chairman of the House financial services committee, minced no words Tuesday night at a town hall meeting in Massachusetts when someone likened Obama’s health care plans to 'Nazi policy.'
'On what planet do you spend most of your time?' Franks replied to the woman as constituents cheered and applauded.
Franks assailed her for carrying a photograph of the president defaced to look like Adolf Hitler — the type of sign that’s been seen among Obama opponents since the so-called tea bag protests in April."

Might as well start with the name. It's "Frank", not "Franks".

"So-called tea bag protests." Yes, "so called" by leftists who hold the protestors in contempt. The protests are more officially called "tea parties", as in the Boston Tea Party protesting King George III's taxation. "Tea bag" refers to a pornographic leftist taunt against the protestors. And the tea parties started in February, not April, and for that matter they've never really let up yet.

And that gal at the townhall with the sacrilegious "defaced" Obama photo is known to have been from the LaRouche Youth. Even the Washington Post saw fit to report it. LaRouche-ites are avowedly not conservative, much less Republican. But the Canadian Press Washington bureau is evidently content to let its readers assume this was just another dastardly doing of those beastly Republicans.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "Franks’s 'mad as hell' moment, captured by CNN cameras, went viral on Wednesday, showing up on countless websites, blogs and Facebook walls and met largely with celebration."

No doubt that was cause for "celebration" among the CP Washington bureau's kind of people. A big committee chairman in a government with practically unchecked power, berating a law-abiding citizen who's completely shut out of power. Prop up the powerful, tear down the powerless. It's the Canadian Press way in the Age of Obama.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau is getting to be a regular watchdog against American citizens exercising their free speech to compare their government to Naziism, which in any event is one of the more hackneyed and less effective lines of argument in public affairs. But there was a time when the Fourth Estate was more wary of unchecked government than of law-abiding citizens saying their piece in the town squares and town halls.

The Senate Majority Leader has called the protestors "evil-mongers". The Speaker of the House claimed they were "carrying swastikas", then she and her House Majority Leader added that the protestors' actions were "simply un-American". An Arkansas Democrat Senator had already called the protestors "un-American", before recanting for fear of her political skin. And a Washington state Democrat Congressman accused the protestors of "brownshirt tactics".

It ought to be a little discomfiting to appreciate that those are the public pronouncements of people holding all the power, about people who are completely shut out of power. A Fourth Estate would be alarmed at such a prospect; it certainly wouldn't throw in with the government in lording over the people. But the Canadian Press Washington bureau finds "celebration" that the big-government bigwig has denounced the insufferable peasant, and put her right back down in her place.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "But there’s another potential option, something called budget reconciliation. That would allow Democrats to push the bill through with only 51 votes."

Quite right. Only, there is that niggling point that reconciliation is to be used for budgetary matters, not a governmentalization of American health-care opposed by majorities of the American people. From no less an authority than the inventor of the reconciliation mechanism, Sen. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia: "I oppose using the budget reconciliation process to pass health care reform and climate change legislation. ... As one of the authors of the reconciliation process, I can tell you that the ironclad parliamentary procedures it authorizes were never intended for this purpose."

Lee-Anne Goodman: "It could have been the Nazi comparisons. Perhaps it was recent remarks from top Republicans that they’d support no health care reform bill. Or it could just be spent reserves of patience following weeks of misinformation about death panels and health insurance for illegal aliens."

Take just that very last point. "Misinformation about ... health insurance for illegal aliens." When Obama and his lot talk about covering the "46 million uninsured" (or "as many as 50 million uninsured Americans," in the preferred formulation of the CP Washington bureau), they're necessarily including 9-10 million legal immigrants and illegal aliens who are counted in that figure. The National Institute for Health Care Management reckons that 5.6 million of the 46 million uninsured are illegal aliens. So insuring those "46 million uninsured" necessarily involves covering millions of illegal aliens included in the figure. It's no "misinformation"; it's Census Bureau statistics and NIHCM estimates.

