Looks like George and Yogi were right

It’s unlikely that philosopher George Santayana and the great Yankee catcher Yogi Berra ever knew one another. But they shared an understanding of human nature. Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” and Yogi said, “It’s like deja vu all over again.”

The unnecessary, futile and poisonous battle in Washington over funding the government and raising the debt ceiling has begun in earnest. It will play out over the next month and will be eerily reminiscent of what occurred in 1995-96.

Shortly after his election in 1992, President Bill Clinton began his effort to enact comprehensive health care reform. He asked the first lady, Hillary Clinton, to lead the effort. She headed the task force that developed the legislation that promised universal health care.

The health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry were adamantly opposed to the legislation and destroyed it with a nationwide campaign of television ads featuring Harry and Louise, who dramatized the complexity of the plan and the dominant role of the federal government. By September 1994, the plan was dead. Its demise was assured by its stupefying complexity and red tape. The Democrats, who controlled both houses of Congress, never brought the legislation to a vote.

Not only had the Clintons failed in their effort to enact health care reform, they had also sewn the seeds of a Republican renaissance on Capitol Hill. Exploiting the unpopularity of the Clinton’s failed health care reform proposal, the Republicans captured the House for the first time in 40 years and also regained control of the Senate. It was a Republican revolution, and it was led by the GOP’s firebrand from Georgia, Newt Gingrich, with his Contract with America. President Clinton was humbled and famously and inaccurately announced that “the era of big government is over.”

It didn’t take long for the battle lines to be drawn between the White House and the House Republicans. And they were drawn around federal spending and the debt ceiling. In late 1995, Clinton vetoed a spending bill that the Republican-controlled Congress had passed with spending cuts in Medicare, the environment and education.

In addition, the developing crisis also threatened to risk a default by the government as Congress threatened to refuse to raise the debt limit unless Clinton agreed to its proposed cuts to the federal budget. The impasse resulted in two government shutdowns in late 1995 and early 1996 totaling 28 days.

The Republicans overplayed their hand by not recognizing the severity of the public’s opposition to the shutdown and the risk of default’s effect to the economy. Clinton exploited the House Republicans’ overreach to regain his standing with the public and to use that popularity in his successful effort to win a second term against Sen. Bob Dole later in 1996. Gingrich’s Republican revolution sputtered and died.

Most of the political class did not expect Barack Obama to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. But once he did, there was no doubt he would be elected in November. President George W. Bush’s dismal performance for the previous eight years guaranteed that, just as it had guaranteed the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006.

As Obama took the oath of office, the nation’s economy was in free fall. The failure of Lehman Brothers the previous September had made clear that something really scary, really bad had infected the economy.

But rather than reaching out to Congress on a bipartisan basis to address the failing economy, President Obama chose to make the enactment of health care reform his top priority. Having made that strategic, unforced error, he then made the matter far worse. He turned the job of writing the bill over to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

We know what happened. The nation was torn in half as the debate over Obamacare became ever more bitter. The public did not and still does not understand Obamacare. No Republican voted for the bill. Obamacare and the way it was handled on the Hill poisoned the well for all ensuing legislation.

Opposition to the bill helped give birth to a political force that has haunted Obama and his legacy ever since the 2010 election — the tea party. The tea party has become Obama’s nemesis, and he is its father! It now controls the House Republican Caucus. Speaker John Boehner is its puppet.

Tea Partyers loathe Obama. They will stop at nothing to repeal Obamacare, and they are willing to shut down the government and/or refuse to raise the debt ceiling and incur default in order to get their way.

Those leading the charge, including especially Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, refuse to recognize the futility of their doomed effort. The lessons of 1995-96 are lost on them. It is always thus for zealots.

All of this has significance for the 2016 presidential contest. Don’t be surprised if the Republican contest for the nomination turns into a death struggle among Cruz, Libertarian Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. The one thing they have in common is that none of them will stand a chance against the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton.

In her inaugural address in 2017, she will announce that first husband Bill Clinton will head a task force to fix Obamacare! It’s deja vu all over again.

The Shadow welcomes comments.  Please contact me at:  EmailMe

A ‘new beginning'? Not quite

Note:   Second of a two-part series. Part one was published in the Sept. 8 edition and can be found at: Blue Ridge Now.

