it isn’t too much to expect him to tell the truth.
a self-serving lie motivated by a desire to burnish Williams’s own authority by associating himself with the military, an institution that actually does command widespread trust?Read more here.
"Imagine that President Obama, immediately after his re-election, assembled a sort of reverse bucket list--an enumeration of the things he least wanted to do in his second term. What's on the list? By our reckoning the top two entries are obvious: 1. Sign legislation repealing ObamaCare. 2. Go to war in Iraq.
Now imagine that Lois Lerner had never been born and Obama narrowly lost in 2012. Fast-forward to the summer of 2014, and President Romney is facing the ISIS crisis. Romney announces U.S. air strikes in Iraq and demands that other countries cooperate: "From governments and peoples across the Middle East there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer, so that it does not spread."
Is there any doubt this would be contentious as hell? Democrats would denounce Romney as a war monger and accuse him of squandering one of Obama's "great achievements," the successful withdrawal from Iraq, by allowing the situation there to deteriorate so as to provide a pretext for military intervention. War protesters would fill the streets of American and foreign cities. Prominent leftists would denounce Romney--who avoided the Vietnam-era draft thanks to student and ministerial deferments--as a "chicken hawk." Opposition to the new Iraq war would mobilize the left, creating the prospect of a Democratic wave in November."
Being president you may have more power than anyone else in the country, but you quickly discover that you have much, much less than you thought you'd have going in. You're hamstrung in ways you never dreamed of. That's truer now than it's ever been. It's not that you can't get anything done. It's that what you can get done is so paltry compared to what you wanted and expected to get done. You are doomed to disappoint the people who elected you. You'll disappoint yourself. And that's only the tip of the iceberg of stress that awaits you.
"the post-presidency . . . is a win-win. Money, Nobels, the ability to leverage your global celebrity for any cause or hobbyhorse you wish, plus freedom to grab the mike whenever the urge takes you without any terminal repercussions." Brown thinks Messrs. Carter and Clinton have made the most of the opportunity, and while she's disdainful of the Bushes' "parachute jumping" and "painting," she allows that they "have seemed happier out from under" the burdens of the presidency.Read more here.
Here is Brown, making the case against President Hillary Clinton: "She is as adored as any ex-president already, she is making a ton of money, and she can expand the real passion of her life," the aforementioned global mission to advance women.
All of which amounts to a very strong case against Mrs. Clinton's running--a stronger case, perhaps, than Brown realizes. A politician for whom adoration and money are ultimate objectives rather than welcome byproducts of success probably doesn't belong in the White House.
if the secondhand Obama comment is accurately reported, it reflects some serious misconceptions, as well as an unwitting but telling acknowledgment.
One misconception is the vaguely xenophobic claim that VW is owned by "German shareholders." In fact, although Volkswagen AG is a German company, it is publicly traded on multiple stock exchanges. Its shareholders include American workers, either directly or through mutual funds and retirement accounts. Owning VW stock does not make you German (which may come as a relief).
Obama's unwitting acknowledgment is that unionization is bad for companies, a corollary of its being bad for shareholders. But that leads to another misconception. If unionization is bad for companies, it does not follow that it is good for workers. The relationship between employers and employees is not fundamentally an adversarial one.