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1. Barack Obama: Unitary Executive Theorist
“Just like Bush”
2. Say Goodbye To Cairo: Why The Iranian Crisis Reveals The Hollowness of The Cairo Speech
Neither Hope Nor Change For The Iranian People
3. The Health Insurance Industry Is On Fire
Does it suggest Obamacare will fail?
1. Barack Obama: Unitary Executive Theorist
“Just like Bush”
Others on this site and elsewhere have done a marvelous job of exposing the fact that Obama almost certainly broke the law in his dismissal of Gerald Walpin (and perhaps other IGs). This story is not concerned with what Obama has done, it is concerned with what it reveals about Obama’s view of executive power. What Obama’s firing of Walpin reveals is very simple: Obama is a believer in the Unitary Executive Theory.
See, a lot of Democrats and left-wing bloggers bloviated on endlessly about the Unitary Executive Theory without ever bothering to educate themselves about what the Unitary Executive Theory is. See, leftists tend to view the world through the prism of power-grabbing conspiracy theories. So when they encountered something called the “Unitary Executive Theory” that had conservative adherents, they immediately assumed it was a conspiracy theory by which conservative Presidents would attempt to increase Presidential power. Soon enough the Unitary Executive Theory became responsible for Guantanamo, “torture”, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and Valerie Plame. No leftists ever bothered to point out or explain how this was so, or to even make a pass at understanding the most rudimentary basics of what the Unitary Executive Theory stood for.
The Unitary Executive Theory (as Samuel Alito patiently attempted to explain over and over to many of these leftist morons) has nothing to do whatsoever with the scope of executive power. A Unitary Executive Theorist might well believe that the office of the Presidency does (or should) have very little power whatsoever. The only thing the Unitary Executive Theory concerns itself with is who is ultimately responsible for wielding whatever executive power the executive branch possesses. The Unitary Executive Theory may be sumed up succinctly in one sentence: The President has the Constitutional authority to fire anyone in the Executive Branch. In other words, anyone who wields executive power is answerable ultimately to the President.
Let me make this simpler for Glenn Greenwald, et al (e.g., Thomas Ellers and Rick Ellensburg). Believing in the Unitary Executive Theory would not make a President any more or less likely to approve of torture, or Guantanamo Bay, or warrantless wiretapping or any other such thing. You know what it would make a President more likely to do? It’d make a President more likely to fire some IGs in violation of statute because he believes that the Constitution gives him the summary authority to do so.
So, while Obama and his many illiterate followers may have campaigned against and decried the Unitary Executive Theory, it apepars that Obama is the first American President in the last 8 years to have violated the law because of his belief in it. So unless Obama is ready to apologize and rescind his unlawful actions against Walpin, et al, it’s time for him to own up to his strong belief in the Unitary Executive Theory.
2. Say Goodbye To Cairo: Why The Iranian Crisis Reveals The Hollowness of The Cairo Speech
Neither Hope Nor Change For The Iranian People
The Obama Administration’s response to protests against the Iranian regime’s contempt for even its own thin facade of democracy has been markedly muted and tentative; even the French Government has spoken out more clearly against the fraudulence of the presidential election and the mullahs’ suppression of the Iranian people than has President Obama. One conclusion we can draw from Obama’s failure to offer support for the Iranian people against their theocrat masters is that it eviscerates the entire point of his Cairo speech to the ‘Muslim world’.
In and of itself, there were already many reasons to be concerned about the Cairo speech, as Mark Steyn, Charles Krauthammer, Martin Peretz, Andrew McCarthy and Erick Erickson have all detailed at length - its factual distortions and omissions of history, its false equivalencies, its acceptance of the legitimacy of treating “the Muslim world” as a collective political construct superseding national interests or popular sovereignty, its contrast between Obama’s deferential words towards Muslim nations with his meddling in the affairs of the world’s lone Jewish nation. In the speech, Obama embraced the role of a defender of the Islamic faith, even going so far as to speak of where Islam “was first revealed,” a statement that explicitly endorses Islam’s claim to theological truth. Obama proved the old saw that a liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in an argument: on every issue on which there is a pro-American (or pro-Western or pro-Israeli) set of factual assertions and arguments and an opposing set of anti-American (or anti-Western or anti-Israeli) factual assertions and arguments, Obama accepted the anti- premises and ignored the pro-. Thus, as Peretz details, he accepted the notion that the State of Israel owes its legitimacy entirely to European guilt for the Holocaust, and wholly ignored the pre-1945 history of Zionism. Thus, he accepted the notion that the U.S. properly bears the baggage of historical guilt for the sins of Europe, while refusing to claim credit for the blood Americans have shed repeatedly for Muslim peoples. Thus, Obama blamed tensions between Muslims and the West on “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims” - even though many of the core regions of the Islamic heartland (such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Levant) were either never Western colonies after the rise of Islam or were only briefly under British control between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Second World War. As a whole, while the speech’s historical and political narrative departed from the pro-American view of the world, it dovetailed neatly with the views of Egyptian-raised scholar Edward Said, a professor at Columbia during Obama’s time there and mentor to Obama’s friend and Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi. (Perhaps that’s one reason why Obama chose Cairo as his location and why he’s taken every available opportunity to offer petty diplomatic snubs to the British in particular.) In short, Obama spent the speech accepting, rather than challenging, the views of his audience, and leaving to someone with a job other than President of the United States the task of defending the United States against the arguments made against it.
There is, of course, an argument to be made, and that has been made by Obama’s supporters, in favor of giving such a speech. Certainly, if you want to persuade people, it’s easier to do if you start your remarks by buying into their view of the world, even if this requires the embrace of demonstrable untruths. (The definition of diplomacy is the art of not speaking the truth). By setting himself up as the arbiter of two contending parties - America and the Islamic world - and above both, Obama banked on using his own personal popularity with Muslims to establish a separate brand identity, the Obama Brand (count the number of times the word “I” appears in the Cairo speech, as well as the references to his own biography), with a base separate and distinct from the American Brand with all its historical associations. As Andrew Sullivan expressed the argument, back in 2007, for the value of having Obama as a distinctive representative for America rather than an advocate for its values or a defender of its record.
3. The Health Insurance Industry Is On Fire
Does it suggest Obamacare will fail?
The largest publicly-owned health insurers in America are United Healthgroup, WellPoint, Cigna International, and Aetna. (Blue Cross and Blue Shield are also dominant players in this industry, but it’s harder to get financial data on them.)
A couple of important points: Health insurance isn’t the inordinately profitable industry that Obama and his surrogates say it is. By my rough count, the four big public insurers are showing aftertax profit margins of barely three percent.
And their total profits add up to well under $10 billion a year. (Again, I’m excluding the Blues.) Obama tells us that health insurance costs too much because these companies make too much money. But even if he wipes out their profits completely, he’s nowhere near the $1 trillion or more that he’ll need in order to pay for a national insurance plan.
Do you suppose the market is saying that a public-health option is a nonstarter? Look at the stocks of those four companies for this week. They’re all up strongly, as much as 20%. In three days.
Or is the market saying that if the government takes over the low end of the insurance industry, that the private companies will take the top end and become a lot more profitable than they are now? I wish I knew the answer.
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