Q. What’s this? A spouse decides whether one runs for president? Has this ever happened before?

A. No. Of course not. I think it’s a joke and makes a laughingstock out of Daniels who on a number of fronts…budgetary expertise, excellent governor…is a well-qualified candidate. The proper way would be for the couple quietly to make that decision up or down and then either go for it or no. Throwing the ball to Cherie in public to make the decision for Mitch makes Mitch a sad joke of the GOP candidates—the weenie runt of the litter.

As we all know, Cherie left him and their daughters for another man, divorcing Mitch and marrying an old flame because she despised Mitch’s chosen vocation of politics…and then did a reverse switch, divorcing him and returning to Mitch. Do they think this device…leave it to Cherie… will insulate her from another switcheroo when the press heat comes on? Looks a lot like it. But with her already demonstrated instability I’m not so sure. This stupid p. r. device should disqualify him from election if anything does. This smacks of Dick Lugar, his topmost adviser.

Q. And what’s this Condi Rice for vice president stuff?

A. Daniels made the suggestion carelessly over cocktails with some college kids after Cherie spoke to a Republican audience. Smart, huh? Earlier he had been quoted as saying he did not feel qualified at this point to debate Obama on foreign policy. Smart, huh? What a laugh after all the goof-ups Obama has made! Now he evidently wants an architect of the George W. Bush foreign policy to be considered for veep! Thus from the outset the negatives of that policy will be used against him and the cameras will switch continually to Condi to defend it. Thus one woman decides whether Mitch will run—not Mitch—and another woman will be asked all the big foreign-defense policy questions—a vehemently pro-abort woman at that…..with Mitch presumably left to drive his motorcycle alone down the highways.

The Bush tie-in has already been glaring….Laura calling up Cherie to steady her nerves….the big media serving a trumpet fanfare that here is the truly super-duper candidate…with smoothly the George W. and Poppy rolodexes clicking into place. That’ll mean we face a return to Wilsonianism…our mission being to lead those nations involved in the Arabian Spring to democracy—no how much blood and treasure it takes.

And why Condi? Does he remotely think that Condi Rice is going to lead him to a treasure-trove of black votes when blacks already have a president? God, I hope not. But “My Man Mitch,” as “W” calls him has made all by his own-self the most spectacular screw-ups any pre-announced presidential candidate has done…with a laudable pro-life record, he announced it would be off his table if he were to run—thus sacrificing an army of social conservative volunteers.

He then angled back and signed the Planned Parenthood state funding ban which didn’t allay social conservatives but proved he was trying to be cute. Anyhow, he vitiated much of the so-called “moderate” vote he had gained previously which had made him so exciting to big secular media. Then he booted his big decision…whether or not to run…to his wife. Finally denying himself a free hand postulating a foreign policy at odds with Obama’s…a great natural advantage…he hoists the white flag by suggesting the point-person in the Bush foreign policy be his veep.

What we have here, friends, is a wimp who has proven he isn’t worthy of serious consideration for the presidency because all by himself he has blown it.

Mitt Romney

Many so-called “business approach” candidates…especially liberal Republican ones…fail to start first with the question—is this a job government ought to do? Mitt failed to ask this question first.

Q. Please explain.
A. Relativists, ultra-pragmatists…and that approach made Mitt Romney a multi-millionaire in business…see a problem….insist there should be a solution and hire an army of experts to crunch numbers and come up with a popular liberal, governmental solution—because the trend lies that way—government leading the way. Traditional conservative thinkers ponder a problem, determine if government or private sector is the route to the solution and postulate from there. In 1994 when he ran for the Senate against Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts a heavily pro-abort state, Mitt Romney decided he would craft a strategy on abortion thusly—Under Roe v. Wade legal abortion is the law of the land. I happen to oppose abortion but the law is the law and I respect a woman’s right to make that choice freely.

He had calculated that a pro-abort answer was correct for his candidacy and then crafted a rationale that seemed to hint he was more amenable than Kennedy to pro-life views. A so-called businessman’s pragmatic “solution.”

But ironically Kennedy won the argument by pointing out that if Romney felt personally abortion was wrong, a moral evil, he should forthrightly oppose it and seek to root it out. It was the closest election Kennedy ever won…and at the beginning Romney was leading him….but the tables turned ever so slightly and Romney’s wobbliness on abortion helped Kennedy a fast-and-forever pro-abort. Years later, when he planned a run for president, Romney said his views on abortion were “developing” and came out as a full-blown pro-lifer but was tied up trying to reconcile his earlier and present views and show that he had not….as suspicioned…changed his sails to square with the national GOP’s consensus on pro-life.

Q. Now on RomneyCare…
A. On RomneyCare, he made the same basic error—calculating via hunch that universal health care was the wave of the future. As Massachusetts governor, he hired an army of experts, drafted the legislation and added some juicy pro-Republican parts such as tort reform. But in the bill was the mandate that everyone in the state had to buy health insurance or pay a penalty which is the same as contained in ObamaCare. Because RomneyCare is a state bill it does not have the constitutional ones that ObamaCare has.

But the thing is pesky enough. He signed the bill with great fanfare….Ted Kennedy was there applauding…but now the unpopularity of ObamaCare has taken much of the issue away from him. So until yesterday he had two strategic choices. Both unappetizing.

He could join the full-throated Republican candidates who urge repeal of ObamaCare by saying it had already been tried in the laboratory of state government….Massachusetts….and had been shown to be inefficacious. He could thus renounce his own child. Here he would have to confess he had been wrong.
Or—

Q. ..or–?
A. Or he could stick with RomneyCare and say it failed by failure of execution by his successors in the state. That’s the course he’s taken …and the rationale is not working. It clearly points out…as The Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial said yesterday…the fault is in Romney’s flawed philosophy and ultra-pragmatic theory of government. Too damned pragmatic by half, Junior by a man who has always been called the smartest guy in the room.

Q. What’s likely to happen?
A. Although a brilliant salesman, he’s got a lemon with this one and I can’t fathom he can make it to the finals. His game-plan is to drown out all the others with kabillions and be the last guy standing by convention-time. I don’t think he can do it.

**

Tom Roeser is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Chicago Daily Observer

A. You’ve identified the nation’s two overage liberal news Harpies there. But it’s all in their dreams. The best research that can be found has determined that when Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003, George W. Bush got a brief 7-point spurt which died as domestic issues took to the fore. Bush won but by the time the 2004 election was held Saddam’s capture was a minor item. And of course George H. W. Bush bringing the first Iraq War to a successful conclusion added 40 points to his popularity….so much so that a number of Democratic aspirants bowed out….leaving Bill Clinton, regarded as a second-tier southern governor, who capitalized on the dreary economy. The 40 points faded quickly. That’s likely to be the case in 2012 with Obama unless job totals start picking up.

