Freedom Line Blog

Remember a year ago, when the biggest rationale for Republican supporters of Barack Obama was his “first-class temperament?” Well, as the Obama Administration prepares to enter its second year in the wake of a near-miss terrorist attack, there’s signs that “No Drama Obama” can’t even muster a pulse for his job’s highest responsibility: protecting the American people.

From a story in today’s Politico:

“In general, I think that the president’s inclinations as a leader work fairly well for this issue — no-drama Obama,” [Cato Institute defense and homeland security fellow Benjamin] Friedman said. “In some ways Al Qaeda is trying to be relevant and trying to be politically relevant, and in some sense they achieved that. He’s denying them that relevance by acting like it’s not the No. 1 thing on his agenda. We credit them with more power and credibility than they have.”

Obama heading to the golf course, Friedman said, “signals that it’s not a crisis, and he’s the president and he has a lot of things to do and this is just one of them.”

Friedman and his fellow-travelers on the left and the libertarian right are engaging in a quixotic bit of terrorism-as-child-rearing fantasy.  Are we really to believe that the highest maxim of combatting terrorism is “see no evil?” If the targeted Northwest Airlines flight had gone down as planned, would this low-key approach from the President be equally effective in discouraging Al Qaeda? And how has this administration’s orgy of euphemisms (you may remember such hits as “man-caused disasters”) done so far in deterring potential terrorists?

It’s naive to believe there’s no such thing as evil in the world. The only thing more naive may be believing that you can make it go away by ignoring it.

Many anti-war Leftists like to taunt military planners with the Vietnam-era missive that it is sometimes “necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Coupling his distaste for enhanced interrogation techniques with the necessity to neutralize terrorists when possible, President Barack Obama seems to be applying that logic to the lives of individual terrorist leaders. In Pakistan, Afghanistan, and now Yemen, Obama is giving the lie to the notion that his approach to terrorists is more humane than his predecessor’s. As Marc Thiessen explains in today’s Washington Post:

President Obama has shut down the CIA interrogation program that helped stop a series of planned attacks — and in the year since he took office, not one high-value terrorist has been interrogated by the CIA.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has escalated the targeted killing of high-value terrorists. There may be times when killing a terrorist leader is the best option (for example, his location might be too remote to reach with anything but an unmanned drone). But President Obama has decided capturing senior terrorist leaders alive and interrogating them — with enhanced techniques if necessary — is not worth the trouble.”

In fact, Obama has been ordering drone assassinations of terrorist leaders since his first week in office. Unlike the Bush Administration’s model of capture, detain, and interrogate, Obama and his team are opting for the ultimate end-run around Attorney General Eric Holder’s epiphany to treat Guantanamo Bay detainees like American citizens: kill them before they’re contacted. If enemy combatants are really more like common criminals worthy of civilian trials, are common criminals now able to be killed by law enforcement prior to being contacted? Why hassle about the vagaries of Miranda rights when a cop can just shoot the bad guy on the street?

As Thiessen rightly notes, there may be situations where such attacks are warranted.  But killing people so you don’t have to feel queasy about dealing with their continued existence is not an elegant solution to a vexing moral problem. Then again, this isn’t the first time President Obama has applied such reasoning.

Besides these troubling inconsistencies, there is usually collateral damage in the form of neighbors and passers-by that get killed in the fallout. These are the fruits of an enlightened presidency? How provocative it is to think that terrorist leaders had it better under George W. Bush than Barack Obama. At least under the former they weren’t guaranteed a death sentence.

If the Senate’s hyperpartisan Christmas Eve healthcare vote and the Copenhagen climate summit “agreement” constitute “victories” for Barack Obama, one would fear to see anything he’d acknowledge a “failure.” 

At every opportunity, the White House, liberal pundits and media apologists herald both as victories for a foundering presidency.  But just as Obama’s performance has failed to remotely match his lofty campaign rhetoric, neither one comes anywhere close to his professed goals. 

