Back to Basics

As President Obama prepares his State of the Union Address and the nation looks forward to a Presidents Day holiday, Americans should consider the warning examples of our worst chief executives.

While few of Washington and Lincoln’s successors could hope to replicate their epic achievements, every president can — and must — focus on avoiding the appalling ineptitude of John Tyler, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and their feckless fellow travelers on the road to presidential perdition. The common elements that link our least successful leaders teach historical lessons at least as important as the shared traits of the Rushmore Four: Broken promises and gloomy temperaments lead inevitably to an alienated public.

All the chief executives unmistakably identified as failures displayed a self-destructive tendency to violate the core promises of their campaigns. Take Tyler, the unbending Virginia aristocrat who won election to the vice presidency in 1840 and assumed the highest office when his predecessor died just a month after inauguration. The new chief executive, dubbed “His Accidency” by critics, used 10 unpopular vetoes to block implementation of his own party’s longstanding ledges. Most of his Cabinet resigned in protest, and eventually they all quit while the hostile Senate voted down four new Cabinet appointments — a record that stands to this day.

Between 1853 and 1861, Pierce and Buchanan completed back-to-back disastrous terms in which personal weakness and pro-Southern sympathies shattered confident promises of unifying leadership. Buchanan pledged to stop “agitation of the slavery question” and to “destroy sectional parties.” By the end of his term, seven Southern states seceded from the union and the nation lunged toward the Civil War.

After that war and Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson (Lincoln’s vice president) defied members of the martyred president’s Cabinet and congressional leaders, ignoring commitments to lead former slaves to dignity and full civil rights.

In the 20th century, Herbert Hoover’s slogan promised “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” but he presided over the beginning of the Great Depression. Similarly, Jimmy Carter’s 1976 platform pledged to reduce unemployment to 3%, but Carter ran for re-election with more than twice that rate.

No wonder that Hoover and Carter, like other unsuccessful presidents, came across as gloomy, self-righteous sufferers. Hoover’s secretary of State said that a meeting with him was “like sitting in a bath of ink.” Carter staked his presidency on a notoriously sour televised address that became known as “The Malaise Speech,” warning the appalled public of a “crisis of the American spirit.”

None of our least successful presidents displayed the self-deprecatory humor of Lincoln or the sunny dispositions that powered the Roosevelts (Theodore and Franklin) and Ronald Reagan. A visitor described the Pierce White House as a “cold and cheerless place,” noting the isolation of the invalid first lady, in deep mourning for three dead sons.

When Buchanan welcomed successor Lincoln, he plaintively declared: “My dear, sir, if you are as happy on entering the White House as I on leaving, you are a very happy man indeed.”

The result of the depressing and erratic leadership of our six most conspicuous presidential failures is that all managed to estrange a once-admiring electorate within the space of a single term.

By refusing to investigate the Al Gore/Al Jazeera deal, it would appear that Capitol Hill “conservatives” like Republican Reps. Michael McCaul, Steve Scalise, and Paul Broun are adopting the view that we have nothing to fear from the global jihad and its instruments of propaganda being positioned on U.S. soil.

This view finds support from Scott McConnell, writing in Patrick J. Buchanan’s magazine, The American Conservative, who says there should be no “national loyalty oath” for a new cable channel in America and that the transaction is “welcome news.”

Al Jazeera is the voice of the Muslim Brotherhood and the various terrorist groups it has spawned, including al Qaeda and Hamas.

In all seriousness, McConnell calls the sale of Al Gore’s Current TV to the Al Jazeera channel a “public service.”

In an endorsement of the deal, McConnell writes that the channel, which he admits is “Qatar government-funded,” can be “quite good.” However, he admits, “I don’t watch it often.”

He fails to point out the elementary fact that there is no freedom of the press or speech in Qatar.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of uninformed commentary that we have seen all too often in regard to the Al Jazeera deal. It is significant that a self-described “conservative” would adopt this view and that a magazine called “The American Conservative” would publish such nonsense.

During the Cold War, Patrick Buchanan, who served as President Reagan’s White House communications director, was an anti-communist who combatted and helped expose Soviet disinformation and propaganda activities. But in the face of the global jihad, such defenses are apparently being dropped. Indeed, Buchanan has himself been featured in a sympathetic light on Al Jazeera, discussing why he opposes U.S. military intervention in the Middle East.

This is, of course, a legitimate conservative point of view, even if going on Al Jazeera is not the proper place to make such an argument. But McConnell’s idea that Al Jazeera somehow has a right to enter the U.S. media market without scrutiny is not supported by the evidence.

There is no “national loyalty oath” for a cable channel. But there are various laws that are supposed to apply to this transaction which are being ignored. These include the Foreign Agents Registration Act, Federal Communications Commission rules, and the review process of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.

But the basic hurdle that the channel cannot overcome, based on the evidence of its collaboration with al Qaeda, is that it provides material support to terrorism and, therefore, cannot legally operate on American soil. The Hezbollah TV station Al Manar was outlawed in the U.S. on this basis.

If there is some doubt as to Al Jazeera’s relationship with al Qaeda, then Congressional hearings can set the record straight.

Even if the deal was legitimate and had received the necessary approval, there is every reason in the world for true conservatives to oppose the channel’s entry into the U.S. on the grounds that it spews propaganda which can misinform, mislead, and inspire violence.

There is nothing much we can do about foreign propaganda that is based overseas. But allowing our enemies to operate on the U.S.

I have been writing this column for over a dozen years, and I can safely say the column I wrote last week, “My Line In The Sand Is Drawn Here,” produced more response than any column I have ever written–maybe more than any two or three columns combined. And what is even more noteworthy: unlike most columns, the responses to this column were at least 90% favorable.

In last week’s column I said, “Throughout the United States, there are tens of millions of fully-armed citizens who are more than capable of defending themselves and their communities against any enemy–whether that enemy is an internal or external one. In fact, many millions of these citizens have been trained in the US armed forces. Firearms–especially semi-automatic rifles–in the hands of millions of American citizens is truly the only thing that stands between freedom and tyranny for the people of the United States. That Barack Obama and Dianne Feinstein want to disarm the American people should be considered an act of war against our liberties! In other words, ladies and gentlemen, this is a line in the sand that none of us can afford to ignore.”

I also wrote, “Make no mistake about it: to take away an American’s right to a semi-automatic rifle is to FULLY DISARM HIM. There is no Second Amendment; there is no right to keep and bear arms; there is no citizen militia; there is no liberty without the semi-automatic rifle!”

I concluded the column saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, whatever the consequences might be, and whatever anyone else does or doesn’t do, I am prepared to become an outlaw over this issue! I don’t know how to say it any plainer: I will not register my firearms, and I will not surrender my firearms. Period. End of story. It’s not just a saying with me: when my guns are outlawed, I will be an outlaw!

“My line in the sand is drawn here!

“Make no mistake about it: it is not just semi-automatic rifles that these gun grabbers are after. Ultimately, they want to take all of our guns. We either stop them now or there will be no stopping them at all.”

See the column at:

My Line In The Sand Is Drawn Here!

Among those who wrote to tell me that they had also drawn their personal line in the sand on this issue and that they would also absolutely refuse to register or surrender their firearms were people from virtually all walks of life: attorneys, realtors, bankers, teachers, physicians, civil servants, salesmen, truck drivers, tradesmen, pastors, law enforcement officers (including federal police officers), and military personnel–even special forces troops. Accordingly, I am absolutely convinced that these people are a microcosm of gun owners nationwide.

Some of the most outrageous attacks leveled at Christianity are by those whose religion of materialistic secularity rests upon the unprovable doctrine of Darwinian evolution.
Mr. Buchanan treats that danger in Christmas in an Anti-Christian Age

Darwinian evolution was enthusiastically endorsed, at the time Origin of the Species was published, by Karl Marx and his followers.  They viewed Darwin’s thesis as “proof” of their doctrine of history “evolving” from capitalism into a revolution of the proletariat that would transform human nature.  Thus liberal-progressive savagery directed against Christianity is intended to destroy spiritual religiosity, which stands athwart the path to “a good socialist society,” called in Orwellian Newspeak “science.”

As I wrote in The Liberal Jihad: The Hundred Year War Against The Constitution,
Chapter Seven excerpt:

Darwin’s hypothesis of biological evolution, when confined to natural selection as a means of modifying species, is just another interesting speculation. When, however, it is employed as Darwin intended— to deny God and morality— Darwinian evolution becomes a piece of heavy artillery for the liberal jihad.