Having said that, however, the smooth professionalism that characterizes Bill Daley’s aplomb as chief of staff was readily evident. I thought Obama’s speech was brilliantly written and carried out –from top to bottom with the reverential signoff “God bless America.” All those sentiments had been missing in Obama’s communications before Daley.

**

Tom Roeser is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Chicago Daily Observer

image Kate Smith, in a Patriotic Setting

There is one important change in U. S. policy that is seldom discussed even in most conservative journalistic organs…and that is the necessity through election of a Republican president to move this country from being the world’s greatest busybody…sending troops to export democracy throughout the world—to returning to a foreign policy where our own self interest is paramount.

And I don’t mean back to Ron Paul the erratic uncle locked up in the attic who every four years escapes to demand cutting the defenses back to the days of Lexington and Concord volunteers and the Navy to rented privateers. I mean back to sensible standards: ala Robert A. Taft.

Overwhelmingly, Democratic liberals…the same ones who engage in hate America “peace movements”…are the ones who with support from the Kept Press, start agitating on grounds of “conscience” for U. S,. global intervention. They’re joined by Republican neo-conservatives—an admixture of all but official duo-citizenship intellectuals…Charlie the Kraut, Bill Kristol…touting a misguided variant of “American Exceptionalism” by which they mean an imperialistic America as the retributive arm of world “justice.”

Exceptional America is –but its founders did not mean us to be the world’s constabulary. There must be change guided by a Republican president—a change to the wise guidance of the West’s greatest legislator since Edmund Burke, a man ignored in recent years by historians, Sen. Bob Taft (R-Ohio). More of this unheralded great man who ought to become an exemplar for future Republican presidents later.

Still any change that must come must be subtle enough not to fracture a major coalition that is important for winning GOP_ elections. It means a gradual change can be accomplished by a president as courageous as a lion and as cannily resourceful as a fox.

Without embracing the near unilateral disarmament advocacy, abject libertarians (who like Paul believe we had 9/11 coming because of our pro-Israel stance—which equates him with the hate-America-spewing Left) also want to repeal the Patriot Act which protects us from domestic terrorists–the next Republican president should return us to the posture of watchful vigilance coupled with minding our own business, using as pretext to any foreign involvement this question: Does what is happening in the Middle East…revolutions, movement imbroglios, usurpations by tyrants… directly—and we meandirectly—threaten the peace and liberty of citizens of the United States?

Which means I I inveigh a pox on both houses: the neo-near dual loyalty people who are set to cry “charge!” on any suspected threat to Israel…and the embittered true isolationists who mistakenly…through anti-Semite hatred…view us being victimized by an inner cabal endebted to Israel. I reject both views equally.

How do we most usually drift to interventionism? It comes primarily from the Left.

Take a typical case. Fictional oil-rich Middle East Arab principality, Lower Slobovistan is a key supplier of our oil. We desperately need the oil since liberals put the kibosh on expanding our domestic drilling. Our economy will suffer with its deprivation. Thus we should avoid sticking our nose into a neighbor’s domestic disputes. But liberal bleeding hearts and editorial boards plead in the misguided cause of “anti-genocide” anguishing for imposition of U.S. sanctions.

Then liberal churches get into it including some of our own wimpy Catholic bishops (the kind who usually go easy on Catholic pro-abortion politicians here). First thing you know the USSB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) delegates some pimply-faced kid, an ex-DNC intern, fresh from Brown University to write a tract urging sanctions and more. Bored bishops, glancing at their wristwatches to see if they can catch the next flight back home, give the resolution an almost unanimous thumbs up. The New York Times, The Washington Post, the AP and those sitting around the rim of the desks writing copy for the TV networks’ Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos are inflamed. Savvy congressional media hounds—aka New York’s bird-dog whose nose twitches for scent of media opportunities, Chuck Schumer—nab the issue to get on the networks…and the rush for another global intervention is on.

Pleading the case of demonstrable history does no good. Since the days of its control by the Ottoman Empire, Lower Slobvastan has been roiling in Arab tyrants committing murder and pillage. It does not warrant our or UN sanctions, nor intervention, nor saturation preemptory round-the-clock bombings by the U. S. air force (by the snap of presidential fingers, not the official consent of Congress) and clump-clump-clump of our military boots on the ground on a messianic mission to install bucolic Jeffersonian democracy on a people who have yet to master the intricacies of installing home flush toilets.

Rejecting the oft-repeated cycle is not a repudiation of American Exceptionalism. It’s not Fortress America (which never existed) and erecting a moat around us; it is not to embrace what globalists have always mislabeled “isolationism.” But itdoes involve a fundamental reexamination of most recent scrapes we have waged including Libya and the often Machiavellian behind-the-scenes maneuvers of some of our most ambitious presidents to become “world leaders.”

A Republican president and two Democrats started imbibing “world leader” brew which led to our impasse: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and later TR’s fifth cousin Franklin. The cycle was broken by a number of restrained presidents including those whom the media defame—Warren Harding…no rube as media has mis-portrayed him…a poker player yes with an eye for the ladies, but in womanizing a gelding next to JFK and Bill Clinton.

He’s been defamed because of Teapot Dome which ranks 114th down the list of later scandals including the Truman ones… who initiated the first arms limitation discussions…and Calvin Coolidge who led 15 nations to renounce war as an instrument of conflict-settling (didn’t work but a worthy goal).

Among those who practiced masterly restraint in military intervention was Dwight Eisenhower (a 5-star general: in fact no general-presidents Jackson barring a few ambitious stints as pre-presidential general…Grant, Hayes… were adventurers), eventually yielding to sending 700 military advisers to Vietnam—and this due to pressure exerted from his secretary of state, Wall Street lawyer John Foster Dulles.. and Ronald Reagan.

Then all to the good was the perversely brilliant Richard Nixon, a far smarter poker player in world affairs than is recognized through his brilliant smiting in twain of the Sino-Soviet alliance that really did threaten world peace. But to begin–.

The bad-guy presidential globalists start with good old Teddy Roosevelt.

A psychiatrist would have had a field day with TR: Born and grown to spindly adolescence as an asthmatic weakling, he built a chest-beating reputation for masculinity through boxing and cowboy antics out West sponsored by his wealthy family and largely contrived tales of derring do charges “up San Juan Hill” in the Spanish American war. Egotism dominated him so hugely he was called (behind his back) The Great I Am after Yahweh’s self-identification in the Bible.