After all, remember the government-run, single-payer system that Obama said was his goal prior to his presidency?  No sign of it in the Senate healthcare bill.  In fact, the bill doesn’t even contain the “robust public option” that Obama sought after he realized single-payer was a bridge too far.  And remember how he demanded them before the August Congressional recess?  Some “victory.” 

And the same goes for the silly Copenhagen climate summit.  Obama arrogantly trumpeted a historic “agreement,” but the only agreement was an agreement-to-agree-to-something-to-be-agreed-upon-at-some-future-climate-summit.  There were none of the economically-crippling carbon limits demanded by environmental extremists, and none of the billions (trillions?) of largess demanded by developing nations. 

The reality is that Obama needes something – anything – to create the mirage of accomplishment for a White House that has failed so miserably that his approval is lower than any President in history at this stage.   His minions and media chorus may label these things “victories,” but that doesn’t make it so.

Early this morning, the United States Senate passed its version of health care “reform” legislation.  Though Congress won’t be back in session until January 18^th, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be discussing ways to reconcile the bills so they can get it to President Obama for his signature.  In a departure from the go-go pace of the last two weeks, there are signs that the legislation may not become law until February of next year.

Since an overwhelming majority of voters oppose either version of the plan, Democrats are leaving themselves open to serious opposition over the holidays; especially since media outlets and activist groups will have time to comb through the bills and highlight the waste and corruption tucked away in each.  For CFIF and its supporters, the fight continues!

Even though there isn’t much hope of Republicans winning a majority in the U.S. Senate after the 2010 election, President Obama may have a few new conservative voices critiquing his administration. Of the four Republican candidates endorsed by the Senatorial Conservative Fund, the two most likely to get elected are running to replace moderate members of the GOP. But while replacing Kay Bailey Hutchison with Michael Williams would be an improvement for Texas conservatives looking for a more aggressive advocate, that scenario pales in comparison to the starkly different paths confronting Florida’s Republican primary voters.

In that race former Florida house speaker and Tea Party darling Marco Rubio just pulled even with Charlie Crist, the current Republican governor and a closet liberal. CFIF has previously covered the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s decision not to endorse in contested primaries. Now, it looks like that decision, coupled with Rubio’s successful linkage of Crist to Obama, is hurting the once front-running Crist. After Doug Hoffman’s narrow loss in the New York 23rd congressional special election, many pundits opined that conservatives like Rubio would be persona non grata in the GOP. Like everything else coming out of Washington these days, the “experts” were wrong about what Americans want.

Foreign Policy Initiative’s Abe Greenwald does an excellent riff on President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptace speech today on National Review’s website. The upshot: Greenwald wonders whether Obama’s stark articulation of evil’s presence in the world (and its impact on international affairs) shows a president who’s starting to rethink some of the first principles of his foreign policy.

Greenwald sees some promising signs, but still wonders whether Obama can ever fully turn the corner. In one bravura passage:

“Irving Kristol said, almost too memorably, ‘A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.’ With that definition in mind, an eminent national-security personage put this perfectly phrased query to me over the summer: ‘Is Obama too arrogant to get mugged by reality?'”

“An excellent question. What the president calls his “philosophy of persistence” looks increasingly like the vice of conceit. The new White House imperiousness explains Obama’s inability to offer full-throated praise for the Iraq War — an undertaking he staunchly opposed. It also explains his devotion to de-fanging Iran through the voodoo of his personal allure (and to his correspondent obtuseness on Iran’s democrats).”

Today’s best piece on foreign policy (apart from this one). Read it here.

Remember when then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that while Obama’s likening himself to Martin Luther King, Jr., was nice, it was really President Lyndon Johnson who changed civil rights from a rhetorical dream into legislative reality?  As usual, Clinton was criticized for speaking truth in public.  But her observation – and comparison – still rings true today.

