State Secrets

The loud left used to call the Bush administration, “The most secretive administration” in, well, forever. But Obama’s administration is, despite promising openness,  is being very secretive.

The Office of U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), part of President Barack Obama’s office, has denied a company’s request for information about a secretive anticounterfeiting trade agreement being negotiated, citing national security concerns.

The USTR this week denied a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Knowledge Ecology International, an intellectual-property research and advocacy group, even though Obama, in one of his first presidential memos, directed that agencies be more forthcoming with information requested by the public.

The USTR under Obama seems to be taking the same position about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) as it did under former President George Bush, that the treaty documents are not open to the public. One of Obama’s campaign promises was to make government more open and responsive to the public.

 So, where exactly is that much promised change? Too much to hope for, one presumes.

In Your Face Double-Speak

Calling it “Obama’s ‘Science’ Fiction“, Charles Krauthammer blasts Barack Obama’s self-congratulatory announcements on embryonic stem cell research and “science”. As always when Krauthammer takes a politician to the woodshed, it is unfailingly brutal.

Obama’s address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the “false choice between sound science and moral values.” Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the “use of cloning for human reproduction.”

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science? Yet, unlike Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not.

This is not just intellectual laziness. It is the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics.

 There is a lot more. Again, this demonstrates the in-your-face double-speak of Obama. He solemnly promises one thing while casually delivering the exact opposite. He preaches responsibility while signing massive, unsupportable spending bills. He poetically denounces wasteful spending while quietly approving pork-laden spending sprees. He promises change in Washington politics while sophomoric attacks on Rush Limbaugh are directed from the White House itself. He promises bipartisanship while ignoring and insulting Republicans in every initiative he announces.

This blatant double-speak cannot but have negative consequences for Obama in the long run. Flowery rhetoric can only carry one so far.

Slip Sliding Away

Douglas Schoen and Scott Rasmussen, writing at the Wall Street Journal, look at Obama’s poll numbers and at the attitudes of Americans toward their government. The data should be giving pause to Obama and the Democrats in general.

It is simply wrong for commentators to continue to focus on President Barack Obama’s high levels of popularity, and to conclude that these are indicative of high levels of public confidence in the work of his administration. Indeed, a detailed look at recent survey data shows that the opposite is most likely true. The American people are coming to express increasingly significant doubts about his initiatives, and most likely support a different agenda and different policies from those that the Obama administration has advanced.

Polling data show that Mr. Obama’s approval rating is dropping and is below where George W. Bush was in an analogous period in 2001. Rasmussen Reports data shows that Mr. Obama’s net presidential approval rating — which is calculated by subtracting the number who strongly disapprove from the number who strongly approve — is just six, his lowest rating to date.

There is a lot more, go read the whole thing. People are not liking what they see coming out as “change” from Obama and the Democrats. They especially do not like the “stimulus” plan or Obama’s efforts toward reviving the economy.

After reading the article, I suspect that what is coming into play here is a dislike for double-speak. I can’t prove that, it’s just a hunch. Obama’s double-speak is so blatant, so in the face of Americans that it has to be a factor in the rapid erosion of his poll numbers. Coupled with his apparent indifference to the economy while trying to rapidly advance his redistributionist “vision” for America, I suspect Obama may out-Carter Carter in the rapid opinion decline department.