Under The Hammer

Another debate and another pounding of the economic policies of President Barack Hussein Obama by Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

Obama has a difficult task running for reelection with the economy in its current shape. Romney is relentless in pointing out that the economy grew slower this year than last year and grew slower last year than the year before, and that 23 million Americans are unemployed. When Romney says the real unemployment rate is 10.7 percent Obama doesn't argue. When Romney says that Obama has piled up budget deficits of over $1 trillion year after year, Obama doesn't argue.

Obama does say that his policies are going to work, but it's hard to sell the idea that policies that haven't worked for four years are suddenly going to start working in the fifth year or maybe the sixth year or the seventh year.

Romney talks a lot about Obamacare, but Obama doesn't. He talks about bringing health care to every American, but he doesn't dwell on Obamacare because polls show that most Americans are against it. It's his signature piece but he has all but given up selling it to the American people.

When it comes to the contraception aspect of Obamacare, Obama is extremely misleading. Nobody is talking about not providing contraception services. The question is, who pays. According to Obamacare it has to be a free service. Why? Why is that free? Most medical care is not free even if you have insurance. What's more, Obamacare will force the Catholic Church and other religious organizations to provide abortion services that they believe are morally wrong.

If Obamacare is not changed by the courts or by Congress, it is likely that Catholic hospitals, clinics, social service providers, universities, schools and other outreach programs will close. Perhaps Obama has been listening to his Catholic Vice President Joe Biden and not the Catholic bishops. But he might want to pay attention because if Catholic hospitals close in the major cities, there is going to be a health care disaster, and the Catholic bishops have made it abundantly clear that they are going to have no part in providing abortions.

Biden was entirely wrong in his answer about the situation with Obamacare and the Catholic Church, but then Biden has been told by at least one bishop that he is not a Catholic in good standing and should not participate in the sacraments.

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There are only two possibilities I can think of when it comes to the response by President Obama to the planned and well-executed terrorist attack on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya.

One is that when an American ambassador was killed in the line of duty for the first time since 1979, during the Carter administration, President Obama decided that in the midst of a presidential election he could not afford to admit that he had refused to give an American ambassador in one of the most dangerous places on earth adequate protection. So he lied to the American people about what happened and hoped that the truth wouldn't come out until after Nov. 6.

The other is that the Obama administration is so incompetent that it borders on criminal. For two weeks the Obama administration – through its press secretary, Jay Carney, and the US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice – claimed that the attack was the result of a spontaneous demonstration over a video some nutcase in California made.

But the night of Sept. 11, when the attack was underway, Obama should have immediately known that an American embassy compound where the American ambassador was in residence was under attack by well-organized and well-armed terrorists. We have one of the most sophisticated communications systems in the world. If the president isn't informed about a terrorist attack on a US embassy compound immediately, then what is the system used for? To make sure Obama doesn't miss any basketball scores? When high-level State Department officials are being killed that is an emergency.

The State Department knew. The intelligence community knew. Obama made a big deal about watching the attack on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan live in the White House. It wasn't exactly true that they were watching it live, but they were watching the video the night that it happened.

The American embassy compound in Benghazi had surveillance cameras. The Rhino Times office also has surveillance cameras. You can watch The Rhino Times surveillance cameras real time from a computer, tablet or smart phone anywhere you can hook up to the internet. I cannot believe that the surveillance cameras at the American compound in Benghazi were not hooked up to some communication device so that they could be watched by people in the State Department and intelligence community.

Even without the surveillance cameras, the US had competent people on the ground who, once they got away from immediate danger, reported to their superiors. In fact, according to the State Department timeline, a call about the attack went out immediately with frequent updates. The State Department knew as soon as the men in the compound knew that they were under attack by an organized force.

Vice President Biden says that he didn't know, and that is entirely possible. Why would anyone bother to tell the vice president, even if he were a competent, honest, intelligent human being? The vice president isn't going to be making any decisions. He is completely out of the loop as long as the president is alive. Biden may still believe that the attack was the result of a spontaneous demonstration or he may believe that it took place in the last century where he evidently spends a lot of his time.

But President Obama knew or should have known within minutes exactly what was happening in Benghazi. He should have received the reports from those on the ground and he should have been watching the action on the surveillance cameras. But the reports from those in the compound who escaped only to be attacked at the so-called safe house about a mile away should have been more than enough proof that this was a highly organized, well-planned attack.

So in this next debate Obama needs to explain to the American people what happened. Was there such a tremendous communications breakdown that he didn't get word from Libya about what happened for two weeks? Did the State Department put the Benghazi terrorist attack report on a sailing ship to send it to the White House? How on earth could a report and surveillance video take two weeks to get to the White House?

Obama needs to explain. If the first day the White House had gotten the story wrong that could be attributed to an honest mistake, but in today's world to claim that the White House didn't get information from its embassy for two weeks is simply a lie or evidence of overwhelming incompetence.