Flash forward to President Obama’s remarks to Senate Democrats on Sunday.  While his midday sermon was long on admonishments to find common ground, it didn’t give any direction on how on to find it.  The lack of setting down definitions or benchmarks for success, or even support for moderates needing a safe harbor during tough re-election campaigns, indicates that Obama has no clue how to line up 60 votes in his own caucus.  LBJ never seemed to have that problem.  Hillary Clinton’s recognition of this indicates she may have learned more from her failures as First Lady health czar than Obama has over a lifetime of risk aversion.

This is a trend.  Since at least his time in law school, Obama has studiously avoided even the appearance of a paper trail.  He’s also managed to spend a decade as an elected legislator without authoring a single consequential piece of legislation.  Simply put, the man doesn’t know how to horse trade, cajole, and get a bill on his desk for signature.  One wonders how much less effective he’d be without a majority in both chambers.

Today President Obama hosts a “jobs summit” at the White House, and apparently he’s looking for ideas. Unfortunately, the folks in Congress have one in the shape of a second stimulus package – this time to be packaged and sold as a “jobs bill.” And just what’s in a “jobs bill”? Make work projects, short-term subsidies, and tax gimmicks all designed to give businesses an incentive to hire people they can’t afford without a government check. Like the first stimulus package, this kind of fix merely prolongs and deepens the problems facing businesses; namely uncertainty about the future.

If the president is truly interested in getting ideas about how to create more jobs, he should read John Stossel and meditate on this pearl of wisdom:

When government sets simple rules that everyone understands and then gets out of the way, free people create jobs.

Granted, we might lose some middle men. But until the tax system is simplified and the government stops intervening in the free market, people may get jobs, but they won’t have the kind of stability they – or their employers – need to get back to work.

Ever since Republicans lost hold of every major organ of the federal government, the MSM has been pushing a meme about how the right-wing wackos on talk radio represent a radical, uncompromising view of the world that will assure permanent minority status for the GOP. In virtually every instance, I’ve thought this analysis almost comically wrong. Until today.

The reality is that — whatever their intellectual shortcomings — the conservative talking heads usually do a pretty good job of keeping the GOP honest. Unfortunately, some of them seem to be totally abandoning that charge when it comes to President Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan.

Rush Limbaugh had some relatively muted criticisms for Obama’s plan on his radio show this morning, but Sean Hannity was positively apoplectic on Fox tonight in the aftermath of the President’s speech at West Point.  Hannity hit Obama hard for “dithering” on the decision making process, shorting General McChrystal’s troop request, and not being “passionate” enough. His reaction was churlish and desperate.

The reality is that Obama (of whom I have little positive to say on virtually any other issue) is boldly choosing to alienate his own political base by embracing the kind of strategy that we know can work based on the Bush experience in Iraq.

Criticisms over the amount of troops are misguided. Obama already ordered a mini-surge earlier in the Spring; he seems to be making a serious effort to get NATO to supply the forces to make up the difference between new American deployments and Gen. McChrystal’s request; and, if the Bush experience is any indicator, the final number of new troops deployed will likely be higher than Obama’s initial estimate.  On top of all this, there’s a bizarre line of criticism that it was somehow inappropriate for Obama not to take McChrystal’s recommendation without a single alteration.  As Commanders-in-Chief, Presidents are not supposed to be  passive receptacles of their military advisors’ recommendations.  Effective wartime leaders push back and push back hard. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Obama got the decision right, but he certainly has the methodology down.

There are plenty of legitimate points of criticism. While Obama was right to enter into a serious deliberative process, the “dithering” claim has some merit — a quarter of a year is too long to leave the theater adrift. The focus on timetables for withdrawal is also a mistake and one that’s liable to get the President into hot water come 2012. His caveat about “conditons on the ground,” while welcome as a matter of strategic principle, only muddies the rhetorical waters further.

All that being said, Obama has made a courageous decision that will shape the rest of his presidency. It’s the right call for the nation. Pundits on the right should keep their powder dry.

In what may be a lesson for budding progressive politicians, the career paths of President Barack Obama and the new European Union foreign minister offer insight into how to position oneself for stardom while ascending in darkness.  It turns out that like Obama, Lady Catherine Ashton has a dodgy past full of close ties to political radicals on the Left.  As a paid organizer for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), then Ms. Ashton rubbed shoulders with a group that Russian Communist leaders found helpful during the Cold War.