As Libya descended into chaos in 2011, the United States vacillated with respect to its role in removing Libya's strongman, Moammar Gadhafi. By October of that year, the Arab Spring revolt in Libya was victorious and Gadhafi was dead.

A year later, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were murdered by terrorists at our consulate in Benghazi. The event created a firestorm of criticism directed at the State Department, then-Secretary Hillary Clinton and the Obama White House concerning what they did and did not do and say as this tragedy unfolded in the midst of the 2012 presidential election campaign.

On Jan. 23, 2013, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relation Committee, Clinton failed to put the issue to rest. Instead, she shouted, "Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?"

Pakistan

Pakistan is the world's sixth most populous nation. It is a catastrophe in the making. Its central government is notoriously weak. Its rogue intelligence service, the ISI, acts independently and has been allied with the Taliban in Afghanistan for decades. Radical Muslim clerics in Pakistan continue their efforts to subvert the central government, which has a nuclear arsenal of 50-100 warheads. Osama bin Laden took refuge in Pakistan until he was killed in 2011 by the United States.

Does anyone believe the ISI didn't know bin Laden was holed up in Abbottabad less than one mile from the Pakistan's version of our West Point? Since bin Laden's death, America's relations with Pakistan have gone from bad to horrendous.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, the United States is unable to project a coherent foreign policy in the Middle East because of the paralytic shadow that is cast upon the region and the American government by our ill-fated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most Americans believe former President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama have little or nothing in common. History will prove that belief wrong in one critically important way, the monumental blunders of those two wars.

After 9/11, Bush took America to war in Afghanistan in order to deny al-Qaida the training ground it had used to attack America. No credible analyst doubted the prudence or necessity of that decision. By 2003, we were on the verge of victory in Afghanistan.

But instead of finishing the job, Bush embarked on a pre-emptive war against Iraq, even though there was clear evidence that Iraq had not been involved in the 9/11 attack. Having decided to attack Iraq, the Bush administration needed a rationale that could be sold to Congress and the American people. It chose to assert that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

It was an argument that carried the day politically but was false. But by then it was too late. America was locked in a no-win ground war in Iraq that cost hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars and thousands of needless deaths and injuries. When the war sputtered to a stalemated conclusion years later, the United States' blunder was obvious, and the victory that was within reach in Afghanistan in 2003 had vanished.

The fundamental purpose of war is to achieve clear and essential political objectives and outcomes, not simply to seize territory and win battles. From that perspective, the Iraq war, unnecessary from the outset, was a failure.

On Dec. 1, 2009, after seemingly endless meetings with his National Security Team, Obama addressed the Corps of Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He announced the fateful decision he had made to escalate the war in Afghanistan and to say in advance when it would end. He said, "As commander in chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home."

Like Bush's pre-emptive war in Iraq, Obama's escalation in Afghanistan was a military and foreign policy blunder that undercut the effective projection of our vital interests throughout the Middle East. Just like it did in Iraq, this nation has invested hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars in a military adventure in a country that was not in 2009 a central training ground for al-Qaida and international terrorism. By then, al-Qaida had migrated to the Arabian Peninsula, Africa and Pakistan.

A recent study at Harvard by Linda Blimes now puts the costs of these two wars, including medical and disability costs, at $4 trillion to $6 trillion.

The Middle East is a seething and uncontrolled cauldron of ferment and antipathy toward this nation. The United States has less influence and less respect in the region that at any time in our history. That is the enduring legacy of Bush and Obama's combined arrogance and incompetence.

With regard to the president's proposal of a possible military strike against Syria, he miscalculated the mood of the American people, Congress and our allies. His behavior reminds us of the mayor of Doodyville, Phineas T. Bluster, a marionette dangling at the end of strings now being pulled by the Kremlin.

The "new beginning" Obama promised at Cairo University in 2009 is stillborn, its death shroud two lost wars. Obama will leave office just like his predecessor, resembling the philosophic Cheshire Cat in "Alice in Wonderland" — with nothing but a grin.

The Shadow's in the Kremlin watching Putin orchestrate Obama's volte-face, but Goldman can be reached at:  EmailMe.

Obama is trapped by his own red line

Obama is trapped by his own red line

Note:  Part one of a two-part series. Part two will be published Sept. 15.