Not only does it deny the truth of the Bible; more destructively it reduces the world of human habitation to a jungle of kill-or-be-kill amorality. Its doctrine provided a rationalization for the liquidations of tens of millions of people in the totalitarian regimes of Soviet Russia, National Socialist Germany, and Red China…

From high schools through college young students are taught that Darwinian evolution is the only scientific truth. Once having accepted that doctrine, students are only a step away from the doctrine that the Judeo-Christian morality underpinning the Constitution is ignorant nonsense…

One of Charles Darwin’s major champions was Thomas Huxley, who asserted that there is no such thing as morality; there is only the struggle for evolutionary survival.  Hence whatever kind of human conduct that enables one person or society to impose its hegemony on others is justified as evolutionary progress.  Enter Hitler and his master race theory…

Huxley’s dismissal of morality and sin echoes Thomas Hobbes’s version of the state of nature described in his 1651 Leviathan; or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil:

… In such condition there is no place for industry, … and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Though from different starting points, Hobbes, Darwin, and Huxley were arguing, in effect, that the earthly sovereign (intellectual or military), not God-given morality, is the sole source of law and order in political society. Needless to say, this is a potentially totalitarian doctrine.

With all the false claims about so-called predatory lending, we may have found the person initially responsible for the problem.  From the Daily Caller:

President Barack Obama was a pioneering contributor to the national subprime real estate bubble, and roughly half of the 186 African-American clients in his landmark 1995 mortgage discrimination lawsuit against Citibank have since gone bankrupt or received foreclosure notices.

As few as 19 of those 186 clients still own homes with clean credit ratings, following a decade in which Obama and other progressives pushed banks to provide mortgages to poor African Americans.

The startling failure rate among Obama’s private sector clients was discovered during The Daily Caller’s review of previously unpublished court information from the lawsuit that a young Obama helmed as the lead plaintiff’s attorney. [RELATED: Learn about the 186 class action plaintiffs]

Since the mortgage bubble burst, some of his former clients are calling for a policy reversal.

“If you see some people don’t make enough money to afford the mortgage, why would you give them a loan?” asked Obama client John Buchanan. “There should be some type of regulation against giving people loans they can’t afford.” . . .

A Washington Post on-line publication that is part of the same unit which publishes Slate magazine has become a cheerleader for communist causes and an outlet for Media Matters propaganda.

TheRoot.com, which is owned by The Washington Post, recently ran a flattering portrait of a communist running for president on a pro-Soviet and anti-Israel platform. “Meet the Black woman running for president on a platform of socialist revolution,” the publication proclaimed. Peta Lindsay was described as a “bubbly African-American activist” who has been preaching “economic change through the socialist transformation of society.”

Lindsay is the 2012 presidential candidate of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), whose website includes slogans such as “Defend revolutionary Cuba!” and “Free Palestine!” In 2008, the party ran Gloria La Riva for president and “pulled 6,818 votes across the nation,” the article says.

Lindsay is 27 years of age and doesn’t meet the constitutional age requirement to hold the office—a “technicality to which she pays little mind,” the article reveals.

Why is the Post promoting this fringe candidate who literally can’t even win?

Perhaps it’s because Lindsay serves the purpose of making Obama look like a moderate. Lindsay laughs at the notion that Obama is a socialist, the article says.

The Root article is by Cynthia Gordy, the former Washington Correspondent for Essence magazine, who reports that Lindsay’s “belief in socialism” was buttressed by a 2002 trip to Cuba, “where she marveled at the free education, housing and health care.” Nothing was said about the bankruptcy of the regime, its desperate need for trade and aid from the West, lack of basic human rights, harboring of American terrorists, and support for international terrorism.

Lindsay is a founding member of the PSL and a member of its Central Committee. The group is so extreme that it defends the old Soviet Union and participates in conferences of the International Communist Seminar, a gathering of political parties and organizations which defend Marxism-Leninism. It supports the Cuban dictatorship and the Marxist Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela, calls Israel “a military garrison state serving the U.S. Empire in the Middle East,” and opposes “U.S. attempts to bring about ‘regime change’ in Lebanon, Syria and Iran…”

But the Post thinks she is deserving of special attention.

