Terrorism

“Turning Point” Presidencies: Those With The Greatest Impact!

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With Presidents Day coming up on Monday, this author has, already, made clear which Presidents were transformative in the areas of foreign policy and diplomacy, and in domestic affairs.

Now, it is appropriate to make clear which Presidents have been the true “turning points” in American history, in the sense of changing the dynamics of Presidential leadership.

This author would say that there have been EIGHT Presidents who transformed America by their actions in office. In chronological order, they are:

Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), who was the first President to transition from opposition leader to one who united the country in his inaugural address, adopted many ideas of the opposition as his views, and doubled the size of the nation, and kept America away from a war with Great Britain.

Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), who added greatly to Presidential power, and was the symbol of the spread of democracy to all white men, rather than just the aristocracy, and became the father of the Democratic Party.

Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865), who saved the Union by fighting the Civil War against the Confederacy, brought about the end of slavery, promoted nationalism over states rights, made the Republican Party the majority party in America, and greatly increased Presidential power

Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), who revived and expanded the Presidential office, promoted government intervention in the economy, advocated for the environment and for labor rights, and became a model for later Presidents of both parties.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945), who helped bring America out of the Great Depression by massive federal government intervention and programs through his New Deal, and took America through another great crisis (World War II), all the time greatly increasing Presidential authority.

Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969), who greatly expanded federal authority beyond beyond the New Deal through his massive Great Society domestic programs, becoming the image of modern American liberalism at its peak.

Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), who promoted a conservative “Revolution”, reversing the direction of the previous fifty years, and helped to bring about the end of rhe Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union.

Barack Obama (2009-2017), who brought about the greatest domestic reforms, including ObamaCare, since the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson, and moved to change the direction of foreign policy and fight terrorism effectively, with of course, his final record of accomplishments still in process.

These eight Presidents all ushered in a generation or more of their political party’s dominance, with the exception of TR and LBJ, who saw what they represented repudiated or replaced by the opposition party within a short span of time.

And of course, the long range effect of Barack Obama is still questionable, although at the moment, it looks likely that his agenda will be pursued by a stronger Democratic coalition seen as likely to keep the Presidency in 2016 and beyond, with either Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden as the standard bearer and inheritor of the Obama legacy!

Also, notice that these “Turning Point” Presidencies occur within a 16-40 year range from one President to another, with most within a generation of earlier such Presidents by the end of each of these Presidencies!

Rand Paul Makes A Fool Of Himself In Response To The State Of The Union Speech Of President Obama!

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Kentucky Senator Rand Paul continues to amaze people with a head on their shoulders, as he is rapidly becoming a major embarrassment to his own father, former Texas Congressman Ron Paul, and to the Republican Party base, which he seems determined to destroy in his quest to become President!

Having already made clear when Hillary Clinton testified about Benghazi, Libya, that he would have fired Clinton if he were the President at the time, an amazing statement to make in the first place, now Rand Paul has responded to the State of the Union Address of Barack Obama, as well as the response of Florida Senator Marco Rubio for the Republican Party, as chosen by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner.

Paul told us he would not have allowed the use of drones against Anwar Al Awlaki, a declared terrorist of American citizenship who we know planned various terrorist attacks, and that somehow, he is going to stop the President from being the Commander in Chief of military affairs. One can disagree with what Obama did, but Paul has the gall to think that somehow he is going to stop the President from what are his powers under the Constitution?

Calling Obama a “King”, Paul makes clear that while the President should not have such power over the military, there should be absolutely no movement on gun regulation or safety in any form, portraying the government as the enemy of the Second Amendment, when all that is being asked is reasonable regulation, not the taking away of people’s rights to own guns, if they are mentally stable!

Paul also advocated massive cuts in spending, including in defense, which fits his image of being a modern day isolationist. Sure, there can be defense cuts, no question about it, and other cuts, but Paul fails to understand the threats this nation faces, and the massive problem of real harm to the poor, the sick, the disadvantaged, were we to pursue his drastic cuts, which almost no one in the Republican Party advocates, including Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, head of the House Budget Committee!

Rand Paul also said Barack Obama is Robin Hood, when we actually need Adam Smith, the author of THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, advocating “Laissez Faire” economics, an idea of the late 18th century, which is totally unrealistic in the modern world of the 21st century!

The major news networks failed to carry Rand Paul’s speech, which in itself is a commentary on how he stands in the minds of serious people. He and his Tea Party followers represent a viewpoint which, if enacted, which will not happen, will permanently eradicate the Republican Party as an alternative to the Democratic Party. If there is the desire to prevent what conservatives call a “one party state”, then they need to adapt to reality and stop sounding like and advocating loony ideas that take us back to the 19th century, when America was suffering through the Gilded Age of unregulated capitalism and a weak labor movement!