Words matter, but they matter less when they are not accompanied by deeds that make them authentic.

Less than five months after taking the oath of office, President Barack Obama delivered a major address at Cairo University titled, "A New Beginning." It fulfilled a campaign promise that he had made to speak to Muslims. The speech was lengthy, eloquent, hopeful, and was closely followed not only by Muslims but throughout the world.

In it, the president said, "I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world ... [based on] principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings."

As Congress now prepares to debate whether to support Obama's decision to launch a military strike to degrade Syria's capacity to use chemical weapons of mass destruction, it's time to take stock of the president's rhetoric at Cairo in 2009 and the standing of the U.S. in the Middle East today.

Syria

The civil war in Syria has been raging for two years. More than 100,000 Syrians have been killed, and more than 2 million Syrians have fled their homeland and are now in refugee camps in neighboring nations. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a physician, is a brutal dictator willing to use whatever force is necessary to maintain his control of the Syrian government and to subjugate its people.

A week ago, Obama stunned the world by delaying his military strike on Syria's capacity to make further use of poison gas against its own people. The delay is intended to give the administration time to seek approval of that strike from Congress, approval which Obama maintains is unnecessary.

But Obama's hand has been forced because he is cornered politically. The American people do not support the strike, nor do the United Nations, the Arab League or our most dependable ally, Great Britain. There is no assurance that such a military strike will be successful. More importantly, there is no clarity about whether such a strike will make the situation on the ground better or worse, and whether it might lead to a further escalation of American military involvement in Syria.

Obama is now trapped by the red line he unwisely drew two years ago. On Aug. 20, 2012, he stated, "We have been very clear to the Assad regime ... that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized." It is that inelegant statement that now has come back to haunt Obama.

The president now feels compelled to strike militarily given our intelligence assessment that Assad has used sarin gas on his own people. The matter is further complicated by the fact that the president has stated that such a strike is not intended to bring about regime change in Syria and that he believes such a change will be effected through diplomacy. That belief is a flight of fancy.

Regime change isn't going to happen as long as Assad has the strong support of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, a dominant Islamic political and militant force in Lebanon, funded by Iran. Hezbollah fighters are in Syria assisting Assad's military.

It's obvious that the only way to effect regime change is to remove Assad, who Secretary of State John Kerry has called a murderer and a thug. Obama has authorized the use of drones for this type of "kill" operation in the Arabian Peninsula, in Africa and along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border. It's past time to put Assad's name on a Hellfire missile, something the president has not been willing to do.

Israel

The United States has been the principal ally of the Jewish state since its founding in 1948. The American people will have it no other way. Yet, under the Obama administration, our relationship with Israel is at its nadir.

Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu do not like and may not trust each other. Efforts at the creation of the two-state peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians have been deadlocked since Obama took office. If the United States cannot deter Iran from its obsession to acquire nuclear weapons, Israel will not hesitate to take military action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Iran

The United States and Iran have been at each other's throat since the Iran hostage crisis in the late 1970s. The current crisis is driven by Iran's clear intention and long-standing program to acquire nuclear weapons. Topping the list of Iran's enemies is the Jewish state of Israel.

The United States has led the effort to impose sanctions on Iran in the hope that such sanctions will deter Iran from its effort to acquire nuclear weapons. The sanctions have exacted a punishing toll on Iran and its people. However, they have not caused Iran to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons capability.

Egypt

The Egypt that existed under Hosni Mubarak when Obama delivered his speech at Cairo University in 2009 is no more. Since then, the United States has stood helplessly on the sidelines as Egypt installed a government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, which has now been deposed in a coup led by the Egyptian military.

Our relationship with Egypt has disintegrated. America can't even determine whether we should continue to provide Egypt's military with $1.5 billion in military assistance annually.

The Shadow's in Libya preparing next Sunday's column, but Goldman can be reached at: EmailMe.

There's an IPAB in your future

There's an IPAB in your future

For all of the years that I was privileged to serve as the staff director of the Senate Health Subcommittee, our No. 1 legislative priority was the enactment of Chairman Edward Kennedy's national health insurance bill. Back in those days, health care reform was known as national health insurance (NHI).