Identified as The Washington Post Company’s African American news and commentary site, The Root was founded in 2008 “under the leadership” of Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University, a close personal friend of President Obama. Remember that it was Obama who went to Gates’ defense when he resisted arrest in an incident outside his home in 2009. Obama said the white policeman who arrested Gates, who is black, acted “stupidly.” The policeman’s fellow officers said the arrest, made in response to disorderly conduct, was justified.

Technically, the Root is published by The Slate Group, an online publishing unit of the Post that also includes Slate magazine. The unit reports directly to Washington Post chairman and CEO Donald Graham.

The “Blogs We Like” section at the bottom of the homepage of TheRoot.com includes Media Matters for America, the Soros-funded group that tries to censor conservative views; the Huffington Post; and “Pam’s House Blend,” a blog devoted to smearing opponents of homosexuality as bigots.

Patrick J. Buchanan, who has been a major figure in the conservative movement for over 40  years, was fired from MSNBC after the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) concluded in Washington, D.C. Buchanan was not a featured speaker at CPAC, but his former colleague, Joe Scarborough, was. Scarborough, the co-host of a little-watched MSNBC program “Morning Joe,” is a former Republican congressman who pleases the liberals by making sure he doesn’t sound too conservative on the air. He takes shots at conservatives to make himself palatable to the left.

Many were astounded that Scarborough was the emcee of a major CPAC event. Scarborough’s real mission was to introduce Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin at a banquet sponsored by Newsmax but he couldn’t resist taking shots at GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, such as saying something about a moon base, one of Gingrich’s more controversial proposals. Gingrich, of course, wasn’t there to defend himself; he spoke to this CPAC on another occasion. Conservatives at my table agreed that Scarborough’s cheap shots at Gingrich were in bad taste. I felt bad for Ryan being introduced in such a tawdry manner.

In order to rub salt in the wounds, Scarborough brought along his liberal MSNBC sidekick Mika Brzezinski, who sat at one of the up-front banquet tables. She posed for pictures with a number of young conservatives who must have thought she was a Hollywood starlet of some kind. For his part, Scarborough has posted photos of himself at CPAC, under the title, “Morning Joe Invades CPAC.” The use of the term “invasion” is the correct one. They invaded the conservative space.

All of this is background information for what has happened to Buchanan and his place in the conservative movement. It’s bad enough that he was fired from MSNBC. In fact, he had been “suspended” weeks before the firing became official. While Buchanan’s magazine The American Conservative was at CPAC, Buchanan was not.

Buchanan seems to be considered anathema by some newcomers to the conservative movement, mostly because of his criticism of America’s foreign wars and pro-Israel foreign policy under George W. Bush. One can criticize those stands and his occasional use of inappropriate language on sensitive issues while acknowledging Buchanan’s stature and place in the conservative movement.

An editorial writer at a young age who was trained in journalism, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of U.S. politics. He has written a number of books, some more controversial than others, as a look at the top of his website will attest. He crossed into government service by working for Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and later ran for president himself. At Reagan’s service, Buchanan was a fierce advocate for freedom against communism.

I first met Buchanan while working for Accuracy in Media. AIM founder Reed Irvine admired and respected Buchanan. This was the norm among conservatives who recognized Buchanan as a fighter against liberals in the media and elsewhere. Buchanan asked me to write an article for his newsletter, “Patrick J. Buchanan From the Right,” about the rise of conservative talk radio. I had hosted a radio show in the early 1990s.

Barack Obama has gone from the “one we’ve been waiting for” to the one we can’t wait to kick out. No one ever thought one man could bring the nation to its knees, but here he is living in the White House. And on our knees we have been praying for the day that he leaves.

The audacity of a president hell-bent on destroying our great nation has truly been a stunning spectacle to observe. No lie is too ridiculous to tell about anyone who opposes him. With a compliant media behind him, the smears this Demagogue-in-Chief promises to unleash on his opponent this fall could divide the county so badly that it becomes ungovernable.

The societal tensions Obama promised to ease have worsened by his politics of envy. The racial healing he promised has been made worse. Despite overwhelming opposition, he forced a health plan on the people that few want. He has trampled on the Constitution, and infringed on powers granted to Congress. He has bailed out auto companies, investment bankers and insurance companies. He has given Constitutional rights to terrorists.

Obama’s greatest transgression, however, has been the explosion of government spending to the point where we are enslaved to a mountain of debt that can never be repaid. He has given us $1.6-trillion deficits, and will have added more than $6 trillion to the debt by the end of his term. He has risen the percentage of GDP consumed by government to 25 percent. And all his spending has stimulated nothing.

If you believe what the government reports, total unemployment is currently 15.2 percent as measured by U-6. During Obama’s tenure, true unemployment has been running greater than 20 percent and is near Depression Era levels. In sum, Obama’s presidency has hastened a financial disaster upon the nation.

Obama calls his policies “transformation.” In an earlier age, they would have been considered something akin to treason. Our enemies could not have planted someone to have caused more damage. And now, with financial collapse on the horizon, our very way of life is threatened.

Altogether, Barack Obama will probably go down in history as the worst president of all time. Until now, historians have long given that dubious distinction to James Buchanan, who left office to Abraham Lincoln as the nation was falling apart and headed toward civil war. It is no exaggeration to say the 2012 election is every bit as important as was the 1860 election. James Buchanan at least had good intentions. The same cannot be said for Barack Obama. His intent is not to build up, but only to tear the nation down, and then to cover his tracks. There is no other way to explain his actions.

Millions of Americans, however, have finally had enough. A counterrevolution is rising to a level rarely seen in our history. There hasn’t been this intensity of grassroots activity since the abolitionist movement of the 1850s. People are making themselves visible in the community. They are organizing rallies and call-in campaigns. They are studying the Constitution, and will not be silenced by charges of racism or any other falsehood uttered by the Left.

And when the new president is sworn in, collective relief will be felt across the land.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. I just want to offer some unsolicited advice to the Democrat Party that I am sure will result in their complete rout and defeat in the 2012 elections. I am doing so because I cannot imagine the Democrats being so suicidal that they would re-nominate Barack Hussein Obama. That said, they probably will!

There are the usual rumors that Hillary is carefully distancing herself from Obama in anticipation of mounting another campaign, but it doesn’t really matter because, as his Secretary of State she is indelibly marked by her association with him and his failed foreign policies. Assuming, of course, he has any policy other than bowing low to Iran, China, Russia and other nations that hold the U.S. in contempt.

In Hillary’s case, the question is what has she done as Secretary of State? I doubt anyone can cite any initiative or action that rises above the level of boring speeches and photo ops.

The Israel-Palestinian peace discussions are doomed to failure. Hamas, in control of Gaza (the PLO resides in the West Bank) murdered an Israeli family just before the talks began and has been rocketing Israel since then. Though Israelis fear that PM Netanyahu might go “wobbly” in the words of Margaret Thatcher, it is doubtful he will sign off on another land-for-peace initiative.

I have not been a fan of Hillary for a very long time, but most specifically since the launch of Hillarycare in 1992. It was a massive healthcare entitlement that ultimately died in 1994, setting in motion the transfer of power in Congress to Republicans after forty years in the political desert.

In her book, “The Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton”, Bay Buchanan noted that Hillarycare was “a 1,342-page plan that would have cut the number of doctors in the country by 25 percent and the number of specialists in half.” Everything about the plan was kept secret, something that was illegal. No doubt she learned from that debacle.

At this point, Republicans—and mainly independents—have begun to clean house of the RINOs and are set to recapture Congress once again in November. Given the low approval ratings of the Democrat-controlled Congress and of President Obama, it seems obvious Republicans will capture the House and might even pull off the miracle of taking the Senate as well.

I am not saying this to be unkind, but the job of Secretary of State seems to be taking a real physical toll on Hillary. Increasingly she looks haggard with dark circles under her eyes. I recall a similar look as she campaigned in 2008 to become the first woman president.

In the end, it would was Obama’s campaign that defeated her. She is, domestically, Obama-light, flogging all the bad socialist ideas that he has come to embody.

Hillary’s nomination would come with a lot of baggage, not the least of which would be Bill. Aside from that, he has been increasingly flat-footed about picking winners in the primaries. A classic insider, he has lost his mojo.