We Must Obey The Obamessiah, Rather Than Human Beings

The President of the US will give His latest State of the Union address this evening, and the BBC has published the press release with key talking points.

Obama State of the Union speech to act on income inequality

Sound promising, no? Just by His words, He can move mountains. What they mean is that the President will announce one of His latest executive orders to help the poorest and most vulnerable and strike a blow against what Katty Kay has described as a social injustice which causes economic problems. There can’t be any doubt that she’s writing her from her personal beliefs. But is that really what He will be doing?

The White House said Mr Obama would unveil an executive order to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 (£6.10) an hour for new federal contract workers.

Oh. So He’s just spending more money that we don’t have, increasing our debt, as an ideological gesture. Not really doing anything to help the working poor in my neighborhood, then. The BBC wants to make sure you get the desired impression, though, so they add key details about who those public sector workers will be:

To sidestep lawmakers, Mr Obama will issue an executive order raising the hourly rate of federal workers with new contracts, such as janitors and construction workers. However, that measure is only expected to benefit a few hundred thousand employees.

Yeah, it’s only going to add a few hundred million dollars to the debt, but at least you know it’s going to noble blue-collar jobs. Now, what’s this about sidestepping lawmakers, you ask? After almost five years of this, we should all know the BBC’s Narrative by heart:

Just over a year after his re-election, Mr Obama must contend with determined opposition from the Republican Party, which controls the House of Representatives and has the numbers in the Senate to block his agenda.

Time is running short before Washington DC turns its attention to the 2016 race to elect his successor, threatening to render him irrelevant even with three years remaining in office.

In the face of a divided Congress, Mr Obama has pledged to use executive action to bypass Congress, and the White House says he will flesh out some of his plans in the State of the Union speech.

As always, the problem is an intransigent Congress, blocking His every move. Screw the separation of powers. Never mind that during the two years where He had super-majorities in both houses of Congress we got the disaster of ObamaCare and a failed Stimulus. It’s His Plans For Us that must be passed, regardless. As the BBC’s friends in the US Left-wing media and the Administration have been saying, the President has been acting too much like a Prime Minister and not seizing power like He should.

“The problem for us is that the test of our success became what we passed in Congress, and even in the best case — if the fever had broken and the clouds had parted — we still would have only gotten maybe 40 percent of what we wanted,” one senior White House official told the Post.

“The political discussion, the press, the politicians want to pull the president into the role of prime minister,” added the official, whom the Post did not name. “So you have to swerve really hard to the executive powers at a time like this.”

According to the report, an internal review of Obama’s failures last year — from Obamacare to sequestration to Iran to the 16-day government shutdown that cost American taxpayers $1.4 billion — led the White House to conclude that the president “too often governed more like a prime minister than a president.

“In a parliamentary system, a prime minister is elected by lawmakers and thus beholden to them in ways a president is not,” the report noted.

Obama will kick off his new agenda in his State of the Union address on Tuesday.

Funny how the BBC decided not to include that bit of information. And they certainly won’t be reminding you that the Junior Senator from Illinois criticized President Bush for doing this.

No. The thing is, the BBC is all for it because they support the President’s policies and report as if His Plans are correct and all opposition is wrong. What the BBC is doing here is more than reporting and analysis: they’re presenting this as if the President’s way is correct and Congress is wrong for not cooperating.

The worst part is Katty Kay’s inset “Analysis”:

Washington can be a cold, cruel city, as anyone who is living here this freezing January is well aware. And as he heads into his sixth State of the Union address, no-one is feeling the chill more than Barack Obama.

In last year’s address to the nation, Obama promised action on three important issues: immigration, guns and the environment. As of today, there has been no legislation on any of those. A gridlocked Congress has thwarted his every attempt to pass laws that would make it possible for undocumented immigrants to stay here legally or increase background checks on gun sales or expand environmental controls.

The president has three years left in the White House, but already everyone here is focused on who replaces him in 2016 and who will win the midterm elections in 2014. With time moving on, chances are slim that he can get anything major done in what remains of his presidency.

No questioning whether or not what He’s doing is entirely legal, no wondering about whether or not the policies He wants are correct, no asking if maybe Congress didn’t pass the legislation He wanted because maybe the majority of the public they’re elected to represent didn’t want it. No, to Katty Kay and the BBC, His Plans are correct, and inaction on them is wrong.

“As for God, his way is perfect:
The Lord’s word is flawless;
he shields all who take refuge in him.

For who is God besides the Lord?
And who is the Rock except our God?”