And since that CP dispatch was published, it's come out that no less an authority than the Congressional Research Service has determined that "H.R. 3200 [the House health-care bill] does not contain any restrictions on noncitzens—whether legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently.”

Of course Obama and his party must claim their health-care "reform" won't cover illegal aliens -- they know even their own side would never swallow such a thing. But there was a time when those people who fancy themselves reporters would have had some skepticism and scrutiny for a president's political tricks and fibs, and not just credulously ape his self-serving rhetoric like some party-organ stenographers.

As for those "top Republicans" saying "they'd support no health care reform bill," that's a neat way of blaming the Democrat crack-up on a Republican minority so small it's in no position to influence much of anything, one way or another.

The Left lost any credibility in blaming Republicans for their failings as of June 30, 2009, when Democrats officially hit the magic 60-vote threshold in the Senate. If the Democrats -- by themselves, without a single Republican vote -- were agreed on this health-care "reform", it'd be passed already. They have the supermajorities in both houses of Congress to do anything they please -- short of overriding a presidential veto, amending the Constitution, or removing a president -- all by themselves, without a single Republican vote.

As of June 30, any Congressional obstruction of Obama's agenda must by definition be the result of balking by Democrats. To imply that Republicans are the obstructionists in this is purest partisan ax-grinding, dependent on ignorance of the numbers and workings of the United States Congress.

And those "top Republicans", whoever they are, are with the people. An August Rasmussen poll found 54% would prefer no health-care reform at all, to anything this president and Congress are likely to come up with. That number shot up to 66% among independent voters. But polls aren't making it into the dispatches of the CP Washington bureau like they used to, now that they've become relentlessly bad news for Obama and his project to "remake the nation."

The Canadian Press Washington bureau was happy to report after just a couple months of the Obama presidency that "Americans are still giving President Barack Obama high marks"; where are the CP Washington bureau dispatches on Obama's marks now that his job approval rating ranks "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures"?

The CP Washington bureau has referred matter-of-factly to the Bush era as "eight years of unpopular Republican rule under President George W. Bush" -- undaunted by the facts that there had been "Republican rule" for just four of Bush's eight years, or that Bush was quite popular enough to be re-elected president and to see his party gain seats in a midterm election for only the third time in the century and a half since the Civil War.

Indeed, it was practically de rigeur in the dispatches of the CP Washington bureau to append any reference to President Bush with "wildly unpopular" or "one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history" -- undaunted by the facts that what was being referred to was not "U.S. history" so much as "polling history", or that even within the history of polling, Bush ranked overall 7th of the 11 presidents since the advent of the Gallup presidential job approval rating in the 1940s.

Well, that "unpopular" Bush was scoring higher job approval ratings than Obama at the same points in their presidencies by late July -- even before Bush's response to the 9/11 attacks had his approval rating hitting 90%. This latest CP Washington dispatch was published on August 20; on that day, Obama's job approval was just about 5 points lower than Bush's had been on the same date in 2001, in the average of all the polls at Real Clear Politics. And Bush had a contested election and a hostile press and popular culture working against him. As to Obama's Democratic supermajorities in Congress, the Real Clear Politics average had the Congressional job approval rating on August 20 at 30%. So when will we read in the Canadian Press about this "unpopular Democratic rule under President Barack Obama"?

And that's the real story in all this, whether the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress -- and the press that shelters and flatters them -- face up to it, or just carry on whistling past the graveyard. They've got their presidency and Congressional supermajorities still, but they've lost the people. All they've got are Democrats, and on a bad day they don't have all of those. The ground has shifted under their feet, and in record time. They've abused what the people granted them, and the people have turned. Now all that's left is a naked push to get their way until their hourglass runs out.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here and here.)

America's conservatism not melting for Obama

Conservative nation: Gallup polling as of August 2009 showed "self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states of the Union," by statistically-significant margins in all states but three. Graphic from Gallup.com.

America is a fundamentally conservative nation, and the most un-conservative of American presidents has thus far not shifted America's conservatism so much as reinforced it. President Obama has run up against D.H. Lawrence's observation on "the essential American soul": "It has never yet melted."