We never were able to get the bill passed. We were trapped, like all the other senators who had competing NHI bills, in that we all had enough political strength to block any competing bill but not enough political support to pass our bill. This, of course, was the political impasse that hamstrung the enactment of any such bill until Obamacare became law on March 23, 2010.

For the record, I have been a tireless and unwavering advocate for genuine health care reform since 1971. During the lengthy, bitter and divisive consideration of Obamacare, I advocated that health care reform could best be achieved by extending the 50-year old Federal Employees Health Benefits Program to all Americans on a pay-as-you-go basis.

It is the nation's largest health insurance program. It is funded and administered by the federal government, but the insurance coverage is provided by private commercial insurers or HMOs. All of its participants get to choose their own insurer, doctor and hospital. Thus, it is a successful public/private partnership. Good luck trying to find any one of its millions of participants who is dissatisfied with it.

But President Barack Obama and his Democrat allies on the Hill unwisely chose a different path. It was a path that divided Washington and the nation. It was a path that forced them to sell out to the powerful health care industry in order to get the votes to pass Obamacare. It's a path that loads an additional 30 million uninsured Americans on the USS Health Care Titanic with no additional life preservers or life boats. Maybe you call that health care reform. It's not.

But whether you love Obamacare or hate it, there's something buried deep within it you need to know about: IPAB, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which, when created, will cut Medicare spending. This new, 15-member government agency was authorized by sections 3403 and 10320 of Obamacare. Its principal job is to cut Medicare expenditures without affecting quality, coverage or the use of rationing. Are you kidding me?

Medicare currently serves about 50 million Americans, and the number is growing rapidly. The baby boomers began to reach age 65 two years ago. By 2029, all 77 million of them will have reached age 65 and be eligible for Medicare. Current Medicare spending is about $600 billion annually. It is projected to rise to $1 trillion by 2022, and the Medicare trustees, in their annual report in the spring, stated that the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will become insolvent by 2026. According to the U.S. Debt Clock, Medicare's liability is currently estimated to be more than $86 trillion — that's trillion.

Somehow the IPAB is supposed to fix all of this. It can't be done painlessly, if at all. But even if it could, there are other aspects of the IPAB that raise monumental problems. A thoughtful and thought-provoking column in The Wall Street Journal on June 19 by David Rivkin and Elizabeth Foley makes the argument that the IPAB threatens not just Medicare but also the Constitution's doctrine of separation of powers and due process.

The provisions of Obamacare that create the IPAB ensure that the board will not be subject to administrative or judicial review. In addition, once the IPAB's members are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, they will be insulated. They can only be removed for "neglect of duty or malfeasance in office."

In addition, Rivkin and Foley point out that once the board acts, Congress' ability to overrule its actions is extremely limited and requires supermajority votes. If the board were to fail to make the required Medicare reductions, the law provides a fail-safe mechanism. Under those circumstances, all of the board's power would revert to the secretary of Health and Human Services.

Rivkin and Foley wrote, "This wholesale transfer of power is at odds with the Constitution's separation-of-powers architecture that protects individual liberty by preventing an undue aggregation of government power in a single entity."

The authors also point out that the IPAB is also "encouraged to make rules ‘related' to Medicare." "Related to Medicare" is a loophole through which an 18-wheeler could be driven.

For example, Rivkin and Foley suggest the board could require providers to make available certain services without payment, or it could require insurers and/or providers to make abortion services available, or any other requirement the board deems necessary.

Finally, they conclude that "the Independent Payment Advisory Board isn't a typical executive agency. It's a new beast that exercises both executive and legislative power but can't be controlled by either branch. Seniors and providers hit hardest by the board's decisions will have nowhere to turn for relief — not Congress, not the president, not the courts."

By the way, why is there no IPAB for Medicaid? Like Medicare, its costs are enormous and out of control, and Obamacare will expand it significantly. Perhaps the answer is driven by political correctness — IPAB-ing Medicaid would have made Obama and the Democrats vulnerable to a bogus charge of discrimination.

The Shadow's sweating none of this, he's ageless and has never been sick, but Goldman can be reached at:  EmailMe.

‘Deathtrap': Suicidal refuge for the GOP

Later this week, "Deathtrap" opens at the Flat Rock Playhouse, the State Theatre of North Carolina. The Shadow and I will be there, and so should all Republicans.