2 Samuel 22:30-32

Katty’s full editorial piece is more or less a pity party for Her beloved Obamessiah. Read the whole thing if you must, but have a sick back ready. While she points out that there have been some relationship problems for the President, none of it is apparently His fault. He has “an aversion to schmoozing”, but all that means is that He’s above the ugliness of political logrolling. It’s not meant as a criticism at all. Aside from an admission that He mishandled the discussion of attacking Syria, even the ObamaCare website disaster is presented as something that affected His political capital, and no mention of the damage the law itself has done and is doing.

Now is the time where a BBC journalist bashes and mischaracterizes Republicans and their policies:

His saving grace is that Republicans are in an even weaker position than he is. The party’s approval ratings are lower than the president’s. They are failing to reach out to women, young people, Hispanics and African Americans – all important voting groups. And on the signature issue of income inequality – something Obama intends to spend a lot of time on this year – Republicans are struggling to come up with any ideas that don’t smack of “let’s just cut taxes.”

This is an editorial remark, Katty’s opinion of her political opponents. Notice that cutting taxes is treated as an anathema. Also notice Katty’s ignorance on young people. They are in fact turning away from Him because of His policy failures. But Katty lives in the bubble, so isn’t aware of it. Now turn back to your hymnal:

This buys the president a little bit of time. He can still use that to get things done over the next six months, which is really all he has before mid-term fever makes legislative action totally impossible.

The smart money in Washington thinks two things could get done this year. First, we could see some form of immigration reform: not a big comprehensive bill, but something smaller. And, Mr Obama may be able to use his Presidential powers to bypass Congress and get something done to raise the minimum wage. That could help narrow the gap between rich and poor.

It is a far cry from the lofty, change-the-world approach of the first term. But six years have beaten the idealism out of Barack Obama. The man who goes to address Congress on Tuesday is more pragmatic. Forget changing the way government works here.

Here’s another way of saying it:

“Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”

All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. 30 But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

Luke 4:24-30

Everyone else is the problem, not Him, not His policies. The policies, as we learn from the personal friend of the White House spokesman, are good and just. So everything He does now will be correct in the eyes of the BBC. Can’t wait to hear the rejoicing in His word from the BBC tonight, and the scorn heaped upon Republican rebuttals.

PS: Post title is from Acts 5:29 with one alteration.

 UPDATE 1/29: The BBC has completely replaced the preliminary article I linked to and discussed at the top of this post with what seems mostly to be Katty Kay’s pronouncements on the speech. Not even News Sniffer has the original, so it’s down the memory hole.

BBC Spins For The White House Again

I’m sure by now everyone knows about the looming swinging budget cuts that will happen automatically if no new budget deal is reached between the Republicans and the President. This is known as the “sequester”, and is the result of them kicking the can down the road a while back.

The BBC reports that the President doesn’t want this to happen, thinks it’s a bad idea, and has called on Democrat Governors to try and influence the elected Representatives and/or Senators in their States to cave compromise.

He warned the $85bn (£56bn) cuts would put thousands of teachers out of work and bring economic uncertainty.

The president has called on Congress to pass revenue rises and narrow budget cuts to avoid the automatic reductions.

The Democratic president will travel to Virginia on Tuesday to discuss the cuts’ impact on the defence industry.

“These cuts do not have to happen,” Mr Obama told a bipartisan assembly of governors at the White House on Monday. “Congress can turn them off any time with just a little bit of compromise.”

“Revenue rises”. Typical partisan language there. The Republicans refer to it as “tax rises”, of course, and the BBC uses instead the Left-wing terminology. Is the President offering to compromise as well? Don’t be silly. He doesn’t, and shouldn’t have to. According to Mark Mardell, when Congress is controlled by Democrats who don’t need to negotiate with Republicans to pass His plans, it’s a Golden Age.

Unsurprisingly, there’s another point of view that these cuts won’t really do much damage at all. In fact, spending will actually continue to rise and rise. The “cuts” just mean that the spending will rise slightly less than it would have otherwise. Does that sound familiar? Even Forbes admits this. Equally unsurprising is the fact that, not only does the BBC refuse to acknowledge this, but they even manage to quote a cuddly Republican, Sen. McCain, who says he doesn’t totally blame the President and is hoping for a compromise to protect the defense industry.

The BBC dutifully informs you that both sides of the aisle will try to blame each other. So, whose fault is this, really? The BBC reports it this way:

The budget cuts, known in Washington DC as the sequester, were devised in 2011 as an intentionally painful cudgel to encourage Democrats and Republicans in Congress to strike a deal to reduce the US budget deficit.

Note the passive voice, as if the cuts materialized out of thin air during some bi-partisan discussions. In actual fact, it was the President’s idea. He and the White House have been lying about it, and the BBC plays along like the good little propaganda organ it is.

Even the sainted Bob Woodward says so.

Woodward documents in his 2012 book The Price of Politics that team Obama first proposed the idea of the sequester. Expanding on his work in a Sunday Washington Post op-ed, he noted—as he has before—that both President Obama and his would-be Treasury Secretary Jack Lew lied on the campaign trail by saying the sequester originated with House Republicans. The White House has now ceded that fact.

The BBC doesn’t want you to know this, so they spin for the White House and deliberately mislead you. Defenders of the indefensible cannot impugn Woodward here. After all, not only is the above not from Fox News or Breitbart, but a previous book on the President by Woodward was lauded by the former BBC Washington correspondent and anchor of BBC World News America, Matt Frei. A diehard Obamessiah worshiper himself, Frei’s only concern then was that all the fascinating issues in the book might get in the way of the reader appreciating “the nuance of his finely-tuned brain”.

The cuts probably won’t be a big deal at all, and in fact will be considered a good start in some circles. The possibility of this is so great that Democrats and their lobbyists are worried about what might happen if there is no disaster. That’s in the Washington Post, not Fox News, not Breitbart. So the President has to do as much fear-mongering as possible, and work behind the scenes (i.e. get the Democrat Governors to do political cuts in the manner of Labour councils in Britain) to ensure as bad an outcome as possible. Is the BBC providing any analysis from this angle? Of course not. He can do no wrong. It’s not His fault, you see. And in any case, cutting government spending is a sin.

Your license fee hard at work, providing a propaganda outlet for the leader of a foreign country.

OBAMA “WINS”?

Interesting set of headlines from the BBC this morning on the deal passed in Congress last evening. Today informed me that it was “Game, Set and Match” to Obama; it also added that “Obama has won” and  that “Obama would not be compromising in two months time of spending cuts”. I wonder if the Democrats just send the BBC press releases to read out as “news”? Incredible pro-Obama headlines from the strictly impartial  State Broadcaster.

Mark Mardell Inadvertently Exposes Himself And His Colleagues

I apologize in advance for any unpleasant images that title may have evoked. As most people here will know, I’m wont to complain about how Mardell is little more than a British mouthpiece for the White House Press Office. I’ve written at length about how this or that report or blogpost from him is supporting the President’s cause, spouting White House talking points, etc.

This time, though, it’s Mardell himself explaining what the White House talking points are. And it doesn’t take much to see how he and his BBC colleagues are in lock-step with the White House propaganda machine.

Mitt v Isaac in Tampa

One has to feel a little sorry for the BBC’s US President, though. He was supposed to be wallowing in a political event, reporting on Romney accepting the nomination and whatever negative stuff he can imagine. But the Republican convention has been delayed because of the storm, so is stuck having to make something up instead. He’s got copy to file one way or the other, so I suppose the White House talking points have to get in there somehow. However, in casually laying these point out, Mardell inadvertently reveals himself and his colleagues for the White House shills that they are.

First, Mardell cleverly tries to use the storm as a metaphor for the impending doom he wants you think Romney’s campaign senses. They’ve been battered and put off message recently, he explains, and Romney is going to face a tough crowd. No, really.

The house band blast out a sound check, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer rehearses a walk and talk for his show. Everything in the vast auditorium is bathed in blue and red lights, atmospheric, but curiously reminiscent of emergency vehicles at a crash scene.

Yeah, it’s a bit ham-fisted, I know. But it’s not easy churning this stuff out on demand, you know. In any case, this is a not so subtle introduction to the White House talking points. In fact, it’s one of them: Romney is in trouble already.

Still, Republicans are crossing their fingers that there’ll be no accidents this week. They hope that Isaac will miss and Mitt will be a hit.

Who at this point – outside the Beltway and the HuffingtonPost, anyway – still thinks the Republican Party is going to turn on Romney and they won’t rally around him for the goal of unseating the President? This is a mentality from six months ago. Sure, Mardell was right all along that most of the Republican Party and sympathetic conservatives and independents wanted just about anyone but Romney. But that was then and this is now. There’s no way that lingering animosity towards him outweighs the desire to prevent the resurrection of The Obamessiah.

Now for the talking points. I’ll let the BBC’s US President editor explain:

He may not applaud all the statements coming from the floor when the convention does kick off. He has a tricky path to walk.

He might want to convince the conservative base that he really is one of them. But he doesn’t want to play into the hands of the Democrats who are determined to depict him as a scary reactionary in thrall to nutters and cranks.

Nobody is going to depict Romney as a reactionary. Mardell is straining here. But “nutters and cranks”? That’s pretty much how most Beeboids describe the Tea Party movement. But now that Mardell has laid it out there for you, pay attention from now on to how many of the usual BBC suspects start saying that on air.

President Obama, apparently determined to distract attention from the economy, said in an interview this weekend that Romney had “signed up for extreme positions”.

You mean like how BBC economics editor tweeted that Romney had gone “so extreme” by picking Paul Ryan as running mate?

The Obama campaign team pulled out all the stops to link Romney’s name to that of the once obscure congressman Todd Akin, who coined the ugly phrase “legitimate rape”.

You mean like how you and your colleagues pulled out all the stops to spread the story all over the place and link Romney inextricably with Akin? In a way, I should point out, that you don’t do with things that might make the President look bad.

By the time they were through, the uninformed might think Todd Akin was the third name on the ticket.

So would BBC audiences. He’s really writing my jokes for me.

The president’s campaign went into overdrive to highlight an awkward joke Mr Romney made about his birth certificate, suggesting he had strayed into “birther” territory.

You mean like how BBC Washington correspondent and anchor of BBC World News America tweeted that Romney’s joke was “dangerous”?

But they’ve already been buffeted off message in the last week by Mr Obama’s accusations.

Really? Is that why polls now have Romney as tied with or even slightly ahead of the President? So where is Mardell telling you that the President is equally in trouble, campaign on the back foot, after all the missteps like “You didn’t build that”, or the harshly criticized bogus ad accusing Romney of being responsible for a woman dying of cancer, or the Democrat mouthpiece who accused Romney of committing a felony – both of which the President Himself had to dance around deal with a question about it at His recent press conference? Don’t make me laugh. The BBC censored all news of it save for one brief mention by Mardell in a blog post. Which he, naturally, defended.

See, it’s not just me saying this or that is a White House talking point. This is the BBC’s top man in the US, a life-long political junkie, highly trained and an experienced journalist with close contacts in the White House, who regularly receives press releases and emails and all the relevant information, telling you that these are White House talking points. Which he and his colleagues then dutifully support.

Oh, and the whole idea that Romney is in trouble and needs to get his game going for this convention? Don’t take my word for it that it’s a White House talking point: read it on the White House website.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK…

This is a wonderful example of BBC political bias, in this case pro-Obama. Even better it is gloriously self-unaware.  It’s by Reggie Nadelson and it concerns a  corner of New York that traditionally votes Republican – the city’s holiday destination, Brighton Beach.

“Everyone smokes on Brighton Beach. The waiters, on their break, smoke. Over a bench not far away, an elderly couple in wide-brimmed hats raise a pair of nylon umbrellas against the sun and light up. But why is that slightly scary fellow staring at me? Then I realise it is the “Re-elect Obama” button on my jacket. This is a little bastion of Republicans in an overwhelmingly Democratic city.”

Yes, and the BBC remains a bastion of pro-Democrat pro-Obama sentiment, just as it was in 2008.

Hat-tip to the eagle eyed B-BBC reader for alerting me to this..

CAREFULLY OBSCURED FROM VIEW..

This rather interesting take on BBC reluctance to say anything critical of Obama was brought to my attention by one of our regular readers;

“Another failure by the Obama administration which is causing outrage over The Pond, yet the name of Ali Musa Daqduq cannot be found on the BBC News search engine.

http://www.michaelyon-online.com/letter-to-president-obama-in-reference-to-ali-musa-daqduq.htm

and a video of Alan West appears here:

http://dtrtministries.com/tag/ali-musa-daqduq/

It’s as if the BBC conceals things which show Obama in a poor light. But that couldn’t be…right?

OBAMANONICS

It’s the sheer infantilism of it that offends. The BBC glowingly reports that…

US President Barack Obama has said there is an “emerging consensus” that European countries must now focus on growing the State and the number of State workers jobs and growth.

Speaking after the G8 summit of some of the world’s leading economies, he said the US was confident that Europe can meet its challenges. President Obama said leaders had made good progress on a range of issues.

Obama said the meeting had been a success.

Well, when it comes to growth, Obama speaks with authority, having grown US National Debt by 50%. Still, that’s a mere trivial detail for the BBC so moving on…

The BBC’s Paul Adams at Camp David says both that communique and Mr Obama’s speech showed the US and French position had won out over Germany and Britain’s pro-austerity stance.