It was Kettle Hill not San Juan and the exaggerated tales were written up by his sidekick, ex-presidential physician Leonard Wood (a chum of TR when both were Washington functionaries). Wood saw real political gain by hooking up with this pompous young aristocrat who knew nothing of war but wanted bully action in Cuba to burnish his political credentials.

Wood wanted a piece of political action too (and ultimately made a very close bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 1920). During the Spanish-American war, looking forward to someday becoming governor general of a defeated Cuba and governor general of our colony Philippines (which happened thanks to Teddy) Wood did the real heroics and flashed back to the U.S. media via telegraph key by a family-hired flack to dispel more authentic original notions of a spoiled eastern Harvard-trained political rich kid, educated by private tutors and who in adulthood wore gold aristocratic pince-nez.

It was Wood who by his own physical and military bravado which he freely attributed to Roosevelt via a crack p.r. hack aided by an adulatory press hungry for media handouts countered what TR’s otherwise favorable biographer Edmund Morris saw as haughtiness, unmatched egotism and as a native effeminacy. The hyped war stories got TR elected governor of New York and ultimately vice president with William McKinley. McKinley’s assassination in 1900 landed Roosevelt in the White House at the tender age of 42, the youngest man to hold the office.

The Great I Am’s manipulation for the Panama Canal showed his deviousness. Needing a short-cut passage between Atlantic and Pacific, he tried to buy a 48-mile strip of land from Colombia: a good thought. But his when his State Department botched the deal and Colombia wouldn’t ratify the treaty, TR got us to secretly finance a hoked up “revolution” that prompted Panama, then part of Colombia, to revolt on cue. Panama split away and sold the land to us. We benefited and the sleaziness prompted a frat-style drinking spree with Teddy and his buddies in the White House, chortling we stole the land fair and square!

Sadly for him, there was no opportunity to engage in war…although he did get a Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese war–but as soon as World War I erupted he was prodding his successor, Wilson, to get involved personally. In fact the before the draft was initiated he publicly asked President Woodrow Wilson for the right to organize a division—which he later hiked to two—which he would personally lead to France as its commander to fight the Kaiser ( which he intended to load up with U.S. press)—obviously a drum roll intended to return him to the White House for a third term (he was then only 59). Wilson wisely turned the old blusterer down.

But it was Democrat Wilson who immeasurably stretched our global adventurism on a world scale. A Princeton professorial history Ph.D snob who scrubbed his hands with antiseptic after handshaking the vulgar mobs, he couldn’t have been elected in 1912 but for TR’s split of the Republicans due to The Great I Am’s boredom with private life.

Wilson was reelected in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” The story of how we were deluded into war comes from the scholar Thomas Fleming in his definitive book Illusion of Victory: America in World War I [Perseus Books: 2003]. Historian Fleming is no relation incidentally to the esteemed Dr. Tom Fleming, president of the Rockford Institute.

Obviously WWI which began in 1914 with the assassination of an Austrian arch-duke leading to a spat between Austria-Hungary and Serbia-Russia which pulled in Europe’s colonial powers was no threat to U.S. security at all. Safely reelected, at first Wilson was aloof from war but he was always partial to Britain. Indeed he had often enthused as a Princeton academic how its parliamentary system was superior to ours.

Now Britain was having a tough time financing its wartime role. Then when old J.P. Morgan in January 1915 said he could not spare Britain from eventual bankruptcy due to its war spending, Wilson became despondent—fearing that Britain’s finances would tank and pull us down with it (which Wall Street pooh-poohed). His pro-war propaganda office circulated unverifiable news stories of German brutality. Worse, he began smuggling weapons in passenger ships to Britain.

By hook or crook, mostly the latter, after his reelection he consulted with his cronies about how we could enter it without looking as though we barged in. His zeal was animated when Britain and French foreign offices communicated secretly that the war would eventually be won, that America need not send overseas troops and all that was needed was America’s financial aid to enable the Allies to put the finishing touches on a preordained victory. Meaning become a part victor of World War I on the cheap. Wilson bought in but soon discovered he would have to put skin in the game. A lot of skin—and American lives.

So be it. Finally, the topping on the cake was the prospect of Wilson sitting at the big postwar peace table carving up Europe and the German colonies. He already had a vision of a world organization of nations where he could play a decisive role. But first: how to get into WWI without looking like we barged in?

Then came a straightforward statement from Germany that shipping to Britain must be curtailed else violators…ships suspected of carrying armaments to Britain…would be attacked by German subs. The German statement was officious but earlier they had discovered that U.S. arms were being shipped in the cargoes of merchant ships bound for England.

Key example: The Cunard luxury passenger ship Lusitania transgressed waters ruled off-bounds by German subs and off the Irish coast on May 17, 1915 was sunk by a German sub after having ignored a warning to steam away. Of the 2,000 passengers on board, 1,198 died including 291 women and 94 children—with American dead numbering 128. The marvel was that after being struck by a two torpedoes it exploded and sank in less than 20 minutes…due to the fact that its hold was filled to the gills with armaments bound for Britain.

Immoral incidents like this…including a suspect telegram from the German ambassador to Mexico’s president “promising” to include him in on carving up the U.S. if Mexico joined in and attacked us, inflamed the country.

By duplicity…as TR did re Panama… Wilson got his declaration of war for which he composed the most dishonest pro-war slogan ever concocted: We’re engaging in one of Europe’s endless bloody cauldrons “to make the world safe for democracy.” Even in hell Machiavelli must have shuddered.

It wasn’t to be the first time bipartisan presidential subterfuge with media cooperation were enlisted to get us into global war. Stay tuned.

**
Tom Roeser is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Chicago Daily Observer

image Robert Taft

There as per usual we had the usually lopsided structure of two liberal Catholics…knowing and having interviewed both adversaries I would judge Barbara Blaine is more nominal than active… against one.

Both belong to the Catholic Left. Robert McClory is a teacher, journalist and resigned priest who’s written a laudatory book about Pfleger. McClory…a former assistant at St. Sabina’s pre-Pfleger who left the priesthood to marry… has in the course of thirty years aligned himself with the most leftward fringes of radical heretical theology: a Hans Kung-style supporter of “participatory democratization” of church structure to the extent that the holder of the papacy is only first among equals and oft-times hardly that. The rock of Peter becomes only one aspect of Church governance, sharing with bishops and…ahem….”theologians” who hold equal sway.