Yet the fact remains that the Kremlin found CND and other “peace movements” useful ways of undermining the unity of NATO, weakening the West’s defence posture and stoking anti-Americanism. The ex-dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, an expert in Soviet penetration of the West, says: “the worldwide disarmament campaign in the early 1980s was covertly orchestrated from Moscow. To a substantial extent it was also funded by the Soviet bloc”.

Like Obama’s well-documented connection to ACORN, though, the row over Lady Ashton’s past affiliation with folks proclaiming “better red than dead” probably won’t be enough to force her resignation as the embodiment of European foreign policy.  Who knows; maybe she’ll be able to broker a deal with a resurgent Russia to help combat the rise of an Islamic Republic inside the continent.

It may be that Barack Obama’s time in office serves to enhance Bill Clinton’s (personal) legacy among Democratic operatives.  For all his faults, The Man from Hope at least made many people he spoke to and worked with feel better about themselves.  Obama is a different cat.  During his campaign for president, several reporters who had worked around both men remarked that Clinton sees a person the way that person wants to be seen; Obama sees a person the way that person is.

And when it comes to working in the Obama White House, loyalty runs in only one direction.  The curious case of soon-to-be-former White House Counsel Gregory Craig is the most recent example.  Last Friday, the early supporter (and bridge builder to the Kennedy family) was forced to resign because of his apparent inability to close down immediately the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.  You know, the same site filled with terrorists no other country wants, including America?

Maybe the only thing different if this had occurred in the Clinton White House would be the inclusion of a teary-eyed hug on the way out the door.  Now that Craig is moving back to his white shoe D.C. law firm, maybe he’d appreciate knowing the president he helped elect still thinks he’s an effective lawyer.  While Craig separates his aspiration from his reality, he’s got plenty of company among those listing the ending date of Obama-related work on their resumes.

Okay, so maybe the cost-control bureaucrats under ObamaCare wouldn’t directly kill people forced into a national health plan. However, a sobering article in today’s Wall Street Journal shows how a key element of every health reform bill now in Congress could cause death(s) by a thousand denials.

As envisioned by the Senate Finance Committee, the commission—all 15 members appointed by the President—would have to meet certain budget targets each year. Starting in 2015, Medicare could not grow more rapidly on a per capita basis than by a measure of inflation. After 2019, it could only grow at the same rate as GDP, plus one percentage point.

The theory is to let technocrats set Medicare payments free from political pressure, as with the military base closing commissions. But that process presented recommendations to Congress for an up-or-down vote. Here, the commission’s decisions would go into effect automatically if Congress couldn’t agree within six months on different cuts that met the same target. The board’s decisions would not be subject to ordinary notice-and-comment rule-making, or even judicial review.”

So, absent a congressional override, there is no appeal for a denial of care made in the name of cost-benefit analysis. Of course, the “costs” and “benefits” will be considered as collective values interpreted by government administrators – not individual patients and taxpayers.

The State of Washington already has a similarly functioning “independent commission” that is actively denying care like the types mentioned above. While the consequences could be deadly, the creation of prolonged pain in the interim borders on unconscionable. Such decisions will become a reality when the public “option” becomes a public “mandate” forcing all but the wealthiest to suffer under a rationed health care system. Let’s hope there is enough push-back from Congress and the country to guarantee similar types of “pain panels” don’t take up residence in the nation’s capitol.

In the aftermath of the Obama Justice Department’s (and, let’s be clear, the President’s) decision to bring a group of terrorist figures — including professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — to trial in American courtrooms, liberals in Congress are bending over backwards to tout the administration’s moral superiority.

What’s notable about their talking points is how thin the gruel they’re serving up is.  Consider this gem from Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Michigan):

The argument by some that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be treated as a warrior and not as a common criminal misses the point. He wants us to treat him as a warrior. But he should, and will, be treated as the common terrorist criminal that he is.