Written by Ira Levin, "Deathtrap" opened at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway in 1978. It still holds the record for the longest running comedy-thriller on Broadway and was nominated for a Tony Award for best play. The preface to the script describes "Deathtrap" as "something so evil that it infects all who touch it."

Thus, it contains a lesson that the GOP needs desperately to learn. Whether it can learn that lesson is as unclear as the twisting and tantalizing plot of "Deathtrap."

The fundamental question is whether the GOP can avert suicide. Astonishingly, the answer appears to be no, and the Grand Old Party is rapidly running out of time and maneuvering room. Just a month or so ago, Bob Dole said the GOP ought to hang a "Closed For Repairs" sign on the party's headquarters. Dole spoke the truth. Let's take a look.

In the 1940s and '50s, as America's "Arsenal of Democracy" flexed its industrial might, blacks streamed out of the states of the Old Confederacy to find jobs in the cities of the North and East. The Democrats welcomed them, while the Republicans ignored them. The result was inevitable. The descendants of slaves, freed by the nation's first Republican president, became a monolithic voting bloc for the Democratic Party. Now that voting behavior is in their DNA.

It comes at a terribly high price for the GOP. In the 2012 presidential election, the GOP lost the crucial battleground state of Ohio because of massive African-American turnout in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), something the Republicans never saw coming. No Republican has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio, and 2012 was no exception.

But the African-American vote pales in significance contrasted to what's at play now — the Hispanic vote. Can the GOP double down in self-destructive stupidity? Sure looks like it!

Let's start with the big picture. In the 1980 presidential election, whites made up 88 percent of those who voted. That percentage has been dropping steadily ever since. In 2012, it was down to 72 percent, and in 2016 it's projected to be 70 percent. The face of America is changing, literally and rapidly.

Hispanics accounted for more than half (56 percent) of the nation's growth in the past decade. In fact, racial and ethnic minorities accounted for 92 percent of all of the nation's population growth in the most recent census. In 2012, for the first time, more whites died than were born. In 2012, the median age for whites was 42. But for African-Americans it was 32, and it was 28 for Hispanics.

In 1900, the nation's population was 80 million. Today it's approaching 320 million. Do you know how much of that 240 million person growth was the result of immigration? The answer is fully half — 120 million. We are and will remain a nation of immigrants. Attempting to deny the relevance and political power of those forces takes stupidity, ignorance and racial prejudice to suicidal proportions.

In 2012, President Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney among Hispanics by a margin of 71 percent to 27 percent. Given the explosive growth of the Hispanic population, margins like that foretell the death of the Republican Party.

Steve Schmidt, John McCain's capable campaign manager in 2008, recently told The New York Times concerning the battle in Congress over immigration reform, "(House Republicans) are totally insulated from public opinion on this because of redistricting." The respected Cook Political Report currently rates only nine of the House's 435 districts as pure tossups. Only 40 of the House's 232 Republicans represent districts that are more than 20 percent Hispanic.

Thus the reality is that the vast majority of House Republicans have no vested interest in reaching out to Hispanic voters. That's a message not lost on Hispanics, and it's a message the Democrats and their allies in the media exploit every day.

To make matters worse, a recent Pew Research poll shows that by a 54 percent to 40 percent margin, Republicans want their party leaders to be more conservative. At the same time, another Pew poll shows a majority of Americans think the GOP is too extreme. And a third such poll of Republicans showed that their first-place vote for leader of the Republican Party was "nobody."

A chilling example of how the GOP is consuming itself can be found right here in North Carolina. Freshman House Republican Robert Pittenger, an evangelical conservative who has repeatedly denounced Obamacare, is under assault from tea party constituents in his Charlotte suburban district. Why? Because he won't agree to shut down the government over the futile effort to repeal Obamacare.

Doctrinal zealotry like this can be summed up in a single word — madness.

Over in the Senate, the newest darling of the tea party, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has called his more moderate GOP critics the "surrender caucus." In another generation Ted Cruz will be gone. Texas will be blue. Try amassing a majority of presidential electoral votes for a Republican without Texas! You can't.

When a political party willingly thrusts its head into an orifice devoid of oxygen and light, coherent thought ceases and vision fades to black. Think of it as a self-inflicted deathtrap, one the GOP will have marched into the old-fashioned way — by earning it.

The Shadow's back stage at the Flat Rock Playhouse, but Goldman can be reached at:  EmailMe

Barack Obama: Whiner in chief

One of my best teachers in eighth and ninth grades was Walter A. Hoskins, who taught social studies. During the spring of 1951, we spent considerable time discussing President Harry Truman's firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur as the commander of United Nations forces in the Korean War. MacArthur rejected civilian control of the armed forces.

The political price Truman paid was immense. By the summer of 1951, Truman's popularity had plummeted to 23 percent, a record that still stands. He did not seek re-election in 1952. But history has shown that he was one of the nation's best presidents.

Truman did the right thing regardless of the political consequences. That's a quality in short supply in the White House today. Let's take a look.

Within months of being elected to the U.S. Senate from Illinois in November 2004, Barack Obama delivered the commencement address at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. Galesburg, some 200 miles west of Chicago and the birthplace of Carl Sandburg, was an important stop on the Underground Railroad in the mid-19th century, and it was the site of the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858.

Those who heard Obama's speech did not have any reason to think that only a year and a half later he would deliver a speech in Springfield, Ill., announcing his candidacy for president of the United States. And even fewer would have believed that in 2009 Obama would take the oath of office as the nation's 44th president.

Sen. Obama told the graduating seniors at Knox College that day, "The true test of the American ideal is whether ... we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them." He told them they would face new challenges by saying, "You see it when you drive by the old Maytag plant around lunchtime and no one walks out anymore."

He asked those in the audience to dream, to imagine what could be done to give every American a fighting chance in the 21st century. He held out the promise of affordable college education for everyone who wanted to go. He promised new jobs based upon job retraining and lifelong education. He promised a pension that stayed with you always. And he said, "Ten or twenty years down the road, that old Maytag plant could reopen it doors as an ethanol refinery ... ."

A couple of weeks ago, just over eight years after delivering that commencement address, President Obama returned to Knox College to speak again. He began his speech with a reference to the Maytag plant that had relocated to Mexico. He announced that America was poised to reverse the forces that had so long battered the middle class. But then he said we're not there yet.

Referring back to his 2005 speech, he condemned a "winner-take-all economy" where a few do better while most languish. And then he said, "Unfortunately, over the past couple of years, in particular ... Washington has made things worse." Over the past six months, he said gridlock had gotten worse in Washington, something he did not think was possible.

Putting a point on it, he stated that "with this endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball." And he concluded by saying the only thing he cared about "is how to use every minute of the remaining 1,276 days of my term to make this country work for working Americans again."

As my wife's grandmother would have said, "Lord-a-mercy." Obama lashes out at Washington's failure, apparently believing we don't know that he is Washington. More than that, this is the man who won the White House by promising all of us "change we could believe in."

It takes real chutzpah to stand before the American people and assume we're not smart enough to figure out that he hasn't been able to deliver on his fundamental promises.

The president's speech was divisive, partisan and churlish. It was as political as any speech he gave on the campaign trail last fall. It was laced with class warfare rhetoric, and it absolved him and his administration of any responsibility for the paralysis that has gripped Washington since he took office.

If you read between the lines, it's clear that the whiner in chief knows he's failed. At Bloomberg.com, Megan McArdle reported that "the speech seemed like a confession that the president knows he can't do much. The deep problems afflicting America — social and economic breakdown in inner cities and rural areas; rising economic insecurity; widening gulfs between ideologies, regions and socioeconomic classes — are simply far beyond the president's reach."

Writing in the Telegraph, Nile Gardiner said, "President Obama spoke the language of decline ... . America deserves better than the failed statism that has bankrupted cities like Detroit, and threatens to do the same to the rest of the country."

The brutal truth now on display is that Obama is a failed president. He didn't stop long enough in the Senate in Springfield or on Capitol Hill to acquire the experience necessary to lead a complex and deeply divided government . Some of us knew that in 2007-08. Now it's on display for anyone with a working brain.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out of the White House, Mr. President.

The Shadow and I heard President Truman speak at Memorial Auditorium in Gary, Ind., on Oct. 25, 1948. We can tell you that Barack Obama's no Harry Truman. Goldman can be reached at:  EmailMe

Put the military in the dock with Hasan

On Tuesday, the trial of Army Maj. NidalHasan begins in earnest. Hasan has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder in the shooting at the Army's Fort Hood military base near Killeen, Texas, on Nov. 5, 2009.

