Podcast 323

Obama Checks Out. After the President’s White House summit on ‘extremist violence’, a firestorm of controversy erupted when he refused to characterize the ‘extremists’ – the subject of the summit – in language that would actually describe them. Our current problem is, after all, referred to as THE ISLAMIC STATE! The President reminds us lowly peasants we are not to refer to the Islamic State as Islamic Terrorists, or even ‘Islamic’. This is apparently so that the President will still be invited to cocktail parties with the nuanced and beautiful. Obama also took care this week to describe the ‘root’ of the problem in the Middle East as a ‘lack of jobs and democracy’. This is a statement which is patently false, since almost all top Islamists hail from upper middle class families, and are well educated. Critics say the President is never going to be able to defeat the Islamist Threat if he can’t name it. The bottom line? Whether President Obama knows it or not, he has telegraphed to the American people and the world he has checked out. Its clear he just wants to make it to January 2017 with his ‘legacy’ intact. For this, we are grateful. We do not want this president conducting a major war, as long as we can get through the next 22 months or so without being blown to smithereens, burned in a cage or beheaded by ‘extremely violent people’. If you’re upset about the possible threat, channel the angst into the 2016 presidential race, because the next guy in is going to have a lot of work to do. It will fall on the next President and Congress to figure out how to clean up this mess, because the current President isn’t going to do a damn thing about ISIS, Putin, or anything else. Do we really want him to? It seems all the world’s leaders are at a loss to figure out what to do about anything. The EU is on the verge of a financial crisis and is probably in a recession, while its leaders burn the midnight oil feverishly negotiating cease fires that are apparently meaningless to people like Putin. As fighting between Ukrainian government troops and ‘separatists’ in eastern Ukraine intensified, ending in a rout for the Ukrainian troops, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said of the short lived cease fire negotiated just last weekend in Minsk, “It’s not Munich’. Is there anyone in charge these days? Or are they all waiting for their people to tell them what to do? Do they know what to do? (Wait! Don’t answer that.) The real question is what the US role in the world should be, and how this country should handle itself. This is a question that is clearly being left up to the people. Some final updates and conclusions on the foreign policy front to end the week. Sponsored by Ryan Plumbing.

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Podcast 296

MYSOTU. What started as a courtesy to Congress by President Washington has morphed into an irritating media spectacle, bordering on – no wait, it has become – obscene. It is time for every American to use whatever media you can, to deliver your own State of The Union Message. Line some chairs up, invite friends over, have the postal worker down the block join you, so you can use him as an example during your speech, make sure everyone wears a suit, add klieg lights and cameras for effect. If you have a teleprompter or two laying around, throw them in as well. (Editor’s Note: I invited congress to join me, but they had other things to do, so my State of The Union Address is delivered from the Broadcast Bunker.) The media machine cannot be without a story, and beheadings are getting old, so the new story line is the President is pugnaciously at least, thumbing his nose at Congress. Somehow this is viewed as new behavior, though he has been doing it all along. The results? President Obama lost the House and then the Senate is a series of historically bad election cycles for The President’s party, yet analysts think somehow, now that Republicans are in charge in Congress, he’ll get different results. Moreover, the President’s restless flying around the country and making speeches, offering candy and popcorn to the masses is now considered something called Populism. If you are a media commentator and you say the word ‘Populist’ and another word like, ‘Electorate’ in the same sentence, people think you’re smart. Populism? What’s that. Nothing, really. Nothing that can be defined as a real political philosophy or ‘policy’ per se. Using the standard definitions, your dog could be a ‘Populist’, and probably a pretty good one. The ‘Populist’ President wants to raise taxes on the rich, give it back to the middle class, if the middle class sops perform tricks and jump through rings of fire to get tax ‘credits’. Thanks! Meanwhile, he wants to increase spending by something like 7 percent, to add to an already massive public debt, the largest ever accrued in one administration in history. But hey, we got a baseball cap and a beer can insulator, right? Republicans? They’re going to fix it all so it works, don’t you know that? What it comes down to is Statist, versus Non Statist, and there are an awful lot of Statists in Washington right now. The good news? The Bob Davis Podcasts SOTU is mercifully short. The post SOTU party awaits. Sponsored by X Government Cars.

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