Free Republic

<p>There have been bad presidents--see Jimmy Carter. Yet has there ever been a president as staggeringly incompetent as Barack Obama? Really,can there be any other explanation for his performance as president than the man is, well...a moron?</p>

Senate Democrats on Tuesday closed ranks behind Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, declaring she should keep her job despite problems plaguing the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges. Democrats sought to deflect criticism by Republicans who have called for Sebelius’s ouster over what even Democrats acknowledge has been a botched rollout of the landmark law. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, praised the implementation of ObamaCare for proceeding smoothly compared to other massive federal programs. “If you compare it to all kinds of other programs of large magnitude, it’s actually ahead of schedule,...

.....[BIG snip]..... .....“But what about President Obama’s explicit promise that if you like your insurance you can keep it?” [Hume] continued. “He later amended that to the government is not going to make you change plans. But that’s not true either because the government has made many lower cost plans illegal. Emanuel and others argue such plans were a rip-off and people should have better ones. But better in whose opinion? Why the government’s of course. And never mind the president’s repeated promise it would never come to this. A promise the very design of Obamacare made impossible to keep....

President Barack Obama is distancing himself from the critical task of repairing his crippled Obamacare website so he can return to the campaign trail. “The President is a very interested observer in this [repair] process [and] is being regularly updated on it, and is holding that team accountable for results,” Josh Earnest, his deputy press secretary told reporters Oct. 25, while flying with the president to three fund-raisers in New York. Obama’s departure Friday from the White House illustrates his focus on electoral and ideological gains for progressives, rather than on economic and practical gains for actual Americans. Obama’s aides...

Pollster John Zogby reports in our weekly White House report card that President Obama has put himself in a horrible position with the failed Obamacare website and indefensible spying on foreign allies. "There is no positive spin for the president this week. A weak jobs report and record numbers out of the workforce. “Plus the worst imaginable rollout of a website in the history of website rollouts. Am I correct that the U.S. paid $600 million for [its] Affordable [Care Act] web presence? At least the $400 hammers and $600 toilet seats worked, I presume. “Listening in on German Chancellor...

Upset at President Barack Obama's policies on Iran and Syria, members of Saudi Arabia's ruling family are threatening a rift with the United States that could take the alliance between Washington and the kingdom to its lowest point in years. Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief is vowing that the kingdom will make a 'major shift' in relations with the United States to protest perceived American inaction over Syria's civil war as well as recent U.S. overtures to Iran, a source close to Saudi policy said on Tuesday. Prince Bandar bin Sultan told European diplomats that the United States had failed to...

"...Sebelius was dutifully giving her canned responses to Gupta's less than penetrating questions when she dropped a jaw dropper; President Obama was unaware of problems with healthcare.gov before the site went live on October 1.[SNIP]It must give the White House a warm and fuzzy feeling to know that no one in the mainstream press is going to call them out for this blatant lie. Or question how it is that the White House was told repeatedly as far back as March that there were monumental technical problems with the website and no one bothered to tell the boss.As with all...

The disastrous rollout of ObamaCare’s insurance exchanges has brought into sharp focus the GOP charge that President Obama is better at campaigning than governing. Republicans have long needled the president as unable to convert adoring crowds and electoral momentum into inside-the-Beltway success, and the failures of the ObamaCare website has given them new ammunition. “It’s very clear that the president is much better at talking the talk, but when it comes to walking the walk of governing, he falls short,” said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean. Obama ran as a candidate who would bring professionalism back to Washington after former President...

Once, when I was a White House reporter for a mainstream news organization, my editor ran a story on the front page. Mind you, we only put two stories on the front page, so it was a big deal. As I remember, it was a first-rate piece that presented some really important information. It deserved to be on the front page. It so deserved to be on the front page that, in fact, it had been there a couple of weeks before. That’s right, the editor ran the same story twice, in the same place. He deserved to be fired....

There isn’t much enthusiasm for Obama’s plan for Syria and even the experts have trouble explaining why the attacks will do any good. The debate has congealed down to credibility. The only real argument in favor of hitting Syria is that Obama laid down a red line and Congress is obligated to protect his credibility when making poorly thought out threats for the sake of national security. But it’s not Congress’ job to protect Obama’s credibility for the sake of the nation. It was Obama’s job to protect the nation’s credibility by not setting a red line until he had...

