MADDOG10's Blog

"Do you have a strategy now, Mr. President?" asked the cover of the Daily News next to a photo of the second American journalist to be beheaded by the terrorist group ISIS.

The impulse to "do something" to counter such evil is strong.

But why do we assume that government doing something is always an improvement over government doing nothing?

In domestic policy, encouraging government to act leads to nonsense like the "stimulus spending" that created boondoggles such as Cash for Clunkers.

Our foreign policy record isn't much better, despite big successes such as stopping Hitler. Consider the unintended consequences of involving ourselves in other conflicts, such as Vietnam.

President Carter, now derided as a weakling, wasn't about to sit around and "do nothing" when Russians invaded Afghanistan. Carter armed Islamic fighters, the mujahidin. Bold move.

But later those fighters formed the Taliban.

President Clinton lobbed missiles at al-Qaida without doing much damage. Osama bin Laden mocked the U.S. as a "paper tiger" for such ineffectual tactics.

When President George W. Bush chose to go to war with Saddam Hussein, Vice President Cheney assured the world we'd be hailed as "liberators." After we weren't, hawks said the invasion still made the world safer, because Saddam harbored terrorists.

Well, Iraq is definitely a harbor for terrorists now.

Despite our frequent military interventions from Southeast Asia to Latin America, in the Wall Street Journal, Brookings Institution foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan warns about "America's dangerous aversion to conflict."

Aversion to conflict?

I too get frustrated watching evildoers abuse Americans overseas. Maybe the plan to "train and equip" certain tribes and eventually "destroy ISIS" that President Obama will speak about tonight will be a good thing.

But I'm skeptical.

After the toppling of Saddam, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice thought it was smart to support Sunni militants who wanted to fight al-Qaida. But now it's Sunni militants who lead ISIS.

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton thought it was smart to aid Islamist militias in Syria and Libya. In Libya, "A monstrous little dictator was removed," writes Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal, but that "left an opening for people who were more monstrous still, who murdered our ambassador, burned our consulate in Benghazi and have now run us out of Tripoli."

We may soon do an about-face and help Bashir Assad against militias we had hoped would overthrow him (a few months ago, when he was the latest in a long line of foreign leaders who hawks likened to Hitler).

We don't know what our interventions will bring. If we remove ISIS, we remove the biggest threat to terrorist cells like Hamas. Fighting these groups is like fighting Hydra, the monster from Greek mythology. Cut off one head, two more grow back.

The policy twists and turns come so fast that Americans may give up on following them all. I don't blame them: In Syria alone, there's conflict between Assad's government, the Free Syrian army, al-Qaida, Jabhat al-Nusra, the Islamic Front, Hezbollah, ISIS and so on.

Remember hawkish Sen. John McCain appearing in a photo with some Syrian fighters who turned out to be terrorists? It's hard to keep track.

One of the terrorists' goals is to get us to overreact. They understand how much it costs us. In a piece titled "The Beheadings Are Bait," Matthew Hoh from the Center for International Policy reminds readers that Osama bin Laden said, "All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there and cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses."

Maybe it's time for America to stop taking the bait. Islamic militants do monstrous things all over the world. We cannot stop it all.

There may be actions we can take. Thousands of people in Iraq were rescued by airdrops of food and water. Air strikes stopped the ISIS advance.

But there is a big difference between that type of action and prolonged engagement.

The urge to "do something" is understandable. But Government can't get domestic policy right. Don't assume it gets foreign policy right.

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Oops. Attorney General Eric Holder’s office accidently tried to concoct a PR strategy to undermine Republican Congressman Darrell Issa with… Darrell Issa’s office. According to a letter released by Issa, a Senior Communication aide to Holder (who used to work for Chuck Schummer) called the congressman’s office asking to release documents that would “undermine” the Republican investigation into the IRS scandal.

So, I repeat: Oops.

Brian Fallon, who previously spent his time in DC as an aid to Democrat Senator Chuck Schummer, apparently needs to update his rolodex. (Wait… Does anyone still use a rolodex, or should we be talking about Google “circles” and i-phone contacts?) Staff members in Issa’s office received a strange call on Friday afternoon of last week when Brian called, asking to release “specific documents” before the “majority” (those are Republicans, by the way) had a chance to comment on them.

Frank Underwood, I’m sure, is shaking his head in disappointment at such a rookie mistake, Brian.

In short, Holder’s aide called up Issa’s office asking to undermine Republicans in their investigation into the IRS targeting scandal… It’s a pretty safe assumption that poor little Brian tried to call Elijah Cummings, who is the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee. After all, reports have been mysteriously appearing in the Press before the Committee makes them public, and it’s highly unlikely that the leading Republican would be damaging his own case. I guess up until now it has been a complete and total mystery as to how such information was leaked… But we could probably take some guesses.

After requesting that a few select documents be leaked to the press, and some PR spin be liberally applied, Brian apparently realized his mistake. It’s still unclear when Brian might have realized he misdialed… Maybe it was when Issa’s staff asked for such odd (and questionably moral) requests to be put in writing, or maybe it just took the brilliant DOJ aide several minutes to process the words “Darrel Issa’s office, how can I help you?”

Either way, the hapless Holder-helper abruptly put Issa’s staffers on hold… For three minutes.

After a short commercial break, the loveable lug from the DOJ got back on the line with a very witty (albeit unnerved) explanation that he was trying to “work together” with the committee… It’s only laughable because Eric Holder was recently found to be in contempt of Congress for ignoring the will of the House.

So, let’s recap:

A DOJ aide accidently called the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee; then he asked that a handful of documents be released to “select” reporters in an effort to get “in front of” Republicans on the issue; then he put staffers on hold; then he came back (audibly shaken) and blabbered about “working together”.

Yeah. This sounds legit.

Good thing Brian wasn’t around when Holder was running guns to Mexico… Who knows what kind of calls Issa’s office would be getting on Friday afternoons

• 

It seems the Export-Import Bank of the United States is once again putting up walls to keep the duly-elected representatives of the American people from getting a look at their inner workings. Ex-Im Chairman Fred Hochberg recently dashed off a letter to U.S. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Patrick McHenry in which he dismissed the committee’s request to interview Ex-Im officials, shying away from what he called “the inherently adversarial nature of transcribed interviews.”

The Ex-Im Chairman also defended the Bank’s practice of making heavy redactions to the documents they have deigned to turn over to the committee. He did, however, offer to provide “additional information if you have questions about particular redactions.” This, apparently, is a man who thinks having committee staff pick out every single blacked-out word or phrase is a good use of their taxpayer-funded time. Or maybe, because he knows how prevalent these redactions are – as Chairman Hensarling put it, “more redactions than answers” – this is simply another attempt to slow-walk any investigation into the Ex-Im Bank’s affairs.

In Chairman Hochberg’s position, it’s hard to blame him. The stakes are high for the Ex-Im Bank at the moment. Their charter expires at the end of this month, and without reauthorization by Congress, the bank will fold. Several Members of Congress, including senior lawmakers like Hensarling and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, have already expressed their support for just that. It’s no wonder that Chairman Hochberg might be a little concerned about his job security. But by redacting documents and withholding access to government workers for interviews, what exactly is he trying to hide about the Ex-Im Bank?

Could it be yet more evidence of corruption? It was widely reported earlier this summer that four officials had left the Bank under a cloud of fraud allegations, ranging from questionable contracting practices to taking kickbacks from companies hoping to do business with Ex-Im. Hochberg made a particularly uncomfortable and evasive appearance before a Financial Services subcommittee in July to discuss these matters. Also called to testify was Johnny Gutierrez, one of the dismissed Ex-Im staffers, who elected to assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Approximately 40 charges of fraud were noted to be under investigation by the Bank’s Inspector General at that time. Perhaps even more cases have been discovered in the intervening weeks and Hochberg hopes to keep them under wraps.

Or, it could be that the bank’s chairman wants to conceal more of Ex-Im’s embarrassing foreign entanglements. They finally stopped making deals with Russia in July, only after the Treasury Department sanctioned two Russian state banks who had previously received $519.6 million in combined financing from Ex-Im. Now, with Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolling around eastern Ukraine, Ex-Im would be especially keen to suppress any additional, unwelcome details of their relations with Russian government-backed financial institutions.

Maybe Hochberg simply wants to keep Congress and the public from discovering any new details that more firmly establish the Ex-Im Bank as a crony-capitalist institution that regularly picks winners and losers – though that’s fairly self-evident as it is. We already know that about 60 percent of the Bank’s financing flows to ten massive corporations like Boeing, Caterpillar and GE. Fine American companies all, but none in need of additional government subsidies – especially not when those subsidies happen to kill American jobs.

When Ex-Im provides taxpayer-backed financing so a foreign airline can buy a Boeing jet, they put our own American airlines – who must pay the sticker price – at a competitive disadvantage. One study estimated that these sweetheart deals for foreign airlines have already cost more than 7,500 jobs in the U.S. airline industry.

That’s exactly the sort of inconvenient connection that Chairman Hochberg doesn’t want the Financial Services Committee to make. He may well be concerned that the more Congress learns about the Ex-Im Bank, the more likely they’ll be to vote against its reauthorization, leaving him out of a job.

It’s time to face the music, Chairman Hochberg. Congress has a right to conduct effective oversight over the executive branch, and even more fundamentally, the people have a right to the truth.

•      

President Barack Obama had another very bad week. It was only because former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell was convicted on eleven of fourteen counts of corruption that Mr. Obama didn't walk away with the Worst Week honors.

President announced during his pre-taped interview with Chuck Todd (to help mark the beginning of the Todd era on Meet the Press) that he would be addressing the nation on Wednesday night on his strategy for dealing with ISIS/ISIL/IS.

Remember, a couple of weeks ago he told a presser that he had no strategy to do that which was about as dumb a statement as we have heard from a President of the United States since Gerald Ford insisted that "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" in 1976.

On his trip to Europe last week to attend the NATO summit, the White House staff thought it would be a big deal for the President to make a stop in Estonia which was one of the Eastern European nations that President Ford didn't realize were under Soviet domination.

Estonia is now aNATO member (along with nine other former members of the Warsaw pact), but whatever impact the Administration thought it might have on VladimirPutin and his forays into Ukraine, it was pretty clear that "Ich binein Estonian" was not the rallying cry most Americans were looking for.

 

In the midst of all that, Mr. Obama let it be known that his highly anticipated Executive Order to make major changes in immigration policy would be delayed until after theNovember 4 elections.

 

If, as most now believe, Republicans will organize the Senate next year, it is not at all clear how much political power will be available to him during the expected Lame Duck Session between the

November 4, 2014 election and the opening of the new Congress on or about January 3, 2015.

Barack Obama's job approval according to the RealClearPolitics.com average of major polls shows the President stuck at 41.5 percent. The Gallup Daily Tracking Poll shows him at 38 percent approval overall through

Friday's polling - his all time low in the Gallup sequence.Looking at the latest crosstabs available which are through the end of August, Blacks supported the President with an 89 percent approval rating, but only 30 percent of Whites approved.

That may not surprise many, but here's where political types' eyes will widen. Among the category of respondents who identified themselves as a "Pure Independent" President Obama's approval was also at only 30%. These numbers, remember, largely portray the President's approval before the damaging "no strategy" blunder. The President's political power is dissipating like the sand under your feet at the beach when the tide is going out.

I was the spokesman for then-Governor Bob McDonnell's legal team through the summer and early fall last year. I know a lot about what went on, much of which is still covered by my tenuous link to attorney-client privilege. Here's my feeling - notwithstanding the trial that ended in all those guilty verdicts last week: If stupidity exhibited by elected officials becomes actionable under Federal law, the U.S. House and Senate will have a tough time gathering a quorum.

My other take-away from my brief time in Richmond is that the only difference between the way business is done in Virginia and, say, Louisiana is the public nature of the "gifts" to officials. In Virginia, they just smile and nod. In Louisiana they say things, like: "Hell, yes he gave me a boat, but I earned it!" The silence from both Republicans and Democrats in the Statehouse as McDonnell twisted slowly in the wind for most of his final year in office was deafening. But, if you listened very closely, I believe you could hear the murmured prayers of many other officials who similarly made liberal use of the almost-non-existent gift laws in Virginia.  Bob McDonnell's term of Governor will, of course, be measured by his conviction, but he was a good Governor who, his dreadful judgment in his private life notwithstanding, left the Commonwealth better than he found it.

The only difference between Obama’s ISIS strategy in defeating the Islamic terror group and Obamacare is that under Obama’s strategy, ISIS will likely be able to keep their doctors and their current coverage, while under Obamacare you will not. Oh, and it won’t cost ISIS even a penny more to beat Obama than it would have previously.

Make no mistake though: Neither will work the way they are being sold.

That’s because Obama’s strategy relies upon the extreme Islamic states --states that made ISIS possible-- forming into a coalition to defend us from the ISIS extremists that they have funded for years. Falling short of the all out war that Henry Kissinger urged upon Obama against ISIS, the president-- of sorts—says that the guys who failed to be able to stand up to Osama bin Laden when he was a stateless refugee, the folks who couldn’t defeat Saddam Hussein, the states that couldn’t stand up to the Muslim Brotherhood or Iran should suddenly become resolute.

And moderate.

Obama’s strategy will fail because those people don’t actually exist.

“We're going to have to develop a moderate Sunni opposition,” wished the guy who couldn’t even get a budget passed as president, “that can control territory and that we can work with.”

Develop a moderate Sunni opposition? That we can work with?

Because THAT strategy was NEVER tried before.