Sadly, we are likely to be plagued by a Rand Paul Presidential candidacy in 2016, which just might make the political circus of 2012 seem only like the preview of comedy entertainment!

Former Vice President Dick Cheney And Obama Foreign Policy: Total Hypocrisy!

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Former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the architects of the disastrous Bush foreign policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, has now denounced the Barack Obama foreign policy as a failure, and termed his appointments of John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, and John Brennan as dismal and second rate. when the Bush team, including Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet and others demonstrated total arrogance and total incompetence in their leadership of our foreign policy for eight years!

The fact that Obama has fought terrorism effectively is ignored, an amazing development when it was under Cheney and George W. Bush that America was attacked. Imagine if Al Gore had been President on September 11, 2001, and the literal hell that Gore would have suffered for such an attack occurring!

Cheney predicted that the war in Iraq would be won easily, and the fact that more than 4,000 Americans were killed in that war does not concern him, or the tens of thousands of men and women disabled by the war.

Cheney helped contribute to a feeble war effort in Afghanistan, and ten years later, we are still in that nation, with over 2,000 Americans killed, and still with 68,000 troops there facing threats every day of loss of life or serious disabilities.

This man also said that deficits and the national debt were not important issues, but of course, now his party emphasizes that, after the destructive financial policies they pursued, including NOT raising taxes in time of war, and helping the top two percent gain the biggest tax cuts in history, and yet see total abuse by Wall Street and the corporations, leading to the Great Recession!

The fact that this most despicable man of recent times has the nerve to even speak up on Presidential leadership, when his own President was a true disaster in so many ways, shows he has no shame or feeling of guilt or responsibility for what he and George W. Bush have wrought!

The Reagan Era Is Over: Obama Agenda Makes That Perfectly Clear!

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The Reagan Era, which lasted from 1981-2009, is over, and will be seen as constituting those years in the history books! This would include the time of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, as well as Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan promoted the idea of distrust of government; of greatly increased federal spending on defense and national security, while cutting domestic spending: helped to undermine labor rights and minority rights; allowed corporate dominance to grow without federal regulations; undermined the environment and consumer safety; engaged America into a major role in the Middle East, therefore promoting anti American terrorism; and caused through their taxation cuts on the upper class and their wild defense spending to cause most of the increase in the national debt from $1 trillion when Jimmy Carter left office to $10.5 trillion when George W. Bush left office.

Even Bill Clinton, the one Democratic President, accepted the idea of smaller government and less regulation, while, however, having the success of adding less to the national debt and having balanced budgets for several years, something that the Republican Presidents—Reagan and the two Bushes—were unable to accomplish during the 20 years out of 28 total in the era they were in charge.

And one must recall that Republicans controlled the Senate from 1981-1987, and from 1995-2007, except for the last half of 2001 and 2002. And they controlled the House of Representatives from 1995-2007. So they had an impact on policy making for a majority of the years of the Reagan era.

Barack Obama represents a diametrically opposite viewpoint on all of the characteristics of the Reagan era. While he will not be able to accomplish all of his goals in the second term, with the GOP control of the House, and the ability to use the Senate filibuster in the upper chamber, the Obama era can now be seen as a path breaking event, similar to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan representing fundamental change in their times!

The Mounting Challenges Facing Barack Obama As He Gets Ready To Take The Oath Of Office

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President Barack Obama faces mounting challenges as he gets ready to take the oath of office for a second term as President a week from now,

These challenges include:

The Fiscal Crisis promoted by the House Republican majority

The Iran Crisis, with the growing threat of a nuclear Iran, threatening Israel, the whole Middle East, Europe and the United States

The winding down of the Afghanistan War, but continuing the fight against terrorist threats

The Gun Control debate as we have growing violence and collection of guns rapidly increasing

The Immigration Controversy at a time of growing Hispanic-Latino and Asian American population

The Global Warming-Climate Change challenge after the warmest year on record

The Education crisis as decline in standards has escalated

The Health Care issue, including the full implementation of ObamaCare and the Medicare-Medicaid crisis

The Energy issue, how to expand energy resources and move away from dependence on oil and coal

Obama has more than a full plate here, and to accomplish much of this will be a major achievement, but will not be easy to accomplish! And of course, there is always the unseen, unpredictable crisis which will arise, which will require a response as well. So let us all wish Barack Obama the best of luck and fortune as he, and this nation, faces the future!

Right Wing Lunatics Never Let Up On Aim To Destroy Barack Obama!

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The wing nut right wing never stops attacking Barack Obama!