McClory has long been an opponent of Humanae Vitae, an advocate of relaxed strictures on abortion, a devotee of an ultra loosened concept of mortal sin…under a slanted version of what normally is known as “Fundamental Option”– where one can only commit it if he pronounces abject alienation from God—else a good Act of Contrition will clear it up…a supporter of women priests, a more “humanitarian” concept of gay rights. In essence his concept is diametrically adverse to the 2,000 plus years of authentic dogmatic theology.

The second participant for the Left was Barbara Blaine of SNAP (Survival Network of Those Abused by Priests) who should not have participated in the Pfleger discussion since pedophilia and child abuse is not been involved in that melee—just the matter of priestly obedience and insubordination.
She was obviously there to weigh in on later-discussed issue about JPII’s style of church governance…but she pitched in also on Pfleger where her clerical pedophilia views were not relevant. She was included because executive producer Mary Field feels that on every issue—politics, economics, urban policy, whatever—it is mandatory that there should be a thumb on every scale to tip discussions to the Left…believing that the marketing formulae of the station would be compromised by equal access to ideas.

However it could be said that the panel moderator, Eddie Arruza that he made a conscientious effort to include Hackett’s views. Just a shame that the station feels so insecure it can’t run a one-on-one show…but that’s good old Mary Field and her so-called employer Danny Schmidt (salary: $450,000 )

Tom Roeser with a full analysis

image Catherine of Aragon, another Defender of the Faith

I say: Better late than never. I fully expect the Crying Towel liberals…including the Sun-Times editorial board, Carol Marin and Laura Washington…both nominal Catholics and whose grasp of theology is wafer-thin…will weep copiously: This man has done wonderful things for the community! Nuts. A priest is not supposed to be a community organizer. He was ordained to be an authorized mediator who offers a true sacrifice in acknowledgment of God’s supreme dominion over human beings and in expiation for their sins. His mediation is the opposite of the prophets.

They communicated from God to the people. The priest mediates from the people to God. He reflects and in a very real sense represents Christ who is God and man, the first priest of the New Law who offered Himself once and for all on the cross—a victim of infinite value who continually renews that sacrifice on the altar through the ministry of the Church. All the faithful share in that priesthood by their baptismal nature…and are enabled to offer themselves in sacrifice with Christ through the Eucharistic ministry…offering the Mass as they internally unite themselves with the outward offering made by the ordained priest alone.

Any community action the priest does is incidental but the above described is his principal role. It does not mean trotting out like a carnival barker in vestments during a Sunday sermon imitating Hillary Clinton…nor does it involve shouting over a megaphone to a legally constituted business owner acting within the law: Come out of there or we’ll drag you out like the rat you are!…We’ll snuff you out!

When I say it’s way overdue, I mean in past years the Archdiocese has allowed itself to be humiliated by this hot dog…made a fool of. The story of Pleger is that of an unruly showboat who went to a decadent “spirit of Vatican II” seminary and so entranced the teaching staff there that he was allowed to slip out, neglect his studies and cruise out to Chicago to do his “community organizing” (read: Left wing shannigans) work and get credit for it. He was ordained but is a veritable illiterate in theology. Thereupon he bamboozled the weak Archdiocese into doing his things at Sabina’s undisturbed.

He shamelessly politicized his ministerial work and developed a nose for media exposure that fed his massive ego. His subordination of his Church to his personal media-centric needs is shown by his frequently demonstrated willingness to shuck the Church and concentration of what he really wants to do with the rest of his life…be the Great White Hope of the Black Community…continue to be a power in The Squid by being able to mis-lead simple followers who like a good razzle-dazzle to enliven their Sunday mornings instead of spirituality.

His departure will not affect the Church. His congregants are reported to be less than 10 percent Roman Catholic anyhow….conceivably troop up to the altar to receive the Sacrament unworthily…and are eager to follow him to either a theatre, an appropriated vacant church or storefront to swing, sway, clap and intersperse shouts of “Amen!” suited for a political rally rather than a divine liturgy which they and he pollute with their sacrilege.

Expect the Sulking Sultan of Pout…Rev. Jesse Jackson…as much a charlatan as Pfleger…to “invite” this pinwheel of political self-indulgence to PUSH. They belong together.

Meantime, congratulations Cardinal George.

**

Tom Roeser is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Chicago Daily Observer

Some day after we’re all dead, revisionist historians will calculate that this 44th president, Barack Obama, in addition to being the worst president from the standpoint of patriotism pro-U.S. motivation, was the most inept.

They will likely cite as Evidentiary One, his utter failure to craft a budget. The American people would have been informed about this incompetence long before this but the national media, accustomed to its role of running interference for him on his murky background, scant evidence of scholarship, mysteriously unavailable college records and dearth of classmates who knew him in Indonesia schools as well as Occidental, have covered up his ineptitude once again.

As this is one of the few places you’ll get the news straight about this so-called genius’ deficiencies, consider his two—yes, two—budget addresses.

Obama’s Two Phony Budgets.

The first one was delivered as the Constitution provides, last February. He forecast that it would reduce the $14 trillion deficit by a trillion. But the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office which examines such things as economic assumptions and baselines, said: Uh-uh, sorry Mr. President. It won’t reduce the deficit by a trillion over 10 years but using your assumptions we can tell you it will hike the deficit by $2.1 trillion.

Then Wisconsin’s Republican congressman Paul Ryan, a numbers whiz whom Obama earlier had praised, produced a counter-budget and submitted his numbers, economic assumptions and baselines to the CBO for scoring i.e. getting approval for using the right forecast. Ryan’s is a very tough budget but since worry about the deficits are high on the public mind right now, his roadmap convinces many that it’s the kind of tough, bitter medicine the nation gets to get back on a solid track.

The CBO gave Ryan’s masterwork a full frisk and said its assumptions are right on the mark: If followed as Ryan wrote it, his budget will reduce the deficit by $4.4 trillion over ten years. Ryan had set into place a master framework so we will be moving ahead to eradicating the entire deficit of $14.5 trillion within the following five years. Ergo: This 41-year-old kid working with a constricted House staff and directing the study himself showed up the entire Obama administration, its treasury secretary Tim Geithner (who was found to be in arrears on his own income taxes), budget director, Commerce Department and auxiliaries, getting a perfect score from the CBO which the Obama people couldn’t get.