I wonder what “won over” means, Mr Adams? I heard Merkel state that Greece must honour the financial commitments it has made. Is that an example of a chastised German leader. I think that the BBC is running with the meme that “growth” (uncontrolled State spending, borrowing and taxing”) is the way forward and they will use this to beat poor hapless Cameron over the head between now and 2015. In the meantime, Balls and Miliband are now pretending that Labour did NOT wreck the economy and that “growth” is their favoured policy. This cannot end happily but the BBC are quite prepared to to look under the petticoats of this growth phantasm lest they catch a glimpse of the financial recklessness that dare not speak its name.

God And Man At The White House

During his entire Presidency, the BBC criticized, or gave plenty of unchallenged air time to critics of, George Bush’s religious faith. Sure, he wore it on his sleeve up to a point, but no more than many people in the US. For many people, this is an act of humility, an acknowledgment of a power greater than oneself. This kind of behavior is an anathema to most at the BBC, so it was always treated with disdain.

I’m sure everyone remembers Jeremy Paxman asking Tony Blair if his shared sense of faith with Bush bonded them, and giggled when asking if Blair had actually prayed with him. Most at the BBC never really understood Bush’s religious leanings, and in fact were quite frightened and concerned about the damage he did because of it. Justin Webb’s criticisms over his stopping federal funding for using embryos for stem-cell research come to mind.

In any case, the BBC was never shy about shining a harsh light on the religious faith of George Bush.

Now the current President also has a problem about public perception of His religious faith. We’ve all heard the BBC reminding us constantly that so many foolish United Statesians think He’s a Muslim. The fact is – and we learned this just recently on Today – that the President was now Christian because He went through a conversion.

With this in mind, one would think the astute producers in the BBC News division would leap at the chance to prove once and for all that these fools are wrong and that the President is really a Christian, and has just as much faith as George Bush. On Friday, the President gave an interview in which He stated that He prays “every night” and reads the Bible.

Praying and reading the Bible are part of his everyday life, President Obama said in a wide-ranging interview broadcast Friday.

Speaking with Barbara Walters, Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama also described how they involve their daughters in daily prayer.

“Michelle and I have not only benefited from our prayer life, but I think the girls have too,” the president told Walters. “We say grace before we eat dinner every night. We take turns.”

What a sickening display of religiosity, eh? I’m sure all the comedians on various BBC shows will be taking notes. And it gets worse:

When asked if he prays himself, the president said: “I do. Every night.”

Oh dear, oh dear. I await the howls of laughter echoing through the halls of Broadcasting House.

Why isn’t the BBC reporting this? Why isn’t the BBC making a fuss about His faith? Could it be that they don’t like such low behavior and don’t wish to call attention to it? Does this make the President less appealing to them and their fellow travelers? As they censor nearly every other bit of news which might cause consternation at the right kind of dinner parties, I won’t hold my breath on this one.

But wait, there’s more new proof on offer that the President is not a Muslim. It’s Haj time in the Mohammedan world, and the President’s grandmother has been caught lamenting that He needs to come back to the fold:

Grandma prays for Obama to embrace Islam

The Kenyan grandmother of US President Barack Obama who was on Haj pilgrimage to Makkah has said that she prayed for the American leader to convert to Islam, a newspaper said on Thursday.

“I prayed for my grandson Barack to convert to Islam,” said Haja Sarah Omar, 88, in an interview with Al-Watan daily held in Jeddah after she had performed Haj.

The paper said that Haja Omar was in Saudi Arabia on pilgrimage along with her son, Obama’s uncle Saeed Hussein Obama, and four of her grandchildren as guests of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.

And there you have it: Incontrovertible proof that the President is not a Muslim. Plus, there’s new proof that the President prays every night, reads the Bible, and seems to be as comfortable with His faith as Bush.

BBC: ZZzzzzzzzz

MAVERICK

I had to laugh at the BBC’s treatment of US General James Conway’s remarks that Obama’s deadline to get out of Afghanistan is encouraging the Taliban. The General was speaking common sense, of course, but he has committed the unspeakable crime of contradicting Obama and the BBC was not impressed. He was dismissed as “a maverick” on the Today programme. Yes, leave the expert opinion of those in the theatre of war to one side and better instead pay heed to strategic giants like Sir Jeremy Greenstock. (On at 8.29am to waffle about Iraq)

It’s not a big thing…

But it is irritating that the Beeb consistently reports allegations against those it supports only after they’ve responded to them. So while Obama’s illegal aunt was making headlines in the Sun, Mail, Times, Guardian, Express and over on Channel 4 hours ago, the Beeb only reports once it can lead with Obama’s response: Obama Unaware of Illegal Aunt