They claim that Obama is a Muslim President, despite the fact that the President has been responsible for the killing of more Muslims than George W. Bush. Obama has utilized the drone program in Afghanistan effectively, and has been able to end the lives of many terrorists, including Osama Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but it is never enough!

Glenn Beck, the lunatic, has now said that if any of his staff members mention Obama’s name in the next four years, they will be fired. He plans to avoid mentioning Obama at all, but if so, how will he continue to make his millions as a demagogue dividing America, since his whole living has been based on destroying Obama with his reckless rhetoric?

And there has been a plan by the far right to try to prevent the Electoral College from counting electoral votes, but that was done in early December in all of the state capitols, and the joint session of Congress today will see Vice President Joe Biden open up 51 envelopes and announce the results of the Electoral College. And even if one or two electors are disloyal, Barack Obama and Joe Biden will be declared the winners of the election, since their margin of victory in electoral votes is 62 votes more than the 270 needed to win!

And World Net Daily, an extremist, conspiratorial news website, has suggested that Chief Justice John Roberts announce that he will refuse to swear in the President for another term on Inauguration Day. In actual fact, Roberts will, assuredly, do no such thing, as he worries about his own reputation and that of the Supreme Court, and is not about to destroy his own image and reputation, which has been promoted by his decisive vote in the ObamaCare case in June of 2012!

But even if by some fluke, Roberts went crazy, it is not a requirement that the Chief Justice must give the oath to the President. ANY judge or Justice can do so, and one can be certain that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Justice Stephen Breyer or even Justice Anthony Kennedy would take on the responsibility if Roberts was to go off the deep end and destroy his whole career by refusing to do so.

And, finally, Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in on Air Force One by a woman federal district court judge, Sara Hughes, on November 22, 1963, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, so again, it does not even have to be a Supreme Court Justice who swears in the President.

It is clear the right wing lunatics will stop at nothing to attack and destroy Barack Obama, but while they make money off gullible and stupid people, it does not change the reality that Barack Obama is the choice of the American people, has accomplished a lot in his first term, and despite constant barriers, will achieve a lot in his second term, and go down as one of our better Presidents in American history!

Barack Obama Should Be Added To List Of “Transformative” Presidents

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As 2012 nears an end, it is appropriate to add President Barack Obama to a short list of “transformative” Presidents, Chief Executives who have had a major impact on the nation in a way that makes them historic figures who have changed the politics of America for the long term!

The list of “transformative” Presidents is short and would include the following:

Thomas Jefferson
Andrew Jackson
Abraham Lincoln
Theodore Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosvelt
Lyndon B. Johnson
Ronald Reagan
Barack Obama

Each of the eight Presidents listed above changed our political system in a way that lasted way beyond their time, and it seems likely that Obama will have the same impact electorally!

Just as Thomas Jefferson co-opted the Federalist Party agenda; Andrew Jackson created a party of the masses; Abraham Lincoln saved the nation in the Civil War and made the Republican Party the dominant national party; Theodore Roosevelt made “progressivism” a term and a movement that would be pursued by Woodrow Wilson and others later on; Franklin D. Roosevelt would save the nation from the Great Depression via the New Deal, and World War II, and make the Democratic Party the dominant national party; Lyndon B. Johnson would transform the nation on civil rights and Medicare; Ronald Reagan would make conservatism the dominant national ideology for nearly thirty years; so will Barack Obama transform the nation on health care, gay rights, the growing role of women and minorities, and in fighting the war on terrorism!

There were Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans; Jacksonian Democrats; Lincolnian Republicans; TR Progressives; FDR Democrats; Johnson Loyalists of the Great Society; Reaganite conservatives; and now Obama Democrats who will affect the future for decades, as his predecessors did!

We are, indeed, living in very historic times!

Nuclear Disarmament and Nuclear Security: Senator Obama To President Obama

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One of President Obama’s great commitments is to promote nuclear disarmament and nuclear security, an issue also pursued by Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton in office. Also, other efforts were made by Gerald Ford and both Presidents Bush, as well.

But Obama showed interest and concern over this as early as being a freshman in the Senate, when he traveled to the former Soviet Republics in Eastern Europe to promote such activities, in league with Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, who was Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in the year 2005.

Obama made a new commitment to such work in a speech today at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, explaining the need to dismantle nuclear weapons, one by one, to lower the danger of a nuclear disaster caused by accident worldwide, or by terrorists gaining control of such weapons.

So Barack Obama can be added to the list of Presidents who have worked to make a safer world for future generations of people worldwide! There is no more important responsibility for any American President!

Jon Huntsman: A Rare, Sane Voice Among Today’s Republicans In Foreign Policy!