At the six-month mark of Obama's presidency, the USA Today/Gallup poll ranked his job approval rating "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures."

By late July and early August, the average of all the current polling at Real Clear Politics showed Obama's job approval dipping into the 53rd percentile. Obama was down to his baseline of 53 per cent which had voted to make him president nine months earlier.

And it mostly gets worse from the job approval ratings. Disapproval of Obama on health-care hit 52 per cent in the August Quinnipiac poll, with 39 per cent approving.

Obama's $787 billion "stimulus" had become such an anathema by June that the Rasmussen poll found a plurality actually wanted the unspent provisions "canceled," 45-36 per cent. Only 34 per cent in the July Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll were calling the stimulus a "good idea."
Even after several days of press enthusing over Obama's "wildly popular" cash-for-clunkers handout, 54 per cent opposed extending the program in an August Rasmussen poll, with just 33 per cent in support. The press was apparently using some alternate definition of "popular."

And 65 per cent opposed Obama's intended closure of the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention camp in the June USA Today/Gallup poll, with only 18 per cent accepting Obama's claim that Guantanamo "has weakened American national security."

So far in this "Age of Obama," the Gallup poll has registered an upswing in even the more controversial conservatism in America. In March, Americans placed economic growth ahead of "environmental protection," 51-42 per cent: a reversal from 42-49 per cent in 2008 and the worst showing for environmentalism in the quarter-century of Gallup polling on the question.

In April, Gallup recorded a new low in support for a handgun ban: 29 per cent. Which is half the 60 per cent that favoured the ban when Gallup began polling the question -- in the late 1950s.

In May, Gallup found pro-lifers outnumbering pro-choicers 51-45 per cent: a reversal from 44-50 per cent in '08 and "the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995."

In June, Gallup's ideology survey showed conservatives unmoved, at 40 per cent "conservative" to 21 per cent "liberal." That breakdown was 40-19 per cent in 2004, when President Bush and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress were re-elected.

Then a July Gallup poll made it explicit: Americans reported becoming more conservative in their politics, 39-18 per cent. The nation is actually more conservative in Obama's first year than it was in Bush's last.

Then there are the unforgiving tendencies of American democracy. In the century and a half since the Civil War, the party holding the presidency has lost seats in every mid-term Congressional election but three.

In the past four decades, the very longest any party has held the White House and both houses of Congress is four years. By election day in November of next year, Democrats will have controlled both houses of Congress for four years and the White House for two.

Congress' job approval rating in the Real Clear Politics average recently went below 30 per cent. And the Rasmussen "who do you trust" survey which had Democrats leading Republicans on ten issues out of ten before the election, had been turned upside-down nine months later, with Republicans leading Democrats on eight issues out of ten.

So it's not the wildest guess that Republicans will gain in the midterm elections of November next year. Which doesn't necessarily mean they'll form majorities in one or both houses of Congress: the Democrat advantage in the 435-member House is 78 seats, and it typically takes more than a single election to dislodge so many incumbents. But Republicans should have a stronger hand after the midterms, and should be better able to tie Obama's hands in the second half of his presidency.

Obama and his Congress are up against a clock. They're unlikely to see such supermajorities past November of next year, and the closer to the fall of 2010 they come, the more fearful they'll have to be of pushing the trickier items on their agenda -- like legalizing 11 million illegal aliens while the unemployment rate is around 10 per cent and governments can't cover their liabilities as it is. Not to mention the unforeseeable events that distract and preoccupy a government, or blow it off its intended course altogether.

Polls are not static, of course, and neither are they elections. It's better to hold the power and lose the polls than vice-versa. But there has to be some significance in polling that's this soft, this soon.

Fraudulently campaigning on the likes of "a net spending cut," and proclaiming oneself the "change" when the system has crashed just a month and a half before election day, can go a long way to winning votes -- once. But it did nothing to alter the fact of America's conservatism. America is a fundamentally conservative nation that's got itself a radicalized leftist national government, and that discrepancy will have to be resolved somehow or other, sooner or later.

Andrew W. Smith, published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia