DNC Part 1 -- the Bumper Sticker, the Amateur & Biased Polling

The DNC was rich with material – not substance, but blog material.  I watched as much as I could stomach and then some, but not all.  One pundit called it soaring in rhetoric, but the rubber doesn’t hit the road.  And as Romney said, their party's over & they awake w. a hangover -- the jobs report.

One place to start would be the bumper sticker Biden so proudly trotted out:  “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive!”  Great for people w. sound bite intellectual capacity.  For others, here are some facts.

Bin Laden Dead

Regarding OBL, which they continue to tout because they have hardly anything else to tout, here’s something I don’t think I’ve heard elsewhere.  If you recall, when Kalid Sheikh Mohamed was taken alive, the Pakistanis played a key part in that – a cooperative effort.  We had good relations with them under Bush.  And of course the waterboarding followed, which gave the information that saved many other lives, and led ultimately to OBL’s whereabouts.  And you recall that Obama was going to be the great leader who would improve all our international relations and our enemies would love us, etc.  But after a couple years in office, relations/trust w. the Pakistanis had deteriorated to the point that it had to be a unilateral mission to get OBL. 

And that as we know infuriated the Pakis, further degrading our relations, and jeopardizing any future cooperation, and weakening the moderates vs the extremists in a nuclear country already teetering.  And of course all the drone killings in Pakistan also doesn’t set well w. the Pakis – yes, we’ve been killing some of the terrorist leaders, but getting no valuable intelligence.  Obama seems to think it’s more moral to take lives (capital punishment) without trial (or even absolute identification), than to interrogate or waterboard.  Straining at a gnat, but swallowing a camel.  And his administration even bungled the intelligence value of the OBL operation, leaking information to political benefit.  And not only abandoned the doctor who provided key genetic ID and has now received a 30 yr imprisonment, but rewarded the Pakis w. $1 billion aid. 

Saving the Auto Companies

Regarding saving the auto companies, Obama is now boasting that he did that, saving many jobs, and Romney would have let them go bankrupt – implying that would have been the end of them and all the jobs.  The fact is, there was basically a bankruptcy restructuring of debts – just not the usual court-supervised, but rather the federal government took it over.  There was, I think Medved said, $16 billion in payments in Dec. 2008 under Bush – not Obama.  I understand the fed. Gov’t holds that debt, and their stocks have dropped in value by about half.  And part of the deal under Obama, I believe, was protecting the unions at the expense of the stockholders and taxpayers and company.  So Obama basically saved the unions – not necessarily jobs or the companies. 

Without the restructuring that would have occurred under a court-ruled bankruptcy, the companies have not had to change their operations (certainly not the unions), and so with basically the same business model, why should they do any differently than before?  A true bankruptcy doesn’t destroy jobs, it makes jobs more secure and survivable in the long term.  Romney understands that.  But Obama & the unions can’t see beyond their own immediate personal gain, and scare ignorant Obama zombies with a word they don’t understand – “bankruptcy.”  And how cruel that supposedly is – to go along with their line about Romney & Bain being so heartless w. occasional failed companies.  As in much else in life, tough love is sometimes the best love, and economic Darwinism sometimes needs to take its course (again, don’t secular liberals love Darwin?).  But liberalism is so emotion-based, there’s no arguing the point. 

Universal Solutions & The Amateur

Obama is lately going on about how Republicans’ idiotic solution to everything is lowered taxes & regulations.  Always gets a laugh among the zombies.  Unfortunately for them, the facts support the effectiveness of that approach historically, especially during economic downtimes (e.g., Laffer’s Law).  And the Keynesian spending that they at least as religiously espouse, has no historical success.  Yet they continue to say despite the failure of $5 Trillion in increased national debt in the last 4 years, with no visible improvement in the economy, that we just need to spend more.  Again, Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.  And they claim to be champions of scientific empiricism!  All they are is an administration of academic theoreticians who want to experiment at the expense of our economy, and generations to come.  On the other hand are two of the most knowledgeable, experienced men in the real economic world – Romney and Ryan.  But of course they’re painted as imbeciles.  That’s the pot calling the kettle black – true projection.

