To keep the economy afloat, the White House cut the deals it felt it had to. Many, such as Obama’s agreement to extend all of the Bush tax cuts in 2010, were poorly received by Democrats. Now comes the payoff. The expiration of those cuts and the automatic reductions set to take effect at year’s end—the so-called fiscal cliff—mean that Obama and the Democrats can gain a huge source of new revenue by doing nothing at all. Republican priorities are the ones suddenly in peril. The combination of tax increases on the rich, higher capital-gains taxes, and sharp cuts in defense spending have congressional Republicans deeply worried. To mitigate these, they’ll have to bargain.
Despite their post-election tough talk, Republican leaders have dealt themselves a lousy hand. Obama can propose a “middle-class tax cut” for the 98 percent of American households earning less than $250,000 a year—while letting the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning more—and dare the Republicans to block it. If they do, everyone’s taxes will rise on Jan. 1. It’s true that going over the fiscal cliff, as some Democrats believe will happen, would set back the recovery and could eventually cause a recession. But Democratic leaders in Congress believe the public furor would be too intense for Republicans to withstand for long.
Going over the cliff would also weaken the Republicans’ greatest point of leverage: renewing their threat to default on the national debt. Right now, the Treasury expects to hit the debt ceiling in February. But if the cliff can’t be avoided, tax rates will rise and government coffers will swell, delaying the date of default—thus diminishing the Republicans’ advantage. Alice Rivlin, the founding director of the Office of Management and Budget and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says that “as quickly as the IRS began changing the withholding schedule, the date would be pushed back.”
Last night, at 11:18 PM Eastern time, FOX News called Ohio — and thus the presidency — for Barack Obama. The announcement followed closely on the heels of ones by NBC, MSNBC, and CBS, and appeared almost simultaneously with a similar declaration from CNN.
But before Mitt Romney would deliver his brief but gracious concession speech, and before the confetti would rain down in Chicago on a thrilling night for the Democratic Party, a minidrama was taking place on FOX News. Karl Rove, the mastermind of George W. Bush’s campaign strategies and the chief fundraiser of American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS (an organization that spent approximately $300 million this election cycle in an almost entirely unsuccessful series of advertising campaigns), insisted that the network had called Ohio too early.
“I don’t know what the outcome is going to be, but we’ve got to be careful about calling things when we have, like, 991 votes separating the two candidates and a quarter of the vote yet to count,” Rove said. “Even if they have made it on the basis of select precincts, I’d be very cautious about intruding into this process.”
Rove, of course, had a big dog in the fight: the near-total failure of his organizations’ efforts over the course of these past two years (echoing the dismal record of fellow Republican tycoon Sheldon Adelson) threatens his credibility as a savvy strategist and, thus, his ability to raise money in the future.
Even so, Rove’s impassioned opposition to the statistically-based consensus was startling in its self-certainty. It was as if, by the mere act of delaying the final announcement for just minutes or seconds more, Rove thought it possible to stave off — or even alter — reality itself. But at long last, the empirical world would wait no longer, and his fever dream finally met its bitter end.
It is precisely because Rove’s delusions echo the larger fantasies of the Republican Party that his earnest entreaties should rattle the moderate voices within a GOP struggling to make sense of its post-election blues. Indeed, his blunt refusal to accept the rapidly descending reality was not an exception, but the norm. Dick Morris predicted a landslide for Romney. George Will similarly forecasted a 321-217 electoral vote triumph. Michael Barone envisioned a nearly identical result of 315-223.
Meanwhile, the New York Times‘ Nate Silver — who first rose to stardom in 2008, when he correctly predicted the electoral outcomes in 49 of 50 states — had been steadfastly forecasting an Obama victory for months. As his stated probability crept steadily closer to 90% and then beyond, Silver’s detractors on the right multiplied. Examiner.com’s Dean Chambers infamously wrote, “Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice…” And MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough lambasted Silver as well, proclaiming, “Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they’re jokes.”
Unlike the analysis conducted by many of his conservative counterparts — to the extent that he has peers at all — Nate Silver’s predictions were grounded firmly in empirical data. He meticulously averaged, weighted, and adjusted polls based on data recency, the historical accuracy of the various polling firms, “house effects,” and so on. While not every aspect of his evaluations was made entirely transparent — every whizkid needs his secret sauce, after all — he explained the bulk of his seemingly alchemical methodology in column after column.
It is useful, then, to transpose the lessons of this Triumph of the Nerds onto the broader political struggle that just culminated in Barack Obama’s reelection last night. Just as Silver’s coolheaded, reason-based analysis prevailed over the flamboyant provocations of right-wing pundits in the months leading up to the election, it was the centrist and well-balanced vision for America that won over the majority of citizens in the voting booths yesterday.
Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are both deeply flawed (and often infuriating) entities, for a variety of reasons that could fill entire volumes of books. But their lack of conviction and courage was dwarfed by the monumental denialism of Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, whose deeply entrenched rage at the president was predicated on an increasingly tenuous grasp of reality.
The list could continue ad nauseum. But it is not simply the misstatement of fiction as fact that characterizes the Mitt Romney-era Republican Party; after all, one could easily compile an impressive list of whoppers told by Obama and his political supporters as well. What Mitt Romney failed to understand was that a platform of extremism — ranging from the “self-deportation” of illegal immigrants to his support of a constitutional ban on gay marriage to his pledge to reject even a 10-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax hikes — is not in line with the views of the American public.
On this issue, the fault lines within the Republican Party are already starting to widen. It is likely that a civil war of sorts is looming within the party, with the moderate wing led by Jeb Bush and Chris Christie facing off against the Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann types for the ideological future of their party.
Today, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standardhas written, “No doubt the media will insist that Republicans must change, must sprint to the center, must embrace social liberalism, must accept that America is destined to play a less dominant role in the world. All that is hogwash, which is why Republicans are likely to reject it. Their ideology is not a problem.”
It is this brand of thinking that the Republican Party must bury if it wishes to emerge from the throes of an eminently avoidable defeat. As Joel Benenson wrote in today’s New York Times, “The president’s victory was a triumph of vision, not of demographics. He won because he articulated a set of values that define an America that the majority of us wish to live in: A nation that makes the investments we need to strengthen and grow the middle class. A nation with a fair tax system, and affordable and excellent education for all its citizens. A nation that believes that we’re most prosperous when we recognize that we are all in it together.”
Mitt Romney was never able to peer beyond the narrow passions of an inflamed base for long enough to understand that the country, as always, is changing. Gone are the days of sole reliance on older white voters. Similarly, a slow national metamorphosis has eliminated the Republican Party’s once-solid, but now anachronistic and non-existent, competitive advantage on social issues. Even on foreign policy, the baton has largely been ceded to a president once derided as naive and unprepared.
The Republican Party of 2012 must see its decisive defeat as an opportunity. Making inroads with Latinos and African-Americans should be a priority. Abandoning its puritanical image — including some truly appalling perspectives on rape — is just as important, especially as the younger generation comes of age in a country of broad diversity in race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and many other facets of life. (As Matthew Dowd so eloquently put it, Republicans have become a “‘Mad Men’ party in a ‘Modern Family’ America.”) Reasserting the GOP’s hegemony on economic and fiscal responsibility will take much work after its free-spending Bush years and its ideological rigidity during the Obama era, but it is not impossible.
Already, there are signs of a Republican thaw. House Speaker John Boehner, appearing today at the Capitol, signaled an openness to raising revenues in exchange for reform of entitlements and the tax code. “Mr. President, this is your moment,” he said. “We’re ready to lead, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans.” This is a far cry from Mitch McConnell’s notorious statement in an October 2010 interview: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Now that the GOP has failed at this singular task, perhaps it can take a further step away from the precipice by cleansing its ranks of the vitriol and stubbornness that so characterized its behavior in President Obama’s first term. Today, Jon Huntsman’s strategist, John Weaver, seemed to grasp the significance of this necessary transformation: “We have a choice: we can become a shrinking regional party of middle-aged and older white men, or we can fight to become a national governing party. And to do the latter we have to fix our Hispanic problem as quickly as possible, we’ve got to accept science and start calling out these false equivalencies when they occur within our party about things that are just not true, and not tolerate the intolerant.”
Such a reformation will require the elimination of the type of epistemic closure suffered by Karl Rove on Election Night. It will require a reorientation away from 1950s-style conservatism and towards a more modern variant that embraces our nation’s diversity and encourages the expansion of marriage to include same-sex couples. And it will require the implementation of a form of self-policing to prevent the party of conservatism from devolving into an aspiring theocracy.
In this sense, Barack Obama’s reelection has done the GOP a favor. It has acted as a natural corrective of a national party gone astray, and it establishes in precise numerical terms the unease with which Americans viewed an increasingly unhinged Republican Party. It serves as a reminder that, while we will tolerate all sorts of folly in the name of entertainment and politics, we draw the line at ideological insanity. For the sake of all American citizens, one can only hope the Republican reincarnation will begin in earnest today.