Now as we all know, Barack Obama wants to get reelected in 2012 which is why he hired William Daley of Chicago as his chief-of-staff. Daley believes that the only way Obama will win is by demagoguery the way FDR did in 1936 by condemning the “economic royalists” and the strategy Harry Truman used in 1948 to condemn the rich no-good members of Big Business “special interests.” The fact that Bill Daley made $32 million in wages last year serving those special interests is apart from the case.

Well, Paul Ryan has been getting so much attention with his counterbudget, that Bill Daley, the Chicago boss’ son, decided that Obama should make another pass at a budget—but this time use it as a campaign document to fire up the listless troops in Obama’s base: the liberal papers like The New York Times from which every “mainstream” news oracle takes the lead—from Brian Williams of NBC to Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos of ABC, to wide-eyed Katie Couric and Bob Schieffer of CBS (Schieffer known particularly as an eager recipient of every liberal line).

So Daley and his crew drafted out a story line for the new budget. It came close to what Teddy Kennedy on June 21, 1987 said would happen if Bob Bork got confirmed for the Supreme Court. “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchlldren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.”

Similarly before a single budgetary statistic was collected, Bill Daley had his speech writers say that in his counter-budget, Paul Ryan would give us “a fundamentally different America…than what we have known throughout our history.” America would be a fundamentally different country than we have known. Autistic and disabled children would be turned out into the street and left to tend to themselves. Moreover just to drive a car in America would be precarious since collapsed bridges would go unrepaired: the country would be on the brink of stagnation.

When he re-read the rhetoric, Bill Daley figuratively rubbed his hands in satisfaction. Now to pump in figures that would cut the deficit and keep the massive superstructure of New Deal-originated social benefits augmented by LBJ’s Great Society plus the $1 trillion worth of ObamaCare.

When the figures were pumped in, crafty Bill Daley ordered that the economic assumptions should be based on 12 years—not 10 as all other presidents and Paul Ryan did—this to confound the CBO from making a line-by-line comparison. With the most shoddy work of guest-timating, Daley concluded that Obama’s new budget would cut the debt by $4 trillion (the same as Ryan had calculated only taking two years longer to accomplish). The figure could be accomplished by hiking taxes on the rich, which thrill the hearts of the Left which were becoming disenchanted with Obama. Then like dispatching a schoolboy, he sent Obama off to make the speech last week at D.C.’s George Washington University.

Now it just so happened that the statistical wizard of the Congress, Paul Ryan, wanted to catch Obama’s speech. When he showed up at the college auditorium, Ryan was ushered by White House minions down to the front row where he would sit right under Obama’s nose. Obama had two teleprompters rolling so that he could turn his head right and left and appear like he was talking conversationally. He spoke for 43 minutes, blasting Ryan as unfeeling, almost un-American.

He kept his eyes from making contact with Ryan. And when the speech was over, two things were clear. One, Obama wasn’t going to negotiate anything but two would use the speech not as an economic document but as a campaign broadside to get reelected.

The liberal media was titillated. Sweet little Katie Couric was overjoyed and The New York Times gushed that it was so-o-o-o good to have the old lefty Obama back in the ring again. So far so good for Obama and his guru Bill Daley.

Except then something bad happened. Standard & Poor, the nation’s leading credit rating agency, read the Obama speech and became so pessimistic about the evident failure to get consensus on the deficit that it warned there is a 1-in-3 chance that this country will lose its impeccable AAA credit rating on debt in the next two years.

And then something worse. Sitting in the front row, Paul Ryan wondered where Obama got his figures, his economic assumptions which enabled him to claim he would cut the deficit, slap higher taxes on the rich, and return the country to economic solvency—because the assumptions sure didn’t square with what Ryan had found. So the next day he called the White House to get the verification.

Guess what? The White House had no official verification—just a reiteration of the unsupported numbers on the bottom of its press release. Next Ryan called the Congressional Budget Office to see if this nonpartisan entity could defend the numbers Obama and Bill Daley conjured up. No, said the CBO: Obama used twelve years—a highly unusual projection instead of the 10 years everybody else including Ryan had used. Aha. No mystery why Bill Daley used twelve years—to cover his tracks and to keep the CBO from contradicting Obama as it had in the first go-round.

But Bill Daley’s twelve-year instead of 10 year ploy wasn’t working. Standard & Poor smelled something fishy and instead of putting the issue to be, the rating agency by capturing SuperBowl style publicity guaranteed that the signal issue of 2012 will be Obama and Daley’s hoaky budget of floating numbers vesus Paul Ryan’s legit budget projection.

The House GOP’s Phony CR.

But lest you believe the Dems have a monopoly on phony-ness, consider the Speaker Boehner Continuing Resolution aka CR that averted closing down the government. Remember the Tea Party’ers and a large number of freshmen conservative congressmen wanted Boehner to cut $100 billion off the 2011 spending list. He said he wouldn’t do it. All right, they said—how about $67 billion. He tried and couldn’t get agreement from the Dems.

But he announced he could cut $38 billion. Rush Limbaugh wasn’t buying that—saying the amount was too miniscule. But $38 billion…if they were real cuts… was something at least so most of the House GOP majority was willing to go along—until they looked at the numbers and found that the sacrosanct Mr. Boehner had in his own inimitable way played games with the numbers to arrive at $38 billion.

It turned out there were all kinds of fudging…$2 billion from unused highway construction funds that couldn’t be spent because some states couldn’t scratch up matching funds…a “savings” of $4.9 billion from a one-time unspent fund on housing that was due to expire anyhow…a $3.2 billion “cut” from the Children’s Health Insurance program unspent because some states weren’t able to qualify. A few billion of unspent funds left over from the 2010 census. In other words it’s like me telling my wife I just saved us $279,000 by my decision not to buy a new Lamborghini.

The hard outlay of savings…again totaled by the Congressional Budget Office…said what was really saved was a meager $352 million. Well the Tea Party and the new members threw a fit that hit the fan. Fifty nine mostly conservative GOP members decided to vote no.

Boehner had to appeal to Dem Whip Steny Hoyer to give him enough Dem votes to make up the difference. So 81 Dems joined 179 Republicans to save Boehner’s lying hide. But Hoyer’s nominal boss Nancy Pelosi said she still thought the cuts were too drastic and disavowed the CR and Hoyer.

That’s the tale of two factions—one led by a duplicitous Bill Daley pulling the strings for Barack Obama but getting sandbagged by Standard & Poor and the other by a fibbing John Boehner who got singed by the Tea Party and his own members. Couldn’t happen to more deserving two guys.

The conclusion this octogenarian makes is this: I’m old enough to remember the 1948 Truman-Dewey campaign where Truman was supposedly on the ropes until Dewey blew it. Dewey blew it because he was unwilling to defend the record of the Republican 80th Congress….unwilling because he was a rival of Sen. Bob Taft who crafted a monumentally good record which Dewey neglected to defend.

Hear me out now: The defining record of this Congress is the Paul Ryan-designed counter-budget to Obama’s which saves Medicare and removes ObamaCare. For Republicans not to have Ryan on the ticket…my druthers would be as vice-president with Chris Christie as president…would be folly. Do you think Romney would defend the counter-budget—he as the godfather of Massachusetts’ RomneyCare? Or Mike Huckabee? ANSWER: In anybody’s hands but Ryan’s the Ryan budget would go largely undefended…and Obama under Bill Daley’s expert guidance would win the game.

Ryan at 41 and a House member is indispensable for the ticket. If he were to be paired with Christie, a tough former United States Attorney and a brilliant governor, I think the duo would be unbeatable.

Let me know what you think.

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Tom Roeser is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Chicago Daily Observer

image Jack Benny with Harry Truman on accompanying piano

Q. Can you explain?
A. The format is so incurably left-wing it wreaks of political correctness and apologias. It is a case of the Left having taken over complete control of the program agenda…due to the feminist alliance of Mary Field, Carol Marin and Elizabeth Brackett…the trio telling hopelessly pliable anchor Phil Ponce what he will do.

Q. As for instance?
A. Whenever the issue turns to same-sex marriage there is only one side presented—pro. They wind up Ponce like a robot…you can almost see the key sticking out of his back… and out he goes with that pasted on smile to mouth banalities while the hard aggressive salesmanship goes on. Remember State Rep. Deb Mell who “married” her lover? You’d think Marin was witnessing a theophany.

Q. So you’d convert the fare to the right.
A. Absolutely not. I’d have a debate—anything would be more robust than that old mushy liberal we-all-agree nya-nya-nya.

Q. Such as…?
A. Two experts on the federal budget debating the Obama second-cut version as delivered at George Washington University the other night and an advocate of the Congressman Paul Ryan counter-budget. Mary Field knows from her rolodex who to get on the Left. The Heartland Institute should have a good representative on the Right. To keep it straight, they should get someone other than (a) Marin, (b) Brackett or (c) Ponce to moderate: they’re so hopelessly indoctrinated by the Left they don’t understand what it is to be fair.

Q. Who would it be?
A. Any ordinary station announcer who has the intellectual mien of the holder of a high school diploma.

Q. What other issues would you like to see?
A. This should have been aired long ago. Pro and Con: Is the removal of Muammar Qaddafi in our long term interest? Also long ago: The growth of public employee unions and how legitimate or illegitimate they are—with emphasis on the Wisconsin imbroglio.

Q. More!
A. Sen. Durbin announced recently that he would hold hearings on anti-Muslim bigotry. Two sides equally represented. Should the debt limit debate feature a deal to force consideration of a balanced budget amendment or a constitutional limit on federal spending with a supermajority required to raise taxes? Pro-and-con.

Q. Is something like this likely to happen?
A. Decidedly not. But this is the stuff that could resurrect `TTW from its old Left-wing blues.

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Tom Roeser is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Chicago Daily Observer

Image Petronius wrote “Moderation in all things, including moderation.” Oscar Wilde wrote “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess”.  Can both be true?

It is so much fun to see how Chicago Tonight “analyzed” the Obama deficit speech last night with Carol Marin as moderator plus Lynn Sweet of the Sun-Times and Jim Warren, formerly of the Tribune and now of the Chicago News Cooperative, funded partly by WTTW which runs pallid pastel features in The New York Times. Of course given that WTTW is up to its neck in the bag to Obama and the Democrats…the Sun-Times a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Squid and the reputation of The New York Times it was no analysis at all but three committed lefties masquerading in journalistic garb gabbing about the exciting days to come in the 2012 campaign.

Rather than do it as the late John Callaway would have—journalistically–with two experts debate the pros and cons of contrasting the Obama second-take version and the Paul Ryan initiative …WTTW’s ultra-liberal co-conspirators Mary Field and Carol Marin decided to feature only one side—Obama’s—with ecstatic, glistening-eyed liberal Sweet gussied up in finery to breathlessly cover the big social gala known as the Obama fund-raiser toeing the party line that Obama wasn’t going to raise a billion dollars, and the Cooperative’s hapless Jimmy Warren telling us what his buddy David Axelrod had already told everybody who attended the City Club luncheon the other day.

All this while `TTW president Dan Schmidt was worrying he might lose his $450,000 job fortified with taxpayer money—which he has been busily lobbying for using `TTW resources funded partially by taxpayer money.

Not a word was said on the panel as to the probable cause why Vice President Joe Biden, sitting in the audience, was shown on TV sound asleep. Can’t blame him. He’d seen the movie before.

It was in fact the second go-round on the budget for his boss who flubbed his first with a gauzy pastiche of non-specifics. It was so in-substantive in content after Ryan’s presentation that the Commander-in-Chief had to hurry back to the rostrum. It didn’t occur to Marin to toss tough questions at Sweet on why Obama didn’t get to his own supposed alternative until the second half of the speech, after he covered his soak the rich demagoguery.

Nothing prompted Marin to ask the two to contrast the two proposals—Obama’s which involves tax-hikes and Ryan’s which doesn’t. Not a word was said about Obama’s tossing out numbers with no credibility behind them, that the issue was not what Obama alleged (for the 2012 campaign)—extension of the Bush tax cuts—and that Obama’s speech was 98% an attack on Ryan’s proposal.

Excitedly propagandizing for Obama as Sweet is used to doing in her paper, she was asked this super-tough hardball question by Marin: Does it matter whether or not the Obama campaign is run from Washington or not?

It gave Sweet the chance to gush the notion that Obama wants to sever from the Beltway and add an answer suited to the inside-Dem campaign logistician she is…pointing out it’s better to dispatch party luminaries to Iowa from here than from Washington.

Oh yes, indeedy, said the deferential Warren. In fact Axelrod told us [at the City Club] that he regards working in Washington as something like being encased in a submarine!

The dazzled Marin…ingrained with three decades of liberal talk with no conservative alternatives… took careful note of this response—all the while the differences between the two fiscal plans remained untouched.

Then Sweet…having apparently painted herself for the fund-raising gala…told us all how there can be absolutely no difference of opinion between Axelrod and his successor, David Plouffe. After all, they have worked together for years as partners in David’s firm. At the fund-raiser, she confided, Plouffe will introduce Mayor-Elect Emanuel and Emanuel will introduce the president.