Clinton went on and on with his “arithmetic” of  job creation historically under Democrats vs Republicans.  I haven’t done the fact-checking, but suspect there are other factors involved.  For instance, his administration’s success came after he moved to the center, working cooperatively with a Republican Congress.  His implication was, vote Democrat for more jobs.  But even giving him some benefit of the doubt on his “facts,” clearly just being Democrat does not guarantee economic success.  There are clearly distinctions among Democrat presidents.  And none are more stark than Obama.  Clinton himself, as reported in “The Amateur,” called Obama an amateur last year, in an effort to convince his wife to run against him.  You’ll note that Clinton’s pitch was hardly for Obama, but for the party.  Obama is easily the furthest Left of any U.S. president in history, and has clearly been uncompromising with the Republican House, or Senate minority (again projection, constantly whining about how uncompromising Republicans have been).  He’s nowhere near the leader or as politically savvy as Clinton.  Clinton said no other president could have “fully” repaired the economic damage Obama inherited in 1 term.  That’s an important qualification – but Obama hasn’t even gotten the economy to budge, let alone start to repair the damage.  All his tax and regulation policies have done is strike fear in investors and businessmen and kept them from expanding and hiring.

Obama has presided over the flattest, by far the longest, recovery (if it can be called that) from any recession in our history.  His jobs record is horrendous – promised no more than 8% unemployment, but it’s not been under his entire term.  For every job created, 4 have left the workforce and joined the welfare (Democrat dole/constituency) ranks, resulting in a true 19% unemployment, vs. the reported 8.2%.  The fraction of unemployed is the worst in several decades.  For all his accusations of Bain outsourcing, he has basically outsourced much of our energy industries (e.g., oil), subsidized outsourcing companies like GE, etc.  And he has added $5 trillion to the debt – more in 4 yrs than Bush did in 8 (and much of his was the last 2 yrs. w. Democrat Congress).  His fiscal policies have resulted in the U.S. credit rating being downgraded for the first time in history. 

Steady....Steady....

The latest Washington Post – ABC News poll shows Obama several points ahead, and some conservatives (e.g., Laura Ingraham) are panicking and attacking the Romney campaign for being ineffective – saying if we can’t beat a guy with this lousy a record, we might as well pack it in and go home, and give up on the Republican Party. 

Not so fast – don’t let them (the biased media & polling) jerk us around.  They continue to try to divide and conquer.  This was just forwarded to me:

“A new poll out from CNN shows Romney losing to Obama overall by 6 percentage points. That result would be fine and dandy if the breakdown of the polling sample showed an equal part of Democrats and Republicans with any number of Independents. Curiously, CNN hasn't released a breakdown of the sample they polled.

The real eye-opener here is this: although the poll shows Romney down by 6 overall, it also shows him leading among independents by a whopping 14%. Only in skewed polling results can a candidate be crushing his opponent among indies but lose overall.

“Christian Heinze of GOP2012 was the first to report on the discrepancy:

But here's a very curious internal.

“Romney leads among independents, 54%-40%. That's a blowout number. Both candidates get 96%-97% of their respective parties, so this means that this sample must have leaned Democratic big-time.

“And of course, CNN didn't release the sampling breakdown.

“There's no doubt Obama got a convention bounce, but the independent number indicates a pretty severe oversample among Democrats in this poll.

“Shame on CNN for trying to create the perception that Obama has this thing in the bag.

I have a bit more confidence in the Romney campaign.  They aren’t called the Comeback Team for nothing.  They came back from behind when there was despair and handwringing in the primaries (and I called him the Comeback Kid).  And they’re pretty savvy in how to appeal to independents who’ll decide this race, where almost everyone else is dug into the trenches and immovable. 

I have more commenting on the DNC, including Obama’s Johnnie-come-lately blatant pandering to the military, the middle class, the religious (e.g., Villaraigosa’s dear-in-the-headlight moment ducking lightning bolts), etc.  Stay tuned for the next post.