Today, America goes to the polls. Mercifully, nearly two years of incessant campaign coverage (including nearly 30 presidential debates in total) will come to an end, assuming no last-minute recounts or hijinks. But barring a surprise wave election, in which one of the two major parties suffers massive defeats in the presidential race as well as in both houses of Congress, our bipartisan gridlock is likely to continue.
That even the apportionment of blame for this sad state of affairs is hotly debated is proof positive of the lengths to which we’ve entangled ourselves into partisan herds. Republican obstinacy faces off against Democratic radicalism in the eyes of their respective adherents. Most problematically, one of the few remaining points of bipartisan coordination is seen in the increasing trend towards ideological rigidity – on both sides.
I have seen this in my own relationship to the political sphere over the last four years. In 2008, I was an undergraduate student voting, without overwhelming enthusiasm, for Barack Obama. I was never able to locate in myself the passionate embrace of the Illinois senator that had so enraptured many of my peers. I respected John McCain and would not have been severely disappointed had he won.
Four years later, I admit to frequent panic at the thought of a Mitt Romney presidency. My discomfort with the Republican platform has morphed into a visceral disgust for most of its standard-bearers. I mock the minor gaffes committed by the tireless tag-team of Romney and Paul Ryan while largely excusing Obama’s as mere faux pas. I deride the elitism of Romney’s “47%” commentary while allowing Obama’s mention of “[clinging] to guns and religion” to fade into the past.
To be clear, I am not peddling false equivalency. Anyone who has followed my blog on a casual basis for the past several months would have little doubt as to where I lay the vast majority of the blame for the current state of American politics. But my mounting distaste for Republican policy and rhetoric has perceptibly nudged me further in the opposite direction. My own views have solidified, less the result of conducting painstaking research and more a visceral reaction to what I viewed as inflammatory and bitter actions from my ideological opposites.
It seems clear that this division is infecting all aspects of our political culture. Mitt Romney has been downright evasive regarding the release of his tax returns, but Harry Reid’s absurd claim that Romney may not have paid any taxes at all for a decade was greeted with cheers by many on the left. Would this have happened before: a party so decrying the missteps of its opponents that it gleefully fights unreasonableness with rhetorical extremism of its own?
A similar vortex has swallowed the debate over national healthcare. When Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act devolved into absolutist obstructionism without any hint of compromise, many of us (including myself) gradually moved from cautious support of the bill to full-throated endorsement. Unfortunately, a real debate is sorely needed to determine what exactly can reduce the skyrocketing costs associated with healthcare coverage in this country. But the decision by one party to halt all discussions need not be met with equivalent foot-stomping by its counterparts.
How, then, should we respond? And by “we” I refer not only to liberals and others who share my dismal outlook on the collective Republican identity: I include also Republicans whose own more sensible positions have shifted slowly rightward under the rising pressure of a red-vs.-blue war. If the opposing party is truly as denialist or radical or obstinate as we believe, what options do we have?
On a practical level, there may be little that can be achieved. But ratcheting down hyperbolism and the most abrasive rhetoric will certainly help. Whatever competitive advantage the expression of vitriol may once have facilitated in shaping public perception has certainly evaporated in the face of equally irate counterattacks.
More crucially, detaching ourselves from the entrenched binary mentality that handcuffs us to our respective parties will allow us to reevaluate our elected leaders from a more clear-headed standpoint. All too often, a unified and angry opposition has compelled many of us to move from a mild preference for a certain party platform to an enthusiastic embrace of even its more dubious propositions – including policies that we once opposed.
This is how, for example, President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program was rightly castigated by liberals as an existential threat to the public’s constitutional freedoms, while Barack Obama’s extrajudicial assassination of American citizens has prompted little more than muted protests. It’s how many Democrats scoffed at Bush’s muscular use of drones while praising Obama’s decision to then ramp up the rate of drone strikes.
As liberals, our primary responsibility is to a set of ideals, not to a thoroughly vetted, compromised, and stripped-down document attempting to represent the broad tent that is the Democratic Party. Conservatives, too, must remember that their own principles of lean government and open markets should trump the narrow interests of a Republican Party still beholden to the incoherence of Tea Party demagogues and xenophobic agitators.
For the next four years, regardless of who wins tonight, my goal is to avoid the reflexive castigation of conservative proposals that has steadily crept into my decision-making process. A nation with two healthy parties is a far stronger one than a nation with none. But it’s up to all of us to subject our ideological compatriots to the same degree of thoughtful critique as we extend to our political opposites.
Disasters are live-action infomercials for big government. A crisis will flex and strain the muscles and tendons of big government until government’s nipples bleed under their racing tank-top: the taut glutes of regulation, the shredded abs of infrastructure investment, the rippling quads of highly-trained and well-paid unionized workers with real safety standards.