As Charles Krauthammer noted on last night’s “Special Report,” the phrase “terrorist criminal” is, in and of itself, an oxymoron. But there’s also a bit of a stolen base in Levin’s argument.  Because KSM wants to be treated as a warrior, he shouldn’t be? How about a justice system that operates according to the facts rather than the feelings of those involved? Sure, KSM might want the glories of martyrdom — give it to him.  For every died in the wool jihadi who bids him well as he’s ferried across the River Styx to the land of subjugated virgins, they’ll be another potential Al-Qaeda recruit who learns that terrorism is a short road that ends in the embrace of an American noose.

Also weighing in was Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont):

By trying them in our federal courts, we demonstrate to the world that the most powerful nation on earth also trusts its judicial system — a system respected around the world.

That Leahy seems to think that whether or not America has any faith in the judicial process hinges on whether or not we empty out the population of Guantanamo Bay into New York City courtrooms doesn’t speak well of his standing as judiciary chairman.  But are the military tribunals that these men would have otherwise faced not part of our judicial system? Or does he not remember being on the losing end of the vote on the Military Commissions Act of 2006?

Politics is supposed to stop at the water’s edge. Unfortunately, these days that water is in the Potomac River.

While touring Asia, President Barack Obama continued his recent backhanding of the international community. Last week it was failing to attend the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall falling. Today, it’s telling Asian markets to perish the thought of relying on future American spending.

President Barack Obama has come halfway around the world to personally deliver the message to East Asia that the global economy can no longer count on the U.S. consumer to keep it afloat.

In what White House aides call a “major address” here on Friday, and in planned comments in Singapore and China next week, Mr. Obama will press his push to “rebalance” the world’s economy, urging China to adjust its economic policy to spur domestic consumption as the U.S. encourages less consumption, more savings and more exports.”

But perhaps the news isn’t all bad for Asian exporters.  With the increasing purchasing power of the federal government under Obama’s rapacious domestic agenda, Asian businesses will soon be able to find a new buyer for their goods: the all-encompassing federal bureaucracy!

Over on National Review, Stephen Spruiell gives an in-depth look at how the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is helping President Barack Obama remake America into a much more liberal place, one piece of legislation at a time. The excerpts below offer a powerful wake-up call to anyone thinking that the stimulus bill, health care reform, and card-check are anything other than massive redistributions of wealth.

On getting a union-friendly stimulus bill:

The stimulus bill was a top priority for SEIU because it contained massive bailouts for state governments and Medicaid. As mentioned above, states such as California, New York, and New Jersey have expanded their social-welfare systems beyond what they can afford, in response to pressures from SEIU and other public-sector unions. At the same time, their progressive income-tax structures have made them especially vulnerable to boom-and-bust cycles. When the credit bubble burst, these states were looking at massive deficits, layoffs, furloughs, and budget cuts. The stimulus bill included a $50 billion slush fund for state governments and $90 billion in Medicaid expansions, helping the states avoid a necessary round of belt-tightening and tax reform.”

A bit surprisingly, California came in for particularly rough treatment:

The most illustrative example of SEIU’s clout during this process came when the Obama administration threatened to withhold stimulus funds from the state of California if it went ahead with a planned reduction in payments to home health-care workers. The administration set up a conference call with state officials to discuss whether the cuts violated the terms of the stimulus, and state officials were surprised to learn that the administration had invited SEIU representatives to join the call. “This was really atypical and outside any norm I am familiar with,” California secretary of health and human services Kim Belshe told the Los Angeles Times. The administration backed down from the threat, but only after the story had leaked and caused significant blowback.”

On getting a union-friendly health care reform bill:

SEIU has poured millions into a group called Health Care for America Now, which has dispatched envoys to deliver portable pavilions, professionally printed placards, and uniform attire at almost every major health-care protest this year. Dennis Rivera sent hundreds of union activists to meetings this summer in an attempt to counteract opposition to the Democrats’ bill. “We’re running this campaign like this was a presidential campaign, and our candidate is health-care reform,” Rivera told the New York Times. Why does SEIU care so much about health-care reform? The subsidies and mandates in Democrats’ legislation would drive up demand for health-care services, meaning more revenue for hospitals, more health-care workers, and more members for SEIU.