And why not? After all, it’s a very quiet and peaceful day on the international front. Just be grateful Kerry didn’t show off an expensive water toy, such as a jet ski.

Barack Obama’s critics are loud enough and persistent enough, but maybe we’ve been baying at the wrong moon. It’s not the president’s ideology, his arrogance, his attention-deficit disorder, his endless deference to alien religious faith and his contempt for the faith of those close to home (or even his backswing) that’s what’s wrong with the man in charge of the government. It’s the sheer incompetence of the leader and his gang. This is the gang that can’t shoot straight, eager to stifle or soften the First, Second, Fourth and Fifth Amendments and ever ready to stumble abroad with timidity in...

For one brief moment on Sequester Day – March 1, 2013 A.D., a day that will live in insolvency – President Barack Obama let down his guard. In one of his rare real press conferences, he accepted questions, and soon wished he hadn’t. Asked a very softball question – whether there was anything he might have done differently, or might do differently in the future, to break the gridlock and make progress on the government’s budget – Obama snapped back “Well, Julie, give me an example of what I might do!” Simply incredible. All over the nation, people stared at...

Last night on FOX, Bill O'Reilly confronted his guest General Colin Powell with the October 4, 2012 quote by John Sununu that "Obama is lazy." In the discussion that followed, the always accurate 'Jeff Foxworthy definition style' of the Liberal Media-shunned four letter word "Lazy" was not used. Thus, to correct this oversight, we FREEPERS are duty bound to allow the TRUTH about Hussein O. to rise to the surface! For example, Hussein Obama might be LAZY if he did NOT send in any US Military help to stop the seven hour murder of the four heros in Benghazi.

It may take election experts years to unravel the mystery of why Mitt Romney was convinced he had won the 2012 presidential election, as a new report shows some skewed internal poll numbers, and explains Romney’s two trips to Pennsylvania. But at the same time, the article from The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber shows inconsistencies with reports from November 5 and November 6 about the numbers that might have convinced Romney and his team that he had a good chance of beating President Obama in Ohio. Obama’s resounding win is starting to take on more of a resemblance to Harry...

Obama’s top election strategist tells a Chicago audience he was surprised Mitt Romney’s team did not attack Obama more, stuck so narrowly with their base—and chose Paul Ryan for VP. President Obama’s top reelection strategist conceded surprise Monday that Republican super PACS didn’t attack Obama far earlier, Mitt Romney didn’t invest much more in ground operations, and that the Republican nominee played narrowly to the party base in picking Rep. Paul Ryan as a running mate. Offering a lengthy dissection of the campaign, David Axelrod told a Chicago audience that he was “a bit surprised that super PACS, which spent...

We are used to Democrats who use campaigns and government jobs as their private piggy banks. A Republican campaign would be the last place you would expect to see wild spending on questionable projects. Yet in the Romney campaign that seems to have happened and this might have cost him the election. What is going on?

Switzerland hit back Tuesday at a US presidential election campaign video that portrays the country as a tax haven. In the video, a character named Miss Swiss Bank Account describes the Republican candidate Mitt Romney as a "boss millionaire with accounts everywhere", the ATS news agency reported. The film gives "the impression that having a bank account in Switzerland is dubious in itself and its only aim is to hide money from the tax authorities," Switzerland's Federal Department for Foreign Affairs (DFAE) said. Switzerland's Washington embassy reportedly expressed its unhappiness at the clip to the Obama team, ATS said.

Obama planted the seeds for all this when he publicly announced a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops. His deadline is fertile ground for jihadis who know that their "window of opportunity" for murder is closing. We should expect the bitter harvest of "green on blue attacks" to produce a bumper crop of American casualties -- unless we hire a new commander in chief who knows how to fight a war and win. --- Oliver North is the host of "War Stories" on Fox News Channel, the founder and honorary chairman of Freedom Alliance, and the author of "American Heroes in...

It warms my heart when a politician is willing to just go the whole hog and call 'em as they see 'em. Of course, I'm sure Gov. Jindal has his own motives in mind ... he's an oft-discussed attractive possibility for Romney's running mate. The Jindal camp has been fairly careful about explicit interest in the vice presidency (I mean, nobody's going to actually come out and say, "Yes, I am actively angling for the Veep slot" rather than staying focused on the job they have), but he hasn't said that he wouldn't do it, either.Speaking at CPAC Chicago on...