Talk about making a federal case. Quin Hillyer quite literally wants to make one against Newt Gingrich because he said the
During his 1996 reelection campaign, President Bill Clinton famously recounted “vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child.” It was a moving story, and it helped shore up his sagging support among minority voters. It was also a lie. As the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and a variety of other publications pointed out at the time, no such atrocities had occurred in Arkansas during Slick Willie’s formative years. Until recently, Clinton’s church-burning whopper appeared to be the most egregious modern example of crass and cynical prevarication by a presidential candidate. It has, however, now been supplanted by President Obama’s oft-repeated tale about his mother’s fictional struggle with her health insurance company while she was battling cancer. Throughout his 2008 presidential bid, Obama attributed his passion for health care reform to painful memories of his mother’s battle with a health insurance company that allegedly tried to avoid paying her medical bills on the pretext that her disease predated her coverage. He used her image in a campaign ad as far back as September of 2007, and he often told the tale during his primary battle with Hillary Clinton. In a New Hampshire debate he phrased it thus: “When I think about health care, I think about my mother, who, when she was dying of cancer, had to read an insurance form because she had just gotten a new job and they were trying to figure out whether or not this was going to be treated as a preexisting condition and whether or not they would pay her medical bills.” Like Bill Clinton’s anecdote about charred black churches, the story of Obama’s mother was moving. And, like Clinton’s tale, it was a work of fiction. Questions were raised about the accuracy of this tale as soon as Obama began peddling it, but the “news” media ignored them and he continued to repeat it even after he had been elected President. He included it, for example, in a 2009 speech to the AMA : “I will never forget watching my own mother… worrying about whether her insurer would claim her illness was a preexisting condition.” And, during the height of the ObamaCare debate, he told the attendees of a town hall meeting, “I will never forget my own mother, as she fought cancer in her final months, having to worry about whether her insurance would refuse to pay for her treatment.” Now, the President’s veracity concerning his mother’s dealings with her health insurance company has once again been questioned in a new biography of Ann Dunham. Author Janny Scott writes, in A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother , that there was never any attempt by Ann Dunham’s health insurance company to deny payment for her medical bills. Scott is a former reporter for that notorious hive of wingnuts and Tea Partiers, the New York Times , and her book makes it clear that Obama’s mother had health insurance through her job and that it covered her medical treatment: “[T]he hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month.” Like all truly effective lies, however, there is a tiny kernel of truth to Obama’s story. Even the best health insurance policies, such as those enjoyed by members of labor unions that supported the President during his campaign, include deductibles — a cost-sharing mechanism designed to bring down monthly premiums and prevent over-utilization of health services. In 1995, when Obama’s mother was hospitalized, this feature was typical of a well designed health insurance plan. Instead of turning to her son, who by that time had the resources to help her, Dunham apparently tried to defray her deductible as well as her living expenses by obtaining payment through a separate disability policy. That claim was indeed denied because her condition was already well-documented before that policy had gone into effect. Twelve years after these unhappy events, Ann Dunham’s son needed a useful campaign narrative that would support his plan to impose government-run health care on an unwilling electorate. Thus, Obama deliberately rearranged the facts of his mother’s “battle” with the insurance company to make it appear that the evil minions of the health care industrial complex had foully mistreated his poor widowed mother when she was dying of cancer. This allowed him to tell audience after audience that the struggle for universal health care was, for him, an intensely “personal” crusade and to claim that he would never rest until such wrongs had been righted. Like most pathological liars, he probably began to believe the tale himself after telling it several hundred times. Nonetheless, it was indeed a lie. Not that this matters a whit to Obama’s allies in the mainstream media. They continue to ignore or brush off this tawdry tale. The very people who accused George W. Bush of “lying us into war” because he made a poor verb choice in a United Nations speech tell us that Obama’s egregious whopper about his mother only matters to desperate conservatives trying to bring down the President. The reaction of Salon is typical: “The RedState/TownHall crowd is feasting on this Obama ‘lie.’ And why wouldn’t they? If Bill Clinton was an all-you-can-eat buffet of half-truths and scandals, Saint Barack of Chicago has been nothing but thin gruel all the way.” In reality, of course, precisely the reverse is true. The man rarely opens his mouth without telling some stretcher. Throughout the ObamaCare debate, he consistently lied about his ultimate intentions, the cost and the contents of the legislation. And since its passage, he has told whopper after whopper about the benefits of PPACA. In fact, his predilection for prevarication has been one of the reasons it has been so difficult for the GOP to put together deals with the White House on Medicare reform, the debt limit and a variety of other serious issues. No one with any sense believes anything he says. How can one trust a man who deliberately and repeatedly lied about the death of his own mother for cheap political gain? “Saint Barack of Chicago” is so profoundly dishonest that even a grifter like Bill Clinton seems trustworthy in comparison.