Why doesn’t Obama just stick to things he knows more about, like stopping the seas from rising, Grammy-winning audiobooks, and peace prizes?

What Obama lacks in executive ability he matches in a lack of originality.

I’m not saying that Obama steals ideas that he claims to be his own, I’m just saying that the title of his next book ought to be “Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Stole from Someone Else, Mostly Communists and Marxists. But It’s All Bush’s Fault.”

Obama was handed a moderate Sunni opposition in Iraq protected by U.S. troops—created by George W. Bush-- and he forsook them. It’s hard to be moderate when the extremists want to kill you with U.S permission.

And if Obama thinks that countries like Saudi Arabia are going to help us, then he’s crazier than I already know him to be. The Saudis are funding the extremists in the same way the Kaiser funded Russian socialists during the Great War. At this rate, expect the Kaiser to eventually abdicate, again.

“Obama doesn’t seem to get it,” Ramzy Mardini, an analyst with the Atlantic Council, a Washington policy group told Bloomberg News by e-mail. “No Arab leader wants to publicly join hands with the ‘Great Satan’ and ‘Crusaders’ in fighting a war in the Middle East.”

That’s because guys like Obama have consistently told the American people and the rest of the world that America actually doesn’t care about Iraq. And some people—some people in the Middle East and in America, even believed him.

I’m not one of them.

Here’s the deal, my fellow Americans: You either make a commitment to Iraq or you don’t. You do it because the stakes are high enough for your own country that the expenditure of blood makes it in your national best interest.

We can have differences in how we got here, but there is no doubt that we are at a Rubicon of sorts.

If, as Obama has said, this is not our fight, then why are we fighting it?

But if, as Obama’s actions and words suggest, we do have something at stake, why didn’t we take it seriously and stick to it when the situation was manageable in Iraq in 2009?

It will take that kind of commitment to win-- again.

Obama has said that in just meeting with world leaders at a NATO summit he knows his fellow heads of state understand the gravity of the threat that ISIS poses to everyone. I hope that’s true.

Because clearly Obama understands nothing about the threat ISIS poses to the United States of America.

The economy created only 142,000 jobs in August, down from 212,000 in July, indicating the economy significantly slowed this summer.

Jobs creation is well below the pace needed to reemploy all the workers displaced during the financial crisis—the economy is in crisis!

 Although official GDP estimates indicate the economy expanded in the second quarter at a torrid pace—4.2. percent—much of that was inventory build, as consumer spending continued to drag along at a nonplus pace and capital investment, especially in manufacturing, remains subpar.

Third quarter growth is likely in the range of 2 percent, and the Obama Administration spin doctors will have a tough time selling these jobs data as anything but bad news.

Simply, the administration’s big spending stimulus policies and the Fed’s obsession with pumping money into a moribund New York financial industry have failed.

Also, now Americans are seeing the real cost of ObamaCare health care subsidies. Employer mandates are not much good to working families if no one in the family is working.

The official jobless rate is down to 6.1 percent but real unemployment is closer to 18 percent, because so many prime aged adults are sitting out the party. For example, one in six adult males between the ages of 25 and 54 has no job, and may have simply quit looking thanks to “compassionate” government policies that reward able bodied men and women to sit at home and watch ESPN NFL reruns or The View.

Since 2000, Congress has beefed up the earned income tax credit, and expanded programs providing direct benefits to low and middle income workers, including ObamaCare and Medicaid, food stamps, and rent and mortgage assistance.

Those buy votes but do little to encourage work.

Benefits phase down as family incomes rise, and often tax additional income as much as 50 percent. Consequently, government benefits penalize work and encourage one partner in two adult households to be idle.

 Also, those programs offer incentives for single people to work only part-time and contribute to skills shortage.

With millions of young college graduates unable to land a professional job and start a career, the president has implemented irresponsible federal student loan policies. And unscrupulous university presidents exploit young people by peddling graduate programs that promise rewarding careers but only deliver a lifetime of debt.

 Student loans take disgruntled college graduates off the streets, lower the official unemployment rate and deliver electoral majorities for Democrats but undermine future growth. Simply, too many folks in their late 20s are stuck in dead end jobs, burdened with crippling debt and unable to buy a home or comfortably start families.

The root cause of the jobs crisis is chronically anemic growth, whose sources candidate Obama promised to address in 2008 but has forgotten.

 These include the purposefully undervalued Chinese and Japanese currencies, which cheapen imports, siphon off demand for American-made products and destroy factory jobs; federal restrictions on offshore oil and gas development, which unnecessarily perpetuate U.S. oil imports and finance terrorism; business regulations more burdensome than necessary to accomplish worthy objectives, which create prestigious jobs for political supporters and create monopolies for campaign contributors; and a tax structure ranked one of the worst in the world for encouraging sound business decisions and supporting international competitiveness.

 

A second term president should be a statesman looking to the long-term security and prosperity of the American people.

Instead, Obama continues to campaign, blames his predecessor and congress for his disappointments, and will leave Americans poorer and less safe in the bargain

Despite brave proclamations that the economy is a rolling juggernaut of wealth and job creation, once again the jobs report underwhelmed even the anemic estimates analysts have been counting on to brightly prop up this gray economy.

“U.S. job growth slowed to its lowest level of the year in August,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “a stumble for labor markets that had delivered a string of steady gains over the prior six months despite uneven economic growth.”

Payrolls came out at 142,000 versus a consensus estimate of 225,000, a miss of 83,000 to the negative or a 37 percent mulligan over the estimate.

It’s time for economists to admit what everyone knows: The experiment in a government controlled economy that sets interest rates, sells insurance, cars, student loans, home mortgages, while rationing out energy, housing, healthcare and money has failed. And the economists should be the first to admit it.

When you predict that global temperatures will get hotter and they don’t, something is wrong with your assumptions. Likewise when you predict year after year, month after month that the economy is finally on the mend, and it remains cool, not hot, something is wrong with your plan.

Some folks at the Federal Reserve Bank seem to understand that.

“In this regard,” write economists at the Saint Louis Federal Reserve Bank, “the unconventional monetary policy [of quantitative easing and zero interest rates] has reinforced the recession by stimulating the private sector’s money demand through pursuing an excessively low interest rate policy (i.e., the zero-interest rate policy).”

And. Well. Duh.

As I pointed out on the radio on Thursday, Japan has been trying some version of “unconventional” monetary policy for over a decade and they have little to show for it. Yes, the once mighty Japanese—now replaced in our mythology by the mightier still Chinese—have screwed up their economy year after year for over a decade by doing the same dumb things that we are perfecting now, keeping interest rates artificially low.

There is a temptation in all this to blame the bankers, who after all, benefit greatly from these policies in that the demand for their product—money—goes up when interest rates are low. But the truth is that it is the government that sets rates artificially low and is the biggest beneficiary of the policy. The bankers go along because in the absence of a sound fiscal policy that generates GDP at least everyone can borrow money to offset our non-growth.

The government, especially THIS government under Obama, benefits because the only campaign they know how to run is the one based on everyone being upset about something that they can blame on someone else. They have lived on the fact that demographically they can create more complainers who will vote for their side than the other side can.

Scapegoating is their typical leadership style. That’s true of politicians in general, but blame-someone-else has been elevated to a kind of mixed-media performance art under Obama.

It’s time to blame the person responsible for all of this.

I nominate Elizabeth Warren.

Looking more and more like a presidential hopeful, Warren sounded off on GOP Majority Whip Eric Cantor’s defection to Wall Street for a big payday after his recent defeat in Virginia by Austrian economist David Brat.

"How wrong can this be that basically what's happening here is that people work in Washington, and man, they hit that revolving door [to Wall Street] with a speed that would blind you," Warren said in an interview with Yahoo News.

But Warren and her colleagues in academia have that similar problem. Where do you think all the money comes from for report after report, study after study generated by academics like Warren who praise government spending, government control and unconventional monetary policy?

The money involved may be smaller, but it smacks of no less of venality, no less of corruption and no less of conflict of interest. It just proves academics typically think smaller than those on Wall Street and Main Street.

That affects us all adversely.

Because it’s those same small academic minds from which economists are born.

So now you know why economists and our economy are so, so, very wrong.

And small. And poor. 

Obama's speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history. Never a politician in this land had such quasi "religious" impact on so many people. The fact that Obama is a total incognito with Zero accomplishment, makes this inexplicable infatuation alarming.

Obama is not an ordinary man. He is not a genius. In fact he is quite
ignorant on most important subjects. Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of the "Malignant Self Love," believes Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist. Vaknin is a world authority on narcissism. He understands narcissism and describes the inner mind of a narcissist like no other person.  When he talks about narcissism everyone listens. Vaknin says that Obama's language, posture and demeanor, and the testimonies of his closest, dearest friends suggest that the man is either a narcissist or he may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

Narcissists project a grandiose but false image of themselves. Jim Jones, the charismatic leader of People's Temple, the man who led over 900 of his followers to cheerfully commit mass suicide and even murder their own children was also a narcissist. David Koresh, Charles Manson, Joseph Koni, Shoko Asahara, Stalin, Saddam, Mao, Kim Jong Ill and Adolph Hitler area few examples of narcissists of our time.

All these men had a tremendous influence over their fanciers. They created a personality cult around themselves and with their blazing speeches elevated their admirers, filled their hearts with enthusiasm and instilled in their minds a new zest for life.

They gave them hope!

They promised them the moon, but alas, invariably they brought them to their doom. When you are a victim of a cult of personality, you don't know it until it is too late. One determining factor in the development of NPD is childhood abuse "Obama's early life was decidedly chaotic and replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations, "says Vaknin. "Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through a divorce when he was an infant two years old. Obama saw his father only once again, before he died in a car accident. Then his mother re-married and Obama had to relocate to Indonesia , a foreign land with a radically foreign culture, to be raised by a step-father.

At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live with his maternal (white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently in the following few years and then she vanished from his life in 1979. "She died of cancer in 1995."

One must never underestimate the manipulative genius of pathological narcissists. They project such an imposing personality that it overwhelms those around them. Charmed by the charisma of the narcissist, people become like clay in his hands. They cheerfully do his bidding and delight to be at his service..The narcissist shapes the world around himself and reduces others in his own inverted image. He creates a cult of personality. His admirers become his codependents. Narcissists have no interest in things that do not help them to reach their personal objective. They are focused on one thing alone and that is power. All other issues are meaningless to them and they do not want to waste their precious time on trivialities. Anything that does not help them is beneath them and does not deserve their attention. If an issue raised in the Senate does not help Obama in one way or another, he as no interest in it. The "present" vote is a safe vote. No one can criticize him if things go wrong. Those issues are unworthy by their very nature because they are not aout him.

Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a contract and advance to write a book about race relations. The University of Chicago Law School provided him a lot longer than expected and at the end it evolved into, guess what? His own autobiography! Instead of writing a scholarly paper focusing on race relations, for which he had been paid, Obama could not resist writing about his most sublime self. He entitled the book Dreams from My Father. Not surprisingly, Adolph Hitler also wrote his own autobiography when he was still a nobody. So did Stalin. For a narcissist no subject is as important as his own self. Why would he waste his precious time and genius writing about insignificant things when he can write about such an august being as himself?

Narcissists are often callous and even ruthless. As the norm, they lack conscience. This is evident from Obama's lack of interest in his own brother who lives on only one dollar per month. A man who lives in luxury, who takes a private jet to vacation in Hawaii, and who raised nearly half a billion dollars for his campaign (something unprecedented in history) has no interest in the plight of his own brother. Why? Because, his brother cannot be used for his ascent to power. A narcissist cares for no one but himself.

This election was like no other in the history of America . The issues were insignificant compared to what is at stake. What can be more dangerous than having a man bereft of conscience, a serial liar, and one who cannot distinguish his fantasies from reality as the leader of the free world? I hate to sound alarmist, but one is a fool if one is not alarmed.

Many politicians are narcissists. They pose no threat to others. They are simply self-serving and selfish. Obama evidences symptoms of pathological narcissism, which is different from the run-of-the-mill narcissism of a Richard Nixon or a Bill Clinton for example. To him reality and fantasy are intertwined.

This is a mental health issue, not just a character flaw. Pathological narcissists are dangerous because they look normal and even intelligent. It is this disguise that makes them treacherous. Today the Democrats have placed all their hopes in Obama. But this man could put an end to their party. The great majority of blacks voted for Obama. Only a fool does not know that their support for him is racially driven. This is racism, pure and simple. The downside of this is that if Obama turns out to be the disaster I predict, he will cause widespread resentment among the whites. The blacks are unlikely to give up their support of their man. Cultic mentality is pernicious and unrelenting. They will dig
their heads deeper in the sand and blame Obama's detractors of racism. This will cause a backlash among the whites. The white supremacists will take advantage of the discontent and they will receive widespread support.

I predict that in less than four years, racial tensions will increase to
levels never seen since the turbulent 1960's. Obama will set the clock back decades.  America is the bastion of freedom. The peace of the world depends on the strength of America , and its weakness translates into the triumph of terrorism and victory of rogue nations. It is no wonder that Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, the Castrists, the Hezbollah, the Hamas, the lawyers of the Guantanamo terrorists, and virtually all sworn enemies of America are so thrilled by the prospect of their man in the White House. America is on the verge of destruction.

There is no insanity greater than electing a pathological narcissist as president.

Michael A. Haberman, M.D.

Many people suggest President Obama has checked out. He treats the ever-growing threat of ISIS as an abstraction. Sources from within the administration are now more openly admitting that, for almost a year, intelligence and Pentagon officials have advised the president of the threat. He has chosen to do very little. Last Wednesday, he said we would "shrink" ISIS and make it "a manageable problem" as opposed to eliminate it.

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with a sitting governor and a dear friend of mine. The friend leaned over to the governor and me and said Barack Obama is to America as Clarence the Angel was to George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life." Barack Obama is showing the world what it would look like had America never been born. As this friend later wrote, "Unsurprisingly, Bedford Falls is now Pottersville, and it's a terrible place. Unfortunately, we do not get to revert to the tolerable if modest status quo at the end of the lesson: George Bailey will eventually have to shell the town and retake it street by street from Old Man Potter's Spetsnaz."

Consider how far the world has collapsed in the past year. Again, my friend noted, since Labor Day weekend last year the Chinese expanded their air defense identification zone to incorporate the territory of other nations; the Russians annexed Crimea; ISIS rose; the Russians invaded Ukraine; Mosul fell; the Hungarian liberal democracy collapsed into Russian-aligned authoritarianism; a Central American refugee crisis spawned a border and humanitarian crisis in the United States; the Egyptians and Emiratis attacked Libya without telling the United States; Iraqi Christians and the Yazidi are suffering genocide at the hands of ISIS; NATO is scrambling to shore up its eastern-frontier defenses; mainstream anti-Semitism is re-emerging; the Americans are on the verge of yet another war in Iraq; middle America is seeing race riots, etc., etc.

Seventy-five years ago this past Monday, German tanks rolled across the Polish border setting off World War II. Sixty-nine years ago this past Tuesday, World War II ended as the Japanese formally surrendered. In the nearly seven decades since, the West has established a world-wide peace. Though not flawless, we have lived a relatively stable and secure existence. In just the past year, Barack Obama has largely undone seven decades of gains toward peace.

Our peace was balanced on top of two pillars. The first of the two pillars is the idea of peace through strength. Ensuring the American military could go anywhere at any time to strike back against any foe, no matter its size, has caused many to give us pause. In the last 25 years, after the collapse of the Cold War, America has consciously decided to scale back our military. We have handed military actions to FBI agents serving indictments, signaling our growing complacency.

The other pillar is the moral certainty of the West's goodness. We have, since the fall of Nazi Germany and the rise of its kissing cousin the communists, maintained Western values are superior and right and true. Barack Obama does not believe in the goodness and superiority of Western values. He sees former old colonialists trying to preserve their dubious claims on power. What so many for so long took for granted, Barack Obama sees as oppressive and regressive.

Barack Obama is the first American president who, through his upbringing, writings and actions, conveys a deep sense of grievance toward the American experiment. The idea that we are the last best hope for mankind is anathema to him. Barack Obama thinks the world, if the American imperial aggressor would just sit on the sidelines, could work out its problems and would be better off.

In short, the world has descended into chaos these past 365 days because the American president thinks America is to blame for much of the world's ills and has chosen not to check himself out, but to check the United States out of international affairs. The only question now is how many around the world will die because of it.

It's one thing to watch race hustlers like the Rev. Al Sharpton bellowing, "No justice, no peace." But when the attorney general of the United States makes false but racially incendiary claims about today's alleged "pernicious racism," we are in uncharted territory.

Holder complains about different prison rates, different school expulsion rates and longer prison sentences for black boys and men compared to white boys and men. He equates "equal rights" with "equal results."

In Ferguson, Missouri, after announcing federal investigation into the cop-shooting death of an unarmed black teen, Holder said: "I am the attorney general of the United States. But I am also a black man. I can remember being stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike on two occasions and accused of speeding. ... I remember how humiliating that was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me."

The New Jersey Turnpike? The long-believed claim of "racism" on that highway has been investigated -- and debunked. Twice.

Numerous complaints of DWB -- Driving While Black -- were filed by blacks driving on the New Jersey Turnpike. So the state entered into a consent decree, agreed to federal monitoring, and put their officers through, among other things, "sensitivity training." New Jersey commissioned a study, checking motorists' speed with laser guns and photographing drivers of vehicles going 15 mph or more over the speed limit.

The result? It turned out that more speeders were black than white, which explained why cops pulled over black motorists so often. The U.S. Justice Department, which requested the study, did not want the results released to the public. Instead, they accused the researchers of using a "flawed methodology." Why shelve a report that disproves racism? Isn't it good news that Jersey troopers do not pull blacks over willy-nilly? Would this not improve race relations in New Jersey? No -- the facts did not fit the script.

The next year, state police "stop data" showed that, on the southern part of the turnpike, 30 percent of the drivers pulled over were minority -- almost twice the 16 percent rate of minority stops elsewhere on the turnpike. So, amid new allegations that cops were targeting minorities, and to correct the "flawed methodology" of the previous researchers, New Jersey Attorney General Peter Harvey commissioned yet another study. The result? Again, it turned out a disproportionately higher percentage of drivers on that stretch of highway were black, and that blacks were more likely than non-blacks to drive 80 miles per hour or faster. Again, critics called the study's methodology "flawed."

Over 20 years ago, black liberal Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson said: "The sociological truths are that America, while still flawed in its race relations ... is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa." Holder, however, sees an America -- as to "race-relations" -- still mired in the 1950s.

On a plane about 20 years ago, I met a black man who told me he was nearing 100 years old. What is the secret, I asked, to a long and happy life? Tall and ramrod straight, he said: "I tell my granddaughters to greet everyone with a big smile and an outstretched hand for a handshake. But those young girls don't wanna hear nothing about no smile and no handshake. That generation ain't got no appreciation for how easy they got it."

Perhaps Holder feels guilty because he didn't do something more noble, like marching with MLK while braving attack dogs and water hoses. Perhaps Holder feels guilty because of his own personal success and fears the "people he left behind" will resent him if he doesn't sound empathetic.

Holder's victicrat mentality might also explain why rich blacks -- including, for time, Oprah Winfrey -- belonged to Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ whose pastor denounces the very drive for upward mobility that made Oprah Winfrey Oprah Winfrey.

Why else would successful blacks pull up in their Lexus and BMW's to attend a church that denounces the work ethic that enabled them to drive nice cars, live in nice houses in nice, clean and safe neighborhoods? What sense does it make for a rich black man to listen to his pastor tell him how racism has held him back from becoming rich?

Those "left behind" need a message of hard work and accountability and of seizing the opportunities uniquely offered by the United States of America. In a 1997 Time/CNN poll, a majority of black teens called racism a "big problem." But 89 percent of black teens called racism a "small problem" or "not a problem at all" in their own lives. In fact, nearly twice as many black teens than white teens called "failure to take advantage of available opportunities" a bigger problem than racism.

Tell that to Mr. Holder.

As Americans celebrated Labor Day and the freedom to provide for their families, let’s hope they didn't spoil the holiday yesterday by pausing to consider whether government today is making their lives easier or more difficult.

To wit, the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, published by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation, which ranks countries based on four main factors – rule of law, limited government, regulatory efficiency, open markets – has the US is headed in the wrong direction. “The U.S. is the only country,” the survey states, “to have recorded a loss of economic freedom each of the past seven years.”

As ordinary Americans toil to put food on the table and provide for their families, most “cling” to the idea that the highest aim of our leaders is to leave a legacy of greater freedom our children, not less. Americans don’t believe in a monarchy, and they actually believe everyone should live by the same set of rules, not one set of rules for them and another set for the political class when circumstances or political arguments fail.

Needless to say, many Americans are outraged to see laws being re-written midstream, whether in health care, taxes, immigration or in government grants to political cronies. They are discouraged to learn of the secret 2012 decision by the Treasury Department to confiscate the profits of the mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. With that decision, the federal government thumbed its nose at transparency, flaunted the basic rule of law and property rights, and put the government deeper into the mortgage market. It moves our country in the opposite direction of where it should be headed.

Ordinary Americans understand that our system of freedom, bolstered by a strong foundation of contract enforcement, property rights and the rule of law works better than any other system in the world, but they also know those liberties cannot be taken for granted.

Working families, through their personal accounts, pension funds including those managed on behalf of public employees, and retirement plans hold sizable investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These large funds also often employ private professional money managers to make choices and take risks on their behalf, and through those managers ordinary Americans are invested in a broad swath of the economy, including Fannie and Freddie.

During the financial crisis, the US government, after years of policies that promoted their excesses, chose to move the mortgage packaging giants into conservatorship to manage the entities on behalf of its investors. In doing so, they agreed to a 10% dividend, a figure reminiscent of White House confidant Warren Buffett’s deal with Goldman Sachs when it was running into trouble in 2008.

That was the deal, and it sent signals to the market at that time, including to foreign investors. Some investors held on as they had for years, some sold, some came in with new capital. Treasury then secretly changed the rules and started taking 100%, leaving those who stuck with their investment, or committed new capital to the market , with nothing.

The Wall Street Journal/Heritage study confirms the slow erosion of freedoms, however imperceptible to the modern liberal eye. That erosion occurs bit-by-bit, with each instance of a grab for greater government power, crony capitalism, lack of transparency, and evidence of disdain for private property rights and rule of law.

Having celebrated Labor Day, Americans must go to the polls this November, and vote for political leaders who will advance liberty, limited government, the rule of law and job opportunities.