The creation of a government-run insurance plan is an especially important priority for the SEIU. “The nexus between government and private industry would give SEIU a toehold to organize more workers,” explains J. Justin Wilson, managing director of the Center for Union Facts. Once the public option is in place, SEIU can pressure the bureaucracy to implement union-friendly policies. For example, the public option “might only reimburse hospitals that are unionized or have a neutrality position toward unions,” Wilson says.

And finally, supporting card-check legislation:

As important as the Democrats’ health-care plan is to SEIU, the union’s top priority remains the Employee Free Choice Act, otherwise known as the card-check bill. Under SEIU’s preferred version of the bill, employers would have to recognize a union once a majority of its employees had signed petition cards. This process would allow union organizers to identify holdouts and pressure them into signing up. The bill would also require business owners to allow union organizers to hold meetings with employees on the business’s property, while forbidding the owners to hold mandatory meetings to discuss unionization.

Finally, the bill includes a binding-arbitration provision that would allow the NLRB to impose a union contract on a business if negotiations with its union broke down. SEIU loves this provision, because Obama just named one of its lawyers, Craig Becker, to the NLRB. Businesses negotiating with the SEIU would have two choices: accept SEIU’s demands voluntarily or have the SEIU-friendly NLRB accept them for you.”

You can read the entire article here.

As health care reform sprints towards the finish line, one can’t help but wonder what repercussions the triumph of Obamacare might have for the White House staff.

I speak specifically of Nancy-Ann DeParle, the President’s “health reform” czar. One hopes that, in fidelity to his promise of good government, Obama would demand Deparle’s letter of resignation immediately upon signing health care reform into law.  After all, what’s left for the reform czar once the sole objective of her employment is achieved? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is probably “a taxpayer-financed salary and all the perks of White House employment until President Obama heads back to Chicago.”

Back before he took his oath of office, there were moments when Barack Obama seemed to have an intellectual clarity that occasionally allowed him to transcend partisanship. One such moment came in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal’s editorial board during the 2008 presidential primaries, when he made the (utterly true) claim that Ronald Reagan had been a transformative president in a way that figures such as Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton had not.

Of course, the fact that Obama wasn’t praising the content of Reagan’s legacy was obvious at the time.  Long before he was praising the virtues of Whole Foods arugula to Iowa caucus-goers (denizens of a state without a single Whole Foods location), The One was a Columbia undergraduate sympathetic to the nuclear freeze movement that thought Reagan was Dr. Strangelove with Pomade.  So this is a man who has never been a fellow-traveler with us Reaganites.

That being said, there are certain times when presidential grace requires biting history’s bullet (especially when it’s in service of a noble cause).  Thus, President Obama’s decision to snub Germany’s invitation to help commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s demise is as petty as it is revealing.

Two decades ago, the world witnessed the parting shots of perhaps the most protracted struggle between liberty and tyranny in human history. That this victory was achieved without any actual shots owes to the man that Obama once rightly recognized as transformational.  Yet while Obama was able to take time out of his presidential campaign to visit a Germany eager to enshrine him as a golden calf, he can’t find room in his day-planner for a return trip to celebrate the greatest human liberation of the 20th century.

Being wrong about the Cold War in the 1980s can be chalked up to an honest mistake fueled by a lack of intellectual sophistication. Being wrong about it 20 years later ought to disqualify you from any public office … let alone the highest in the land.

What if suddenly, after eight years of a “cowboy presidency” and the election of a worldly, foreign policy-hesitant President, America’s biggest nemesis voluntarily offered to deescalate tensions? As the Obama Administration waits for such a breakthrough moment with North Korea, Iran, Hamas, Sudan, Venezuela, and others, a new article in Foreign Policy by David E. Hoffman analyzes the actions of a different man in a similar moment.