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Pre-Existing Prevarication
America this week marks the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth. Born February 6, 1911, Reagan lived a remarkable life, with a presidency of utmost consequence, winning, among other things, 44 states in 1980 and 49 in 1984, plus a Cold War against a truly Evil Empire. Oh, yes, he also won a long battle — less recognized — against progressives. It was a crucial battle — even less understood — that began for Reagan, with fascinating twists, back in Hollywood. The Reagan centennial is a golden opportunity to consider what happened there and to draw lessons for what America faces with progressives today. In the 1980s, the progressives Reagan faced called themselves “liberals.” In the 1940s, when Reagan first encountered them, as a liberal himself, they weren’t shy about calling themselves progressives. More telling, Reagan was shocked to find that many of those spearheading “progressive” groups and causes weren’t really progressives but were communists exploiting progressives, their labels, and their organizations. Understanding this is no mere historical curiosity; no, for Reagan, it was a life-changing wake-up call, initiating a personal-political transformation that, ultimately, and dramatically, led to the presidency and victory in the Cold War. That path included Reagan handing the progressives their biggest setback since the founding of their movement — a setback they’re striving to “change” and “reform” right now. Before considering Reagan’s conversion, it’s key to understand what was happening with Hollywood’s progressives in this period. Many “progressives,” especially following the surge by Communist Party USA (CPUSA) during the Great Depression, were actually closet communists lifting the progressive label to dupe progressives. This was done quite cynically and successfully, whether ordered and orchestrated from CPUSA headquarters in New York, from CPUSA’s branch office in Los Angeles, or from Comintern headquarters in Moscow. It’s fascinating, and would be hilarious if not so sad, that the Soviets even referred to Joe Stalin as a progressive. The Soviet Ministry of Education framed Stalin as “the great leader of the Soviet people and of all progressive mankind.” Similarly, in Washington, some self-proclaimed “progressives” serving President Franklin Delano Roosevelt were actually communists penetrating and influencing the administration: Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White, Harold Glasser, Alger Hiss. Even FDR’s most trusted adviser, Harry Hopkins, may have been a closet communist masquerading as a progressive. That’s the conclusion of some experts who have dissected the Venona transcripts. The communist pilfering of the “progressive” label was evident in a major Congressional report in December 1961, the most in-depth investigation of communist front groups ever done. Titled, “Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications,” the investigation went back to the early 20th century. Probably the most popular title listing in the 994-page cumulative index is the word “progressive.” That brings me to Hollywood, where the exploitation of the progressive label was especially rich, and where communists truly desired to hijack the motion-picture industry. Progressives would be central to that plan. Consider the group, Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), which was thoroughly penetrated. One liberal actor exploited was the great Gene Kelly, a pleasant, patriotic American. Kelly was enlisted as a progressive prop to stand in front of a giant American flag and lead the Pledge of Allegiance. He rallied the progressives in reverential renditions of “America.” In one sorry display, the all-American boy was cast to provide the introduction at PCA’s initial meeting in Los Angeles on February 11, 1947. The evening’s theme was established before Kelly spoke, as a large screen flashed photographs of bombed Hiroshima, with rolling footage of the dead and maimed. That evening, PCA board members would be elected. On the ballot were secret hard-line Hollywood communists like John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, as well as non-communist liberals like Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, Gregory Peck, Lena Horne, and Melvyn Douglas. Take another sorry case, where Katharine Hepburn was the opening speaker at a May 19, 1947 Progressive Party Rally at Hollywood Legion Stadium. Draped in a long, flame-red dress, the liberal New Englander read a speech scripted by Trumbo — and so admired by People’s Daily World that it reprinted the entire text. This manipulation was old hat for the comrades, who found no shortage of progressives to do the bidding of Stalin. Alas, into this waded an actor named Ronald Reagan, mid-30s, politically passionate. As a committed FDR liberal, Reagan was susceptible to the conniving of communists. He was targeted immediately after World War II, a quick victim of several front-groups. He was very “naïve,” Reagan admitted later, “blindly and busily” joining “every organization I could find that would guarantee to save the world.” He was “an active” but unwitting participant “in what now and then turned out to be communist causes.” The deceived Reagan assumed these folks were “liberals, and being liberals ourselves, [we] bedded down with them.” Most redeeming about Ronald Reagan is that when he learned, he really learned. By October 1947, he was testifying before Congress on communist infiltration. Later still, he would explain: “The communist plan for Hollywood was remarkably simple. It was merely to take over the motion picture business … [as] a grand world-wide propaganda base.” Before TV and mass production of foreign films, said Reagan, American movies dominated 95% of the world’s screens, with an audience of “500,000,000 souls” around the globe. “Takeover of this enormous plant and its gradual transformation into a communist gristmill was a grandiose idea. It would have been a magnificent coup for our enemies.” In Reagan’s view, those were the stakes, prodded by a “master scheme” to “line up big-name dupes to collect money and create prestige.” Progressives were central to the plan. Even at the height of party membership, CPUSA never had more than about 100,000 members; it couldn’t advance without progressives. Americans needed to wake up, as had Reagan. Of course, the rest is history. Reagan began a historic march to the presidency that, by the 1980s, threatened to squash the progressive long march that preceded him. He had splendid success, but one thing about progressives — which Reagan understood — is their patient ability to work slowly, incrementally, with victories not necessarily at the ballot box but in other influential facets of American life, like education. They waited and waited, until, in November 2008, enough oblivious Americans, especially moderates and independents, were duped like Reagan once had been — and voted into office a progressive-in-chief campaigning under the banner of “change.” Some things never change. We must learn what Ronald Reagan learned: The progressive left isn’t going away, ever-awaiting the next step in the evolutionary chain. It’s an ebb and flow, but always creeping toward centralization; or, what Reagan called “creeping socialism.” We must awaken, providing progressives with more setbacks. Most of all, we must not to be fooled, misled, duped, certainly not more than once. Ronald Reagan’s life, and path, is a history and life lesson for all of us.
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Reagan vs. the Progressives
CAIR comes to his defense claiming he was “racially profiled” in 3..2..1… HOUSTON — A traveler from India has been arrested on a weapons charge at Bush Intercontinental Airport, and police said the man was carrying extremist books that refer to “jihad” and “infidels,” Local 2 Investigates reported Friday. “He had a ton of books,” said one law enforcement official involved in the lunch-hour arrest. The man also had a large amount of cash and a portable computer storage device capable of holding documents and data, officials said. Police identify the passenger as Vijay Kumar, a resident of Mumbai, India. He has been booked into a Houston jail on charges of possession of a prohibited weapon after brass knuckles were found in his checked luggage. Law enforcement officials involved in the arrest said that Kumar was pulled out of the Terminal E security screening line for a closer look after TSA behavioral detection officers noticed he was sweating and fidgeting. Officers said they then found the brass knuckles, as well as several books and diagrams in his carry-on luggage, including one book titled, “New Voices of Islam,” and another espionage publication called “Spycraft.” Officers said many of the books were written in Arabic, but they did notice English publications that refer to “jihad” and “infidels.” They also found diagrams that purport to describe U.S. military weaponry, according to law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. FBI agents were called to the screening area where Kumar was being arrested. Agents are trying to determine the contents of a flash drive, or thumb drive, that was confiscated as he was arrested. Investigators said that Kumar claimed he was in Houston for some sort of “Islamic seminar.” In addition to the publications, thumb drive, and the brass knuckles confiscated by police, investigators said that Kumar had a large amount of cash that had not been declared to Customs officials as part of his travel. Investigators told KPRC Local 2 Investigates that at least $8,000 in U.S. bills were found, along with thousands of dollars in a foreign currency. Federal law requires passengers to declare any time they are traveling with $10,000 or more, and officers point out there was no such declaration in this case. H/T: Jihad Watch
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Indian Muslim Man Arrested in Houston Airport Carrying Brass Knuckles, Jihadist Literature, Large Amount of Cash, Claimed to be in Town for “Islamic…