At one extreme you have the ripped, disciplined, and prepared Michael Phelps of government springing into action. At the other extreme you have the malnourished, drug-addled, and skittish government wholly unable to prepare or respond to a disaster. Think Haiti after the earthquake.
There are plutocrats who in their pillow talk believe that if you are poor enough to be hurt by a storm, then that is the natural consequence of your foolish choice to be poor. If natural disasters create the occasional Malthusian spike in immiseration and death, then it will be good for dividends. At best, human suffering that doesn’t affect me is not my problem. The stalwarts of the 1% would gladly replace FEMA with the Federal Country Club Maintenance Administration.
Right now the merit of big, burly, over-reaching, centralized, government contrasts sharply with the exuberant villainization of all things public by both parties. Both parties love austerity while loathing debt, spending, regulation, public workers, and taxes. Both candidates wring their hands about the debt and compete over who is most on the free enterprise system’s nuts. The difference between Obama and Romney is in degree.
Like Mr. Clinton, President Obama restored FEMA’s professionalism, effectiveness, and reputation. But would Mitt Romney destroy the agency again? Yes, he would. As everyone now knows — despite the Romney campaign’s efforts to Etch A Sketch the issue away — during the primary Mr. Romney used language almost identical to Mr. Allbaugh’s, declaring that disaster relief should be turned back to the states and to the private sector.
The best line on this, I have to admit, comes from Stephen Colbert: “Who better to respond to what’s going on inside its own borders than the state whose infrastructure has just been swept out to sea?”
Look, Republicans love to quote Ronald Reagan’s old joke that the most dangerous words you can hear are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Of course they’ll do their best, whenever they’re in power, to destroy an agency whose job is to say exactly that. And yes, it’s hypocritical that the right-wing news media are now attacking Mr. Obama for, they say, not helping enough people.
Back to the politics. Some Republicans have already started using Sandy as an excuse for a possible Romney defeat. It’s a weak argument: state-level polls have been signaling a clear and perhaps widening Obama advantage for weeks. But as I said, to the extent that the storm helps Mr. Obama, it’s well deserved.
The fact is that if Mr. Romney had been president these past four years the federal response to disasters of all kinds would have been far weaker than it was. There would have been no auto bailout, because Mr. Romney opposed the federal financing that was crucial to the rescue. And FEMA would have remained mired in Bush-era incompetence.
So this storm probably won’t swing the election — but if it does, it will do so for very good reasons.
If there has been one enduring lesson from his career, it is that the Big Dog is resilient. He can be disgraced, impeached, defeated — but he comes back. The full spectacle of this has been on riveting, if raspy, display in the closing days of the presidential campaign.
Mr. Clinton, 66, has jumped into a hopscotch of battleground states in what — depending on his wife’s future plans — may or may not be his last campaign tour as a Super Surrogate. He is scheduled to appear, if not be heard, at four stops across Pennsylvania on Monday.
He also includes a fair amount in his speeches about Bill Clinton: his enthusiasm (higher than four years ago), his legacy (“I am the only living former president that ever gave you a budget surplus”) and, yes, his wife, the mention of whom brings big applause and the occasional “We love you, Hillary!” cry from the crowd.
Whoever wins Tuesday, the 2012 campaign has solidified (or restored) Mr. Clinton’s status as the hardest-working man in a game he loves and plays like no one else. “The master, Bill Clinton,” Mr. Obama called him on Saturday, hailing his predecessor as “a great president and a great friend.”
Unsaid, at least here, is that Mr. Clinton has also been a salvation to Mr. Obama. He gave what was widely considered the best speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., rocking a strong endorsement of the president while arguably conveying the re-election rationale better than Mr. Obama or his campaign has.
Pop star Katy Perry is sporting a skin-tight minidress with President Barack Obama’s campaign slogan ‘‘Forward’’ emblazoned across it at the president’s rally in Milwaukee.
Perry came on stage at Saturday’s event initially wearing a red, white and blue dress and holding a microphone shaped like the Statue of Liberty’s torch.
But after her first song, a cover of Al Green’s soul hit ‘‘Let’s Stay Together,’’ she tossed aside the dress to reveal the bright blue minidress.
Obama’s slogan ‘‘Forward’’ is also Wisconsin’s state motto.
Or more specifically, Nate Silver. The New York Times‘ resident stats wizard now has Barack Obama at an 85.1% chance of winning the election on Tuesday:
There are not really any recent precedents in which a candidate has led by something like 49 percent to 46 percent in the final polling average, as Mr. Obