Friday, April 10, 2009

Mike Williams' Obama Watch - Apr. 10, 2009

Here's Mike Williams Obama Watch letter today. I add a few comments following it.

Mike begins - - -

I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Rick Moran at American Thinker nails it:

It's no great secret that most politicians lie - a little anyway. But with Obama and Biden we seem to have entered a whole new ballgame when it comes to shockingly gaudy, in your face, don't-care-if- I'm-caught-or-not, deceitful lying that dares the press to call them on it and always get away with it.

How about the White House saying with a straight face that the president didn't bow to the Saudi King? How about Obama getting in front of a battery of microphones the day after firing the CEO of GM and saying that the government was not in the business of running GM?

There are many more examples of the president's inability to be straight with the American people.

But the point is that the press will never follow up or write anything that exposes their lies….
The press will never follow up or write anything that exposes their lies.

**********************************************
My comments:

No one should be surprised President Obama routinely lies even when facts, video tapes and common sense contradict him.

And no one should be surprised that most of MSM lets him get away with it, even to the point of framing the lies in ways that make them seem credible or at least not blatantly false.

During the presidential primaries Obama, for almost 20 years a close friend of Rev. Jeremiah Wright who regularly attended services at Wright's church, made the preposterous claim he'd never heard any of Wright's anti-white, anti-American pulpit screeds?

Almost all MSM went along with Obama.

Even if we allow for the sake of argument that somehow Obama really wasn't in Wright's church for the virulently racist, anti-American screeds, can you recall a single reporter asking Obama:

"Senator, if you weren't in church for any of Rev. Wright's controversial sermons over the course of the almost 20 years you were a member of Trinity UCC and you never read similiar remarks Wright made in Trinity publications, didn't Ms. Obama or any of the other Trinity congregants ever tell you what Rev. Wright was saying?"

When Obama can get away with telling us he didn't know about Wright's anti-white, anti-American screeds, why is anyone surprised the White House, for example, is telling us President Obama didn't bow to Saudi Arabia's King?


14 comments:

Nameless Cynic said...

Give me a break.

Bush kisses King Abdullah, and then walks hand-in-hand with him through the flowers. Bush showed more obeisance to the King than any previous President ever did. This is just unhinged wingnuts trying to manufacture outrage again.

If you want to check out Abdullah's obedient vassal, go here: http://imagesource.cnn.com/imagesource/player.swf?streamer=rtmp://isfms.cnn.com/vod&file=mp4:895/05281895&type=video&controlbar=none&autostart=true&width=480&height=324

JWM said...

To NC,

Thank you for a serious comment.

But nothing in it refutes the facts or theme of Williams' letter or my post: Obama lies a lot and the press, for the most part, looks the other way or enables.

John

mike in houston said...

Excuse me NC, but you obviously do not know very much about Saudi culture. The "handholding' is a sign of friendship in Arab culture and is a sign of mutual respect. Thus the king was showing respect for Bush as much as Bush was showing for the king. Now, bowing has the same meaning in both our cultures and in Arab culture clearly shows the pecking order.

Ken said...

Obama lies. If you point this out, the lapdog media will attack you. There is no serious political reporting in this country, just Democratic Party activists writing worshipful hymns to Obama and conducting character assassination on his detractors.

Obama is a lousy President but he's doing what he thinks is right. I think most of his policies are in error. But I accept he will try and carry them out. The press is another matter. They have abandoned the search for facts to look for "truth". Down that path lies a pseudo theocracy of Obama worship. I do care to go there.

Nameless Cynic said...

Oh, you're absolutely right, mike. Bowing always means exactly the same in every culture. Unless it doesn't.

"Bowing to other human beings is frowned upon in Muslim cultures as all human beings are considered equal and bowing is only supposed to be done to God in Islam."

Oh, my God!!! Obama was insulting the King!

Wasn't it Freud that said "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar"? Maybe Obama was just bowing in an attempt to be polite.

Because it's not like he looked like he was being somebody's bitch or anything.

Anonymous said...

Hey NC: Can you tell us why you use the Tao character?
Tarheel Hawkeye

Nameless Cynic said...

I use that particular character because I like a lot of the Taoist concepts (without being Buddhist). It's a philosophical thing. I strive for balance.

You know, unlike JWM, who is going to refuse to see anything positive in anything Obama does, and will spin even the slightest misspoken word into a full-blown lie.

JWM said...

To NC,

The accusation in your latest comment is noted.

So, also, is the absence of any facts to back it up.

I'm not interested in ad hominems or blog wars meant to build traffic for any blogger, you included.

Reasoned, fact-based comments are always welcome.

John

Anonymous said...

