The Administration

Al Kamen’s “In the Loop” column in The Washington Post reports that even though Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton only shows up 33 times on the White House logs over the past three years, her spokesman says Clinton has actually made 681 trips to the White House.

The obvious question that follows is that if signing into the White House visitor logs is routinely ignored for, as Kamen called them, “bigwigs” who most often get waved in, are they a legitimate tool for the public to learn which lobbyists are camping out in the White House doing business?

Chairman Doc Hastings’s House Resources Committee released secret audio in which an Obama administration Interior Department official stunningly states, in connection to their rewrite of the 2008 Stream Buffer Rule, “this is not the real world, this is rulemaking” as a justification for not considering actual “conditions on the ground.”
 
“This is not the real world, this is rulemaking” should be the new slogan of Obama’s Committee to Reelect the President.

When it comes to those American whites who are uncomfortable with a black president, there has been no shortage of racial distortion either. Some have tried to use Obama's skin color and Muslim name to prey upon the fears of a white electorate that has seen its economic prosperity plummet amid an overall decline in America's global influence. Others have even gone so far as to question his citizenship and his birthright. Still others have deliberately misconstrued his political philosophy in a racially tinged manner — asserting that he's an African anti-colonial revolutionary.

She: I love you.

He: Thank you.


Wow. That kind of cool repartee, by a young man courting a young woman, says a lot about the style and temperament of our president. David Mariness’s book excerpt in the recent Vanity Fair includes stories about President Obama’s college days in New York City, from which this telling “romantic” exchange took place.

Vice President Biden indicated in a passionate speech yesterday that the American Dream was dying (Obama was elected president) for those not born with a silver spoon in their mouth.

It is difficult to understand how he has arrived at such conclusions. In fact, there are many hardworking Americans who, despite the difficult economic times, are finding ways to be successful and productive.

True libertarians do not care what people do in their private lives.

Phony libertarians use private-life issues as partisan political weapons, as the pseudo-libertarian Rand Paul does in his low-grade comments that mock honorable libertarianism as much as they mock President Obama.

Possibly because of the Obama/Hollywood fete this week with Obama yukking it up with George Clooney and the Beautiful People, I keep getting this annoying image of Joe Biden in “Apocalypse Now” with Obama as the Brando baldy Col. Kurtz, the god-king gone mad from self-idolatry and ethereal abstraction, and Biden as his coked-up scurrying sidekick (originally played by Dennis Hopper): “He (Obama/Brando/Kurtz) is not like you and I,” says Hopper/Biden, wild-eyed and arms flailing. “He reads poetry. Out loud!” T.S. Eliot, no doubt.

I cannot imagine how Obama, five points behind Mitt Romney in the current Rasmussen poll, thinks this is going to work for him. Does he really want to be president a second term or is president just resume filler and like Kurtz (and Clinton), he has greater plans ahead as a demigod?

The manner in which those who would be president view the basic civil liberties and rights of all Americans regardless of race, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation says all that we need to know about the moral character of those who would be president of the greatest nation on earth. In asserting his belief that same-sex couples should have the right to marry, President Obama demonstrated that he is a man on the side of all Americans, not just those who are “straight.”
 
One of the marks of true leadership is the ability and willingness to stand up for the rights of others in the face of opposition and regardless of the political consequences one may face.

I don’t buy the White House version about Obama’s stand on gay marriage according to which he was bounced into the announcement last night by something Vice President Biden said on Sunday.

You don’t bounce the president of the United States, particularly a lawyer like Barack Obama, into adopting a position only months from a presidential election.

On the contrary, it looks more like a carefully choreographed move. Biden laid the groundwork for the announcement by Obama on ABC News that his “evolving” position had now settled on a full-throated “personal” support for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community to wed.

In many ways, President Obama’s new position on the whole issue of gay marriage is completely irrelevant. This has largely been a state issue, and while the Justice Department decided not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, the president’s signature or veto is not pending on any piece of legislation produced by the Congress.
 
But that is not how the media played it. For them, this issue is far bigger than Social Security reform, Medicare reform, the debt limit, the largest tax increase in history (which is just around the corner) and the shocking lack of leadership from this president on a host of other issues.