People who live in glass houses — and this is a category that includes many reporters, pundits, and leading political figures — love to throw stones. They especially like it when they are all aiming at the same target and boiling over with righteous indignation — to mention two of the common attributes of mobs. Tony Hayward, the just deposed CEO at BP, had a legitimate point when he said that he had been publicly “demonized and vilified” over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. That said, through his own fumbling and fragility, Hayward made the perfect fall guy. “The Most Hated and Clueless Man in America,” shouted a headline in the New York Daily News. “What Not to Say When your Company is Ruining the World,” Newsweek fulminated in another headline. Newsweek taunted Hayward for “making gaffe after gaffe defending his company’s response to the Gulf oil spill.” And then there was never-let-a-crisis (or a juicy oil spill)-go-to-waste Rahm Emanuel, who was at his sneering best in an ABC News interview: Well, to quote Tony Hayward, he’s got his life back, as he would say… and I think we can all conclude that Tony Hayward is not going to have a second career in PR consulting. This has just been part of a long line of PR gaffes and mistakes. President Obama got into the fun when he declared that he would have fired Hayward if he (Obama) were in charge of things at BP. “He wouldn’t be working for me after any of those statements,” Obama said, speaking of a man he had never met and speaking of a situation (running a large business enterprise) that is far removed from his own knowledge and experience. During the same interview, the president made his famous remark about going down to the Gulf to talk to people, “so I know whose ass to kick.” Apart from holding the top job at BP, what did Hayward say or do to merit all this huffing and puffing? Let us sort through all these terrible “gaffes.” Hayward got off on the wrong foot on May 18, stating that the Gulf is “a very big ocean” and “the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest.” This infuriated a lot of people — beginning with those most inclined to fits of hysteria, which is to say the environmental activists — and it set the stage for the media to pounce on any comments or actions that they might consider inappropriate, such as daring to appear before the American public in anything other than sackcloth and ashes. On May 30, Hayward told reporters, “There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would love my life back.” This was whiney, to be sure, and cause for much derision. Then on June 19, Hayward was observed to be taking part in a boat race around the Isle of Wight. Emanuel and other self-appointed critics howled with outrage that BP’s CEO was not devoting himself to managing the crisis 24/7. And that’s it — those are all the “gaffes” committed by Tony Hayward. Where he really went wrong, I would submit, was to look rattled, and even scared, during the Grand Inquisition that took place over several press conferences and the Congressional hearing during which one screaming and oil-smeared protester called for his imprisonment and had to be wrestled to the ground by half a dozen policemen. Nothing excites would-be attackers so much as the whiff of fear emanating from a potential victim. BUT IT IS WORTH NOTING the media’s bias and selectivity in making sport of Hayward. If BP’s CEO was to be pilloried for taking any kind of a break during the midst of the crisis, why not the president? After all, the U.S. commander-in-chief made a big show of declaring himself to be charge of the whole operation and he publicly vowed that he would not rest until the hole had been plugged and damage cleaned up. Yet Obama drew little criticism for playing several rounds of golf and taking no fewer than three mini-vacations in the three months following the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20 (i.e., the first to Asheville, N. C., just three days after the event, the next to Chicago over Memorial Day weekend, and the last to Bar Harbor, Maine, on July 17). If “gaffe” is used in the normal sense of the word — meaning a clumsy error, faux pas, or foolish blunder — surely U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar committed a number of gaffes back in May when he repeatedly referred to BP as “British Petroleum” (a name that the company had dropped a dozen years ago) and turned it into a term of opprobrium — saying that it was his intention to “keep a boot to the neck of British Petroleum.” Salazar made it sound as though the evil Brits had wished this terrible thing upon their American cousins. Obama’s demand that BP “pay up” — big time — had the same effect. From listening to Obama and Salazar you would not have known that the U.S. citizens and institutions are almost as deeply invested in the company (with a 39% share of BP’s ownership) as their British counterparts (40%). Nor would you have known that BP has 24,000 employees in the U.S. compared to just over 10,000 in the U.K. That’s right — more than twice as many as employees in this country. In macho man style, Salazar, a lawyer and career politician, even threatened to push BP “out of the way” if it didn’t move faster. This was too much for Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, overseeing the federal response, who gasped: “Replace them with what?” (In a wonderfully sarcastic editorial on May 26, the Wall Street Journal noted that Salazar “wouldn’t know an oil drill from a dental drill.”) Certainly, all the bluster and grandstanding by the president and his interior secretary did nothing to advance the common objective of plugging the hole and cleaning up the damage. It only succeeded in causing unnecessary offense to our British friends and allies. Nor