The Obama “Jokes” that Aren’t

Glenn Reynolds linked to an article in the Wall Street Journal Tax Audits Are No Laughing Matter; the subhead is “A president shouldn't even joke about abusing IRS power.”

Reynolds commented:

Remember, Obama joked about auditing his enemies in 2009. At the time, I warned about the damage to the “trust and voluntary cooperation of citizens upon which this democracy depends,” but Obama didn’t get much pushback elsewhere. Now, however, people need to be fired, and most likely prosecuted, to drive home the appropriate lesson. And Obama himself needs to be taken to task. The Post editorial is just a start.

Here’s what I have noticed about Obama’s “jokes.” They are a way of disarming the opposition by mocking them. If you joke about sending the IRS after your opponents, it makes it much harder for people the IRS is going after to get other to pay attention. They are going to be laughed at and ridiculed as conspiracy theorists. One of the Tea Party groups that had trouble getting a tax exempt status is in Richmond, Virginia. They complained but got no help from anyone in the press or in government.

Obama has several times joked that he is a Muslim and a Socialist. He did so most recently at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.

“Look I get it,” Obama joked. “These days I look in the mirror, and I have to admit I’m not the strapping, young, Muslim socialist that I used to be.”

It was a laugh line and the Washington Press dutifully laughed. I have no idea whether he is actually religious or not. I believe that his membership in Jeremiah Wright’s black liberation, America damning church was designed to advance his political career rather than his salvation. I also believe, based on his family background and the testimony of friends from his college days, that he is Leftist and believes that the State should be the center of decision making in a society. If that’s the case he is - at best - a socialist. If he actually is either a Muslim or a Socialist making a joke about it is much more effective way of deflecting the accusation than either ignoring it or denying it.

This technique is the flip side of Obama’s straw man argument, his favorite technique. Karl Rove gives several examples in this article in the Wall Street Journal.  Here's one:

On Tuesday night, Mr. Obama told Congress and the nation, "I reject the view that . . . says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity." Who exactly has that view? Certainly not congressional Republicans, who believe that through reasonable tax cuts, fiscal restraint, and prudent monetary policies government contributes to prosperity.

The use of these rhetorical devices is designed to mislead, much like a magician uses misdirection while he does his tricks. In a politician it's the technique of the rogue, the demagogue. The role of the press should be to expose this kind of deception. It doesn’t even require investigate skills, simply knowledge of the language and awareness of how words can be used to deceive. That’s Journalism 101 and one of the pre-eminent practitioners is James Taranto who writes Best of the Web. Too bad that most of the rest of the press are, as Glenn Reynolds says, "Democrat operatives with bylines."

‘Wall St.’ flees NY for tax-free Fla.

There's really no longer a reason to live in the City.

Why is Corzine bundling for Obama instead of being prosecuted for fraud?

Democrat Jon Corzine got about half a billion dollars from Goldman Sachs and used some of that money to buy a senate seat and the New Jersey governorship. Now, I suspect, he’s using some of that money to prevent his indictment for using customer money to pay off his losing bet on European bonds…over a billion dollars worth of customer money.

If there is a poster child for over-the-top Wall Street malfeasance, Jon Corzine is it. Yet a year after telling investigators that he doesn’t know where customers’ money went, there is no indictment. One can’t help but wonder if the reason is that he’s busy raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

Jonah Goldberg writes:

Corzine proceeded to do exactly the sorts of things Wall Street has become infamous for: making crazy bets with other people's money, counting on governments to bail out the private sector and, allegedly, expecting to get friendly treatment from regulators. Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was an old friend and colleague of Corzine's at Goldman Sachs and in Washington. Gensler had been a key aide to Sen. Paul Sarbanes and had reportedly worked closely with Corzine writing the Sarbanes-Oxley bill. At MF Global, under Gensler's watch, Corzine bet more than $6 billion on the European sovereign debt crisis, using borrowed client money. MF Global also apparently commingled client and company funds to pay off financial obligations, which is illegal.

Goldberg misses one point; investment firms can’t “borrow” client money. Not ever. You cannot take money from segregated client accounts and use it to make investments for the firm. You can’t do that, and if you do you go to jail. Unless you are Jon Corzine and you are one of Barack Obama’s big campaign contributors and then you can expect the cops to back off, and live a life of ease on your half a billion in assets.  

We may be seeing exactly how much it costs to buy a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Wealthy UBS banker Charles Wolf is major Obama contributor

One of President Obama’s largest financial backers is a key executive at the largest Swiss bank in the world, complicating his criticism of presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Robert Wolf is president of Swiss financial giant UBS Investment Bank and chairman of UBS Americas. He has been one of Obama’s most prolific fundraisers dating back to 2006, when the former Senator from Illinois initiated his run for the White House.