God—that’s exciting as hell to know!

Jim Warren made occasional mention of a tough time Obama may have in states which he carried in 2008…the only time he discussed the campaign in realistic terms… about which Sweet had nothing to say…and which Marin didn’t care enough to follow up.

Then it ended mercifully and the camera returned to the real heavyweight of the show, Phil Ponce.

**

Tom Roeser is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Chicago Daily Observer

Q. Has the budget process has changed dramatically since you first went to work as a staffer in the U. S. House in 1958?
A. Absolutely. When I went there then, at the tag-end of the Eisenhower administration, the course of action had been always in the president’s hands—and had been so since the days of Franklin Roosevelt: Meaning that the ball started rolling with the president: in his State of the Union where he outlined his vision and the budget address where he unfolded his schema on how to pay for it…tax revisions—either escalated up or laden with certain incentives.
The debate would start there—with the president going first; often the presidential budget was just the starting point for debate: but let’s be clear—it was the starting point. That system was in place ever since the nation’s first budget chief, Charles Gates Dawes of Evanston (later to become vice president under Coolidge) initiated it under Warren Harding. And it has continued through the administrations of Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, GW Bush…until now. The Congress waited eagerly to get their hands on it—to either tear it apart or add to it….but whatever: the presidential budget was always the starting point. Until now.

Q. What’s the change that occurred?
A. First, the last State of the Union speech, the last one delivered by Obama was a laugh: a pastiche of hoary old slogans including the title Winning the Future which was a steal of Newt Gingrich’s early books.

Second, the outrageously expensive and regimented ObamaCare bill which Nancy Pelosi described as something once we all—including she—understand, we will like…and the awful force-feeding of the medicine with Rahm auctioning off goodies to Louisiana (the Purchase) and Nebraska (the Cornhusker Kickback) to get it passed without a concern for the ever-growing deficit or looming national debt ended the historic pretext of the presidential budget and programs being introduced first and Congress then taking a whack at them. It led to the election of a Republican House, the chamber where appropriations begin and a strong reinforcement of Republicans in the Senate.

Third, the 2010 Republican congressional victory led to the ascension of the first intellectual leader the GOP has had on substantial issues since Robert Taft [1889-1953]—41-year-old Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of House Budget.

Q. How did Taft dominate Democratic and Republican congresses?
A. By un-showy intellectual prowess. Everyone came to defer to him since he knew the most. He had a mind that scooped up facts like a vacuum cleaner.
I came to Washington five years after his untimely death in 1953 but his intellectual influence was still strong. Wherever he served in the Senate….member of Finance….chairman of the Labor committee…co-chairman of the Joint Economic committee….Senate majority leader…his reasonable yet firm intellectual dominance was impeccable: his view of fiscal solvency as Finance and the Joint Economic committee which enabled him to put together a successful coalition with Virginia Sen. Harry Byrd…his crafting of the first revisionist labor reform legislation since passage of the early New Deal Wagner Act—Taft Hartley…his farsighted support of realistic anti-Communist yet not interventionist foreign-defense policy. Sen. Paul Douglas (D-IL) who didn’t agree with him on most issues except thrift (having said “being a liberal doesn’t mean one is a wastrel”) nevertheless grudgingly averred that he was “the uncrowned intellectual leader of the Senate.”

Q. And you say the budgetary procedure has moved with the initiative going to Ryan rather than the president?
A. Yes. The first initiative to supposedly “control” spending and the deficits coming from Obama was so weak…remember the long since abandoned “spending freeze” no one ever believed?…that since nature abhors a vacuum, the momentum moved to Ryan. Last week he fearlessly outlined a counter-budget which was so courageous that Obama was forced to do what no other president has done—announce via his top political adviser not his budget guy or economic guru, the successor to David Axelrod, David Plouffe, his 2008 campaign manager, that he would make a second try at a budget/economic speech: tacit recognition that he was outpointed by this young congressman.

Q. But Paul Ryan’s blueprint has been described as draconian.
A. It has but since the American people have come to recognize that our deficit and debt position is so draconian, realism….grasping the third rail that other politicians fear to touch..is needed.

Q. What are the essentials of the Ryan blueprint?
A. It starts with bold thrusts. It reduces spending by $6.2 trillion over the next decade and cuts the deficit by $4.4 trillion. A big part rests with the assumption that ObamaCare will be repealed which means that over the next decade this will cut $1.4 trillion in savings alone. It cuts the top income tax rate from 35% to 25%. He will cut $389 billion from Medicare over the next decade; at the same time he puts $735 billion less toward Medicaid.

Discretionary spending on domestic programs is reduced by $923 billion. He makes two exceptions—national defense spending and Social Security which would be unchanged from the Obama budget.

His plan shows that $1.1 trillion less than the next five years under the Obama budget and would add $3 trillion less to the debt than the Obama budget over the next decade. It would bring down the debt to $13.9 trillion by 2016 instead of $15 trillion under Obama and $13 trillion by 2016 compared to Obama’s $16 trillion and $19 trillion by 2021 under the president’s plan. Ryan would have $40 trillion in spending over the next 10 years compared to $34.9 trillion in revenues. Obama would spend $46 trillion in the coming decade while bringing in $38.8 trillion in revenues.

The gradual nature of the Ryan plan can be seen this way: Ryan would still result in government spending $5.1 trillion more than it brings in in the next decade but this is less than the $7.2 trillion in deficit spending Obama has proposed.

Ryan’s plan is gradual but radical since he maintains the impasse demands radical action. Under Ryan, the federal government will spend $5.8 trillion less over the next decade than it would under current law. Over a reasonable amount of time his blueprint would begin to reduce the size of the deficit relative to the economy and over the coming decades would not only balance the budget but would actually begin to pay off the principal of the debt. He would do this by cutting discretionary spending, reform the tax code to broaden the base and lower rates, block-grant some federal welfare programs including Medicaid to the states, repeal ObamaCare (already described), privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, cut back farm subsidies and corporate welfare and—most important—reform Medicare for those now younger than 55 from an open-end entitlement to a system of premium supports to subsidize the purchase of private insurance.

One can argue with the details of the Ryan plan but this much is true: He…not the president…has set the standard of a debate which has at the end of the tunnel the prospect for a gradual return to solvency. Which means that the initiative has swung from the White House to the Republican House. This follows the widely heralded Republican victory under Speaker Boehner in negotiations with Obama and the Democratic Senate.