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Sane Republicans, the small number that seem to exist these days, should mourn that Jon Huntsman, the former Utah Governor and Ambassador to China, who was the only legitimate GOP candidate for President this year, before his withdrawal in January, was one of the few of that party to express the proper thoughts on the Middle East situation that blew up this week, with the death of the US Ambassador to Libya.

Huntsman said this is not the time for someone to be impetuous, to be reacting without all of the facts, or to suggest that foreign aid should be cut, or that we should withdraw from the region of the Middle East altogether!

This was Huntsman’s reaction to Mitt Romney’s impetuosity; to Bill Bennett’s justifying that impetuosity; and to Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s call for a cut in foreign aid and withdrawal from involvement in the controversial area of the Middle East—all signs of just how nuts much of the Republican Party has become!

There are Republicans who are silently, and quietly, whispering privately how crazy the Romney campaign has become, and all that they hear is that Romney and Paul Ryan are accusing the Barack Obama Administration of sympathizing with terrorists and the thugs that attacked the Libyan Consulate and killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others!

The incompetence and recklessness of both Romney and Ryan is literally terrifying, politicizing a national tragedy! And when the former Secretary of Education under George H. W. Bush (Bill Bennett) can double down on what Romney said after the first reports of the attack, and Rand Paul and other crazies can talk about losing all influence in the Middle East by punishing nations for the actions of a few, and even advocate total withdrawal and isolating ourselves, it makes one quiver at the thought of a Republican in the White House!

And when aides to Romney say that if he was in the White House, what happened this week in the Middle East would not have happened, one has to shake his head in disbelief, as if a President or anyone can control what goes on in other nations and prevent mobs or hoodlums from taking action, simply by the image of his presence! How egotistical and arrogant can someone get in the pursuit of becoming President, that his aides have the gall to state such an imbecilic assertion!

This is not the sanity of George H. W. Bush and his foreign policy advisers, or even the statesmanship of Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell!

This is the insanity of people who have no respect for foreign countries, no knowledge of the world, and no understanding of what the use of language can do in relations among nations!

How far the Republican Party has fallen, from an image of being expert in foreign policy, to one of total irresponsibility and looniness, and in so doing, giving the Democratic Party and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton the distinction of being the grown ups in the room!

Mitt Romney has dug a hole for himself that he will be unable to dig himself out of at the last Presidential debate on October 22, devoted solely to foreign policy. We will see the final disintegration of his candidacy on that evening, just 15 days before the election!

Eleven Years Since September 11: What It Has Done To America

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Eleven years ago, on a bright, sunny New York morning, just as today it is in New York, and on the same day of the week, Tuesday, America was struck by Al Qaeda and forces backed by Osama Bin Laden, causing the deaths of about 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, along with those slaughtered at the Pentagon in suburban Virginia, and those on the plane bound for the US Capitol or the White House, and forced into a crash by its courageous passengers in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

This is a day of commemoration and mourning for the loss of life, plus the deaths of over 6,000 Americans in unsuccessful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since then, and the nearly 50,000 young men and women wounded, many of them severely, as a result of those wars.

We also mourn the loss of innocence that we had, that somehow, as the super power of the world, we were immune from such a shocking attack, and the sense of insecurity that it brought upon all of us.

Our lives have been transformed in so many ways that we can never reverse, and we can say that we have become ever more divided in the years since, politically, economically, and socially, and that we have a divided America more so now than ever since the Civil War and Reconstruction period in the middle to late 19th century.

We are a more stratified society economically, and we have become, more than ever, a nation of the coastlines versus the massive interior, a nation of blue versus red in political terms, and our country is rapidly changing in a way that worries us about the future, as to whether there is the potential for internal violence in the future, that might make the terrorism of September 11 seem like something minor, as compared to what could happen between the sections of the nation, the religious groups, the racial groups, the age groups, the gender groups, and the cultural groups that make America a complex nation in the 21st century.

Imagine going back to the year 2000, before the divisive Presidential Election of 2000, at a time when most Americans had never heard of Osama Bin Laden; when the World Trade Center dominated the Manhattan skyline; when there was no Facebook, Twitter, or Steve Jobs technology; when unemployment was only 3.9 percent; when the national debt was only $5.7 trillion; when gasoline was only $1.79 a gallon; and when the previous year, the biggest controversy was Bill Clinton’s sex life and his impeachment trial.

As America was entering the new century, we were extremely naive, worrying more about the effects of “Y2K” on computers, than the reality of what we were going to face in the first decade of the 21st century, which has worsened the outlook for America’s future in a dramatic way.

Oh, for the “good old days!”