NC: Perhaps you haven't been reading JWM's blog very long. He is the most even-handed and objective commentator I can imagine. During the presidential campaign, he found positive things about both Obama and McCain. For some reason, you seem to be personally offensive to him and there's no good reason. Many of us who are regulars could certainly be accused of making only negative comments about Obama, so if it pleases you to strap on the armor and gird your loins to fight for Obama's honor, take some shots at us.
BTW Taoism generally avoids confrontational and abusive verbal exchanges.
Tarheel Hawkeye

Anonymous said...

Obama bows to the Saudi king and lies about it and NC wants to talk about Bush. You don't get it. Obama is the president and must now take responsibility for his actions.
Poor guy just got back from a feel good trip to Europe kissing the rings of the internationalists, condemning his country. The Iranians responded to his call for disarmament by announcing they they have all the elements for a bomb. The North Koreans fired a long range rocket over Japan. The Russians are defying his leadership. The rest of Europe patted him on the head and gave him nothing of substance. A group of rogue pirates from Somalia is making him look rather impotent.
NC, the problem with bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia is that Obama's it seems consistent with the rest of his rather clueless international positions.
It seems the three AM phone rang and no one is home.

Nameless Cynic said...

Tarheel Hawkeye: Ah, but I specified that I strive for balance. I never said I achieve it. I like the philosophy. I am, by no means, a Taoist master. I am, at best, a Taoist dilettante.

As for our other (more accurately) anonymous commenter, let me point out your first sentence. "Obama bows to the Saudi king and lies about it and NC wants to talk about Bush." Two points. Obama has, at no point, lied about bowing to anybody. It looks like his press guy might have - in fact, I'll go out on a limb and say that he did. In the tradition of presidential press secretaries, from the pretty-but-vacuous Dana Perino on back, not a one of them could open their mouths without crap pouring forth.

As to "and NC wants to talk about Bush, well, there's two parts to that answer.

1. I was comparing Bush's open fawning to Obama bowing at the waist. Did anybody here have anything to say about Bush openly fellating the Saudi king? I'm just curious.

2. Of course I mentioned Bush. It's ten weeks into Obama's run as President. And everything he's doing right now is in order to clean up the mess he inherited. He needs to fix an economy destroyed by years of deregulation of the Stock Market and banking industries.

And, oh yeah, he has to improve the image of the United States in the eyes of the world, because Bush and his cronies turned the US into an international bully, insulting and ignoring anyone who disagreed with him.

It's amazing, for example, that the French president was so openly friendly, after eight years of tools from the GOP implying that the French are cowards (do you remember the phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys"?)

So why should he be rude to an influential Middle Easterner? One of the things he's going to need is a good relationship with the Saudi's, even as he pushes for alternative energy policies. So, yeah, bow, smile, shake his hand. Being polite is not the same thing as being deferential.

Oh, incidentally. This is from an Air Force manual on diplomacy: "You will also need to be aware of different greeting
rituals such as kisses, handshakes or bows." Our military is allowed to bow. Why isn't our military's Commander-in-Chief?

But regardless. Let's see what the media has turned up. Ah, here it is.

But protocol experts told FOX News that no rule exists on presidents bowing.

"To my knowledge, there is no rule at all," said Lloyd Hand who was chief of protocol for President Lyndon Johnson. "Protocol is 95 percent common sense judgment and 5 percent specific rules and that has nothing to do with bowing."

Hand said he doesn't believe Obama's stoop qualifies as a bow.

"American protocol favors the extension of warm gracious hospitality and I put what he did in that context," he said.


But, hey, you keep right on trying to make something important out of a small gesture of diplomatic civility.

Anonymous said...

NC...
Blah blah Blah. Bush is bad, obedient vassal...blah blah blah blah. You are going to have to do better.
Bush is off the scene and Obama is now our President. More and more people feel about Obama like you felt about Bush or how we once regarded Jimmy Carter. For eight years, folks on the left could fill blogs with personal attacks against Bush.
Now Obama must be accountable for his choices. Admitting the bow and saying it was a diplomatic choice would be one thing but denying it both insults our intelligence and positions the President as a fool.
You went to a lot of trouble to justify a bow that the President says never happened.
The underlying issue is that Obama's bow is a part of a larger pattern of ineffective leadership when confronted with crisis. He is failing with Iran, with North Korea, with the Russians, with the UN and in securing real European help. It seems that his ideology which says that if we will be nice to them, bow and scrape, then we will get what we want is in error.
In the next month, we will find out if Obama will learn or if he will cling to his ideology.
Obama has a much more serious problem than whether a bow to a foreign king is ok. His real problem is the lie and what flows from it.

Anonymous said...

I did not have sexual relations with that woman and President Obama did not bow to the Saudi king. How stupid do they think we are

Anonymous said...

Bush Hatred Derangement Syndrome is alive. I wonder how many years Obamaphiles will be able to use Bush to explain Obama's shortcomings?
Tarheel Hawkeye