were the American people impressed. In national polls, the great majority of Americans say that the government has done a poor job of responding to the crisis (the Obama administration has received lower scores on the oil spill than the Bush administration did on Hurricane Katrina). Lo and behold, it now seems possible that Hayward could actually be right in his original prediction that the Gulf spill is likely to be much less of an environmental calamity than many believed. On July 26 — the same day that news came out of Hayward’s resignation — ABC News carried a special report saying that oil from the spill was becoming “increasingly hard to find.” “At its peak last month,” ABC News reported, “the oil slick was the size of Kansas, but it has been rapidly shrinking, now down to the size of New Hampshire.… The numbers don’t lie: two weeks ago, skimmers picked up about 25,000 barrels of oily water. Last Thursday, they gathered just 200 barrels.” Ed Overton, a professor of environmental studies at Louisiana State University, told ABC: “Mother Nature is doing what she is supposed to be doing and we’re losing most of it [the spilt oil] to microbial degradation in the open ocean.” Admiral Allen — who is still around to provide a sense of adult supervision in the cleanup operation and the final stages of permanently sealing the now-capped gusher — agrees. The National Incident Commandant (his official title) observed: “It is becoming a very elusive bunch of oil for us to find and do anything about.” Hundreds of skimmers have been idled as the size of the oil slick has diminished. NONE OF THIS IS TO SUGGEST that the environmental damage — and the damage to marine life — won’t be long-lasting and severe. Scientists worry that patches of oil below the surface could reduce oxygen levels and endanger many species of fish and marine mammals. No one can tell what the final outcome may be. What is certain is that the blowout in the Gulf will be remembered for a very long time as an extremely traumatic and costly accident. Eleven crew members lost their lives in the ferocious explosion on the night of April 20 and thousands of people living and working along the Gulf coast have suffered real economic hardship. Without a doubt, as I endeavored to show in an earlier article in the Weekly Standard (entitled “Beyond Pathetic: BP’s Gulf disaster was no surprise to those who understood the corporate culture,” link ), this was a preventable accident. This accident involved a whole chain of mistakes and failures of a human or managerial nature. It was human failure rather than technological failure. Was BP’s top management (including both Hayward and his predecessor John Browne) at fault? Absolutely, say the insiders cited in my article. One of the ways that BP began to go wrong almost a decade ago was in short-changing safety and basic engineering excellence in a dash for faster growth and higher profitability through international acquisitions and forging closer ties with political leaders in the United States and elsewhere. BP became more and more of a politicized, rent-seeking company and one that paid a lot of lip service to the easy part of safety (e.g. telling people to hold onto the hand rails and keep the lids fastened on their coffee cups) while slashing maintenance budgets on aging and rusty rigs. It was under Browne’s tenure as CEO that BP became the first major oil company to embrace “the clean energy future” that Obama and other leading Democrats so love to talk about. In fact, BP has been walking that walk and talking that talk for a dozen years already. BP never fails to play up all it is doing to promote solar panels, windmills, and other forms of alternate energy in its annual reports and other publications. Until the blowout, it went about calling itself the “green” petroleum company. The company and its people have been large political contributors. According to Politico , “During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and was the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past ten years.” In today’s context, it is funny to see how President Obama and others have seized upon oil gusher as an excuse to revive cap-and-trade (or cap-and-tax). The fact is, with help from Enron, BP invented cap and trade and has been trying to sell it to Congress. Browne brags about it in his memoir published early this year: In order to know where to reduce carbon emissions, we wanted to develop a simple emissions trading scheme. It would become the first of its kind. And the person instrumental in helping us set this up was Fred Krupp, head of the Environmental Defense Fund, an environment NGO. We had come full circle. This NGO had virtually single-handedly halted the construction of the Trans Alaska Pipeline in the early 1970s. And now BP has come full circle again. It is back to being regarded as evil incarnate by the left-wing politicians it has spent so much time and money courting over the past decade. As Tony Hayward could tell you, events since April 20 have shown just how ready this government is to throw its corporate benefactors under the bus for reasons of political expediency. Andrew B. Wilson is a writer and business consultant.
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Sic Transit Tony Hayward: BP’s Abused and Fumbling CEO