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Liberals love this, and the moderator for the presidential debate, Candy Crawley, is certainly a card-carrying liberal, which is why she re-asked the incredibly stupid question about making AK-47s illegal in the United States. Romney answered the question correctly by saying that fully automatic weapons are already illegal in the US. They have been since 1934. It is possible to get a license to have one, but it is not easy or cheap.

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One of the so-called fact checkers said Romney was wrong when he said that fully automatic weapons were illegal. Technically Romney was wrong. Most people would tell you that it is illegal to carry a concealed weapon without the proper permit, but the fact checkers evidently would tell you that is wrong because you can carry a concealed weapon on your own property without a permit. Technically there was no Vietnam War, but that is simply not how we speak. Technically only a couple of hundred people get to vote for president, but candidates and pundits talk about voters in the presidential race all the time. Nobody says "people who vote for electors committed to one candidate," we call them voters.

However, what the question was about were "assault weapons," which is a term invented during the Clinton administration. The AK-47 is not an assault weapon; it is an assault rifle because it is fully automatic and for all practical purposes illegal. The assault weapons ban was not about banning a particular kind of rifle but banning rifles because of the way they looked. Rifles that operate identically could be legal or illegal based on how they looked. One that looked like a hunting rifle would be legal and one that looked like an assault rifle would be illegal.

It was a law that simply made people who want all guns to be illegal happy, but didn't really do anything. Now many hunters are using what are technically assault weapons for hunting. They are lightweight, accurate and make good hunting rifles. And it is true that they are used to kill people. But knives are also frequently used to kill people and there was no question for the candidates about making knives illegal.

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President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat who won the respect of both parties and whom history has smiled upon, had a plaque on his desk that read, "The Buck Stops here!"

President Obama, a Democrat who has not won the respect of Republicans and is losing the respect of many Democrats and whose place in history is unknown, has no such plaque, and up until Tuesday night did not follow the philosophy expressed on the plaque.

We know this because Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was sent out to take the fall for Benghazi. The buck stopped with the secretary of state, not the president. You have to wonder what Truman would say about such cowardice by an American president.

Obama takes full credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden although he was over 7,000 miles away. That was Obama who took Bin Laden out, not the Navy Seals who were onsite risking their lives and doing the shooting. But when an American ambassador gets killed in the line of duty for the first time since 1979, it was not Obama's fault, but the fault of the secretary of state.

During the second presidential debate on Tuesday night, the story changed again. Evidently having Hillary Rodham Clinton take the fall for the terrorist attack in Benghazi was not working with the American people. So during the Tuesday night debate Wendy Crawley threw Obama a softball so he could take full responsibility for the failure.

The attack was on Sept. 11, and on Oct. 16 the president finally takes full responsibility. It does make you wonder how many months it would have taken for Obama to take full responsibility if it wasn't an election year.

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The more we learn about Obama the more questions arise. According to his own personal history Barry Obama quit being Barry and became Barack when he was at Occidental College in Los Angeles. By the time he went to Columbia University he was going by Barack exclusively, even to the point, according to his sister, of trying to get his family to call him Barack. But Martha Raddatz reportedly invited Barry Obama to her wedding. So if everyone called him Barack and had no reason to even know that he was called Barry as a kid, why was Barry invited to the wedding.

Or did really close friends at Harvard call him Barry? We'll never know.

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They call it the Stupid Party for a reason, and unfortunately the reason hasn't gone away. Four years ago the moderator of the vice presidential debate, Gwen Ifill, had written a book about Obama. If he were elected her book would make money, if he lost then the book would go in the remainder bin. She had a lot of money riding on the outcome of the debate and the election.

But then the Republicans allow that snafu to be topped. Barry Obama went to Martha Raddatz's wedding and she was invited to the Obamas' wedding but didn't attend. However, her husband (now her ex) did. Do the Republicans vet these people at all? Do they have a list of Obama's immediate family and if the person is not on that list, not named George Obama for instance, then they are eligible?

Then when you think it can't get any worse they come up with this woman for the second town hall meeting, Candy Crawley, who gave Obama 9 percent more time than Romney and was much harder on Romney than on Obama. She also selected the questions, which were Obama-friendly, and asked her own follow-up questions, which she was not supposed to do according to the agreement signed by both campaigns.

This just in for the next and final debate, Obama's campaign Communications Director David Axelrod is unexpectedly unavailable to moderate the debate so the Commission on Presidential Debates has asked Michelle Obama if she will step in. The Commission on Presidential Debates has noted that Mrs. Obama is a Harvard Law graduate like president Obama but did not attend Harvard Law School at the same time as President Obama, so they do not think she will have a conflict of interest based on their law school years.

The Republican Party has reportedly agreed to accept Michelle Obama as a fair and impartial moderator but has insisted that her daughters not be allowed to sit with her while she moderates the debate.

Who are these people on the Commission on Presidential Debates? Do they pick moderators from a list submitted by the Obama campaign? It's like having the Ram's Club pick the referees for the Duke-Carolina game. The Republicans have four years to get their act together but they had better get some conservative Republicans appointed to the Commission on Presidential Debates.

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