Early in the afternoon of that day, Hasan allegedly entered Fort Hood's Soldier Readiness Processing Center, where he worked, sat briefly at a table with his head bowed, then stood up and shouted, "Allahuakbar" (God is great), and opened fire. Prosecutors say he was armed with an FN Five-seven pistol, a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Hasan was shot four times and is now a paraplegic.

The Defense Department and federal law enforcement agencies have deemed it to be an act of workplace violence, not an act of terrorism, even though the National Counterterrorism Center immediately labeled it as a terrorist attack.

In November 2011, survivors of the shooting and family members of those who were killed filed suit against the government for negligence in preventing the shootings and in an effort to force the government to classify the shooting as terrorism. Absent such a reclassification, the victims of the attack are not eligible for the Purple Heart.

Hasan is an American citizen and a Muslim whose parents came to America from Palestine. He joined the Army in college and graduated from Virginia Tech University in 1995. In 2003, he received his medical degree from the federal government's Uniformed University of the Health Sciences. He was trained in psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Hospital.

During residency training, he gave a lecture titled, "The Koranic World View as it Relates to Muslims in the United States Military." His lecture was not related to health or medicine, and it was jarring to many who heard it.

Hasan was known to express extremist views, which were brought to the attention of his superiors in the military and to the FBI. His behavior, his views respecting Islamic extremism and his email exchanges with Anwar al-Awlaki, an imam and former senior leader of al-Qaida, were known to officials of the military and the FBI.

Al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was killed Sept. 30, 2011, in Yemen while riding in a vehicle that was struck by Hellfire missiles that had been launched from a Predator drone based out of a secret CIA facility in Saudi Arabia by the Joint Special Operations Command. The strike had been authorized by President Barack Obama.

But instead of being discharged, Hasan was promoted from captain to major in 2009, and in July he was transferred to Fort Hood. Four months later, the massacre occurred.

Hasan is an Islamic extremist who should have been drummed out of the Army. He should not have been promoted, and he should not have been transferred to Fort Hood. Instead, driven by political correctness, the military airmailed Hasan to Fort Hood. Think of it as a cowardly, out-of-sight, out-of-mind move! The military should be charged as an accomplice to murder.

Understanding why and how the military acted as it did is found in the Report of the Senate Homeland Security Committee's investigation into this preventable tragedy. The March 2011 Report, authored by then-Chairman Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and ranking minority member Susan Collins, R-Maine, is titled, "A Ticking Time Bomb — Counterterrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government's Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack."

Here are highlights of the report:

Witnesses reported that Hasan expressed support in open class presentations for the principles of violent Islamic extremism. His officer evaluation reports were uniformly positive and described his exploration of violent Islamic extremism as praiseworthy. The Senate Report concluded that "an individual who embraces violent Islamic extremist ideology clearly is unfit to serve in the U.S. Military."

Hasan reportedly told several of his classmates in residency training that his religion took precedence over the U.S. Constitution that he had sworn to support as a U.S. Military officer.

In summary, he made off-topic presentations on violent Islamic extremism rather than medical subjects; he justified suicide bombings twice in class presentations; he stated that some of the actions of Osama bin Laden were justified; and he stated three times in writing that Muslim-Americans in the military could be prone to fratricide.

But Hasan was never disciplined, never referred to counterintelligence officials and never discharged. The Senate Report states, "One of the officers who report Hasan to superiors opined that Hasan was permitted to remain in service because of political correctness."

That same officer added "that he believed that concern about political discrimination complaints stopped some individuals from challenging Hasan."

The Senate Report also indicates that Hasan received evaluations that flatly misstated his actual performance. They described him as a star officer, recommended him for promotion to major and stated that his "work on violent Islamic extremism would assist U.S. counterterrorism efforts."

In conclusion, the Senate Report states, "The officers who kept Hasan in the military and moved him steadily along knew full well of his problematic behavior. As the officer who assigned Hasan to Fort Hood admitted to an officer at Fort Hood, ‘You're getting our worst.' "

The only way to serve justice in this case is to haul the military into the dock with Hasan and convict all of them of murder.

The Shadow's on his way to the trial, but Goldman can be reached at:  EmailMe

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