Hoffman’s primary criticism of President George H. W. Bush during the tumultuous year of 1989 is that he failed to appreciate the scale and speed of change inside the Soviet Union. On more than one occasion, Bush took a cautious, wait-and-see approach when evaluating Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization programs of perestroika and glasnost. It literally took the Berlin Wall falling down before Bush convinced himself that Gorbachev was serious about implementing fundamental changes both inside and outside Russia.

The title of the article, “1989: The Lost Year,” reflects the missed opportunities that, if realized and acted on, could have led to a much smoother Soviet transition from orthodox communism. Would President Obama be able to distinguish real reforms from empty platitudes, or would he make the same mistakes as Bush Senior? For all of the current president’s stubbornness in ramming through his domestic agenda, he’s shown a conspicuous lack of clarity when it comes to foreign affairs. From urging restraint during the Russian invasion of Georgia to dithering on Afghanistan troop levels, Obama shows signs of being caught off guard in the unlikely event his overtures to America’s enemies actually work.

During his closing argument for New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine’s re-election campaign, President Barack Obama moved back the goalposts on when elected leaders should be held accountable for their actions:

Listening to Jon’s opponent, you’d think New Jersey was the only state going through a tough time right now,” Obama told almost 19,000 gathered inside the Prudential Center in Newark. “I have something to report: We have the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. By the way, that didn’t start under Jon’s watch, that didn’t start under my watch. I wasn’t sworn in yet.”

Obama quipped there was a little revisionist history or selective memory on the part of Republicans and other critics who seek to hold Corzine responsible for New Jersey’s economic woes.

“A little amnesia about how we got into this mess,” Obama explained. “This crisis we are living . . . came about because of the same theories, the same laxed regulation, the same trickle-down economics that the other guy’s party has been peddling for years. And you know, look, we’re not interested in relitigating the past, and I’m more than happy to go and do the work that’s required to get this economy moving again. I think about it every day. Jon Corzine thinks about it every day.”

One problem with Obama’s remarks; Corzine was sworn in before the economic recession hit – by two years. And it’s not like Corzine can say he’s just a community organizer with scant business experience. As head of Goldman Sachs during part of its “master of universe” phase, Corzine – along with former colleague and successor, Hank Paulson – knows how to make money under a lax regulatory system.

In fact, Corzine apparently knows how to “spread the money around” to take care of his former corporation while serving in government.

As for the president, apparently he thinks a re-election campaign is not the right forum to “re-litigate” the past four years of the current administration. Good to know. I guess that means a politician can only be criticized when he’s termed out of office. Thank goodness for Jon Corzine!

For those worrying about the lack of legislative action in our nation’s capitol, Jonathan Weisman at the Wall Street Journal writes a nice summary of the “other” legislation racing through Congress and landing on President Obama’s desk.

Last week, Mr. Obama signed defense-policy legislation that included an unrelated measure widening federal hate-crimes laws to cover sexual orientation and gender identification — 12 years after it was first introduced. The same legislation also tightened the rules of admissible evidence for military commissions, an issue that consumed Congress in debate in 2007 but received almost no attention this go-round.

Other new measures signed into law since the administration took office, all of which kicked up controversy in past congresses, make it easier for women to sue for equal pay, set aside land in the West from development, give the government the power to regulate tobacco and raise tobacco taxes to expand health insurance for children. Congress and the White House, in the new defense-policy bill, also killed weapons programs that have survived earlier attempts at termination, among them, the F-22 fighter jet, the VH-71 presidential helicopter and the Army’s Future Combat System.

Rob Nabors, the White House’s deputy budget director, called the series of new laws “a very, very quiet but important victory.”

But it’s not like the Republican opposition is asleep at the wheel. According to Rep. Tom Price (R. Ga.), “The administration is pushing so many things so rapidly it’s difficult to concentrate on all of them.” Hopefully, the bills they are concentrating on – health care, energy, education – can be stopped or modified before they too become unqualified Democratic victories.