Swiss bank UBS was bailed out in 2008 by both the Swiss government by the the US taxpayer after leveraging itself over 50 to one in bonds. If borrow $100 for every $2 you own, you can be wiped out if your investments go down by 2%. UBS, like GE, is trying to return to profitability on the back of US taxpayers by paying off Obama with campaign contributions.

It works in Europe, we'll see if it works here.

Wall Street's Message to OWS

Via Jim Treacher:

We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, it’s not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work until 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime, and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?”

The Dirty Wall Street Crooks and the People They Give To.

Rajat K. Gupta, the highest-ranking corporate executive to become embroiled in a push to root out insider trading, was accused of leaking confidential information while serving as a director at Goldman Sachs and P&G.

And sure enough, he's a major Democrat donor.

We can only assume he didn't buy enough protection.

I blame the Democrat Culture of Corruption™   

Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all of the GOP candidates combined

Running a protection racket is VERY profitable.

If you can't get money from people because they love you,

 you can get it from them because they fear you.

Polling the Occupy Wall Streeters

Up to now the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests have been like a Rorschach test; what you saw was primarily a reflection of what you believed. Some have wandered through the protesters and drawn their own conclusions, like James Taranto, who said the people he met were “endearingly earnest,” and “very nice.” He admits that “Possibly there was a selection bias at work” since “disruptive elements” were marching elsewhere when he visited.

So now we have the first actual survey and here’s what it shows.

Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda.

The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed, and the proportion of protesters unemployed (15%) is within single digits of the national unemployment rate (9.1%).

An overwhelming majority of demonstrators supported Barack Obama in 2008. Now 51% disapprove of the president while 44% approve, and only 48% say they will vote to re-elect him in 2012, while at least a quarter won't vote.

Fewer than one in three (32%) call themselves Democrats, while roughly the same proportion (33%) say they aren't represented by any political party.

What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.

Sixty-five percent say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost. By a large margin (77%-22%), they support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, but 58% oppose raising taxes for everybody, with only 36% in favor. And by a close margin, protesters are divided on whether the bank bailouts were necessary (49%) or unnecessary (51%).

Thus Occupy Wall Street is a group of engaged progressives who are disillusioned with the capitalist system and have a distinct activist orientation. Among the general public, by contrast, 41% of Americans self-identify as conservative, 36% as moderate, and only 21% as liberal. That's why the Obama-Pelosi embrace of the movement could prove catastrophic for their party.

Now, people who have no use for capitalism and are ready to go to the barricades to redistribute my wealth may, when you talk to them, be very nice people and endearingly earnest. But at the risk of invoking Godwin’s law we are reliably told that Hitler loved dogs and his secretaries adored him, along with a large swath of the German people. Lots of people who are nice one-on-one are moral monsters when it comes to public policy, taking seriously the reminder that you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

We have seen countless examples of anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, Nazis and Communists joining together, the demand for sex with animals (I kid you not), and simple loonieness on public display as part of a series of nation-wide OWS demonstrations. If these have been exhibited by the Tea Party they would have led the nightly news and spread across the nation’s newspapers. But since they represent the media’s own ideology, they are airbrushed away or left on the cutting room floor.

Thanks to YouTube, Andrew Breitbart and a lot of conservative bloggers the real nature of the OWS activists are being exposed. The result will be the kind of landslide repudiation that followed the Viet Nam war protests in the 1960s which led to Richard Nixon’s election. The only people who actually believe that the OWS protests help the Democrats are those who believe what the protesters believe. Let’s not disabuse them.

Occupy Wall Street and financing the Obama campaign.

Imagine you are one of those investment bankers who gave and gave to the 2008 Obama campaign. Imagine further that you are less than happy with the results of Obama’s economic policies and don’t think that you ought to be demonized by Obama and his Occupy Wall Street army.

Would you contribute to his 2012 campaign?

You betcha. You would if you know what’s good for you.

Remember that it was earlier in his administration that he told bankers that he was the only one standing between them and the pitchforks of the mob. So now if he senses an reluctance to give him money, he’s got the mobs and it’s only a few blocks from Zuccotti Park to their offices and penthouses.

Yeah, That’s the Ticket! Let’s Blame Wall Street. Yeah!

Non-conformity ... in unison

Isn't Francis Fox Piven the aging moonbat that Glenn Beck warned us against?

Now let's repeat the non-conformists' oath:


I promise to be different! (audience repeats)
I promise to be unique! (audience repeats)
I promise not to repeat things other people say! (audience repeats, laughs)


- Steve Martin