Q. What are the reactions of key Obama allies to the Boehner-Obama-Reid deal that sent Obama scurrying to the Lincoln Memorial yesterday…sprinting up the steps to show his youth… to politick with tourists, trying to move into the limelight for some of the glory ala 2012?
A. Understand when the negotiations began I was one who said something I still believe that if Boehner hit a sticky wicket it would be advisable to shut the government down. But in the negotiations Boehner came out the winner so dramatically that it wasn’t necessary no matter what some Tea Party purists believe. Friday’s deal cuts spending more than in any other single year on record–$78 billion more than Obama initially proposed. While domestic discretionary spending grew by 6% in 2008 (under George W. Bush) and 14% in 2009, this year it will fall by 4%. For a party that controls only one House of Congress that’s a signal victory—and Boehner was right to accept it as well as the other goodies from a conservative point of view rather than moving to pull the plug. You only pull the plug as a last resort—not at this time.

Q. But Boehner sold out the pro-lifers on Planned Parenthood, didn’t he?
A. Quit this “sold out” stuff will you? That’s Captain Queeg rolling-the-steel-ball-bearings talk. The District of Columbia which has the most excessive pro-abort record propelled by public funding has to drop it—returning to the days pre-2009 when the ban was lifted. As far as not removing all public funding for abortion, I don’t yield to anyone my near 40 years of activism on pro-life and in opposition to federal subsidies for Planned Parenthood but for the first time the Democratic Senate….sharply reduced in numbers…will have to vote on a rider that supports their contention which is greatly politically more desirable than feeding our enemies the notion that to end monies for PP we’d close the government down.

That would be politically disastrous for the future and be a tragic setback for pro-life. This way we have the best of all possible worlds—a remarkable fork in the road from 70 years of liberalism plus in a country which is undergoing serious reappraisal of abortion, a vote by Senate Democrats that will be disadvantageous to them. As a matter of fact, if Boehner had rejected this deal he’d be repudiating his leadership. Plus the District of Columbia with the worst schools and in the grip of the teachers’ union gets a return to vouchers.Magnificent deal. Not perfect but one which can be defended on human attainability under Natural Law. Get over this if we don’t get everything we want, we pull the plug, take our marbles and go home—to live in ignominy because of our legendary hard-headedness.

Q. What is the reaction of the Obama press to what you call the Boehner victory and the Paul Ryan seizure of the political initiative?
A. When I unfolded The New York Times yesterday over the breakfast table the main editorial said: “The cuts to keep government running are far too large and the next battle could be worse.” The editorial said this: “The Republicans set the terms of the debate at every point and learned they can push the fumbling and fearful Democrats far to the right[sic]. ..[T]he Republicans did far better than they could possibly have imagined when the process began, winning $38.5 billion in cuts, more than even the House [GOP] leadership had proposed. That’s on top of the $40 billion in additional spending President Obama had originally proposed for this fiscal year which was dropped. About $13 billion will be cut from the Departments of Labor, Education and Health and Human Services…Democrats also agreed to the ideological demand of House conservatives that the District of Columbia be banned from spending any money for abortions, a cruel blow to the poor and largely African American women who need these services [sic]. “

Q. Wow—that’s the New York Times?
A. The paper that sets the agenda for liberalism in this country and which is scrutinized by the networks for what tone to take in their coverage. Then while I was munching my Quaker oatmeal squares, I turned to Paul Krugman’s column…the Nobel Prize-winner who is easily the most convoluted leftwing economist in the country, one of Obama’s great apologists and fervent supporter of ObamaCare. This is what he said yesterday morning in his column entitled The President is Missing.
“What have they done with President Obama? What happened to the inspirational figure his supporters thought they elected? Who is this bland, timid guy who doesn’t seem to stand for anything in particular?…Maybe that terrible deal in which the Republicans ended up getting more than their opening bid was the best he could achieve—although it looks from here as if the president’s idea of how to bargain is to start by negotiating with himself, making preemptive concessions, then pursue a second round of negotiations with the GOP leading to further concessions….But let’s give the president the benefit of the doubt and suppose the $38 billion in spending cuts—and a much larger cut relative to his own budget proposals—was the best deal available. Even so, did Mr.Obama have to celebrate his defeat? Did he have to praise Congress for enacting `the largest annual spending cut in our history…?”

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Tom Roeser is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Chicago Daily Observer

A. All of them show ineptitude but none forecasts the desperation reflected in his request to the Rev. Al Sharpton to keynote Sharpton’s National Action Network which he did Thursday. That’s as if a Republican presidential wannabe would speak at the Klan. If you’re the first black president in U. S. history but you still feel you don’t have sufficient support with your black base to the extent you have to pander to the racial arsonist who perpetrated the Tawana Brawley hoax, a leading anti-Semite associated with bitter demonstrations in New York, that tells you all you need to know.

The fact that the conspiratorially fawning media has collaborated in this farce leading to the most incompetent of administrations headed by a real lightweight…loaded with honorifics but so far as we can tell since we are denied access to his school papers or grades, educated far beyond his intelligence…who substitutes drawing room grace for ability—and is by being rendered immune to proper media investigation a walking hoax who personifies media’s complicity.

Three major network Obama shills are getting out now—Katie Couric of CBS…Matt Lauer of NBC…and Meredith Vieira of NBC—the latter having disgraced herself at the inauguration by announcing on air that she was close to sexual orgasm with excitement. But there are many lesser lights—including Mike Flannery formerly of Chicago CBS now with Chicago Fox who wrote a disgustingly sophomoric plea in mid-campaign that Obama send Flannery an ornament from the White House Christmas tree…this before the election—and written for a shamelessly liberal advertisement supplement in The New York Times sent to Chicago subscribers. Any competent editor would have removed Flannery from the political beat for this outrage—but no.

Q. Your views on the Caterpillar letter to Gov. Quinn and what it means. There seems to have been a blurring over the import.
A. The blurring comes from the pro-tax-hike group typified by Capitol Fax…which gives superhuman coverage to state government much of which is exemplary and unduplicatable…but which has taken the back-down by the CEO as support for Quinn’s out-of-control government. No CEO likes to be in the limelight threatening to leave, but the letter said plainly that it was disturbed at Illinois’ spend-and-spend, tax-and-tax. The fact that the CEO seemed to endorse the tax hike can be laid to the mushy quality of Big Business expostulation in the media. The letter said everything but of course Capitol Fax, a megaphone for the unions—particularly public unions—draws its own conclusions consonant with its megaphone.

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Tom Roeser is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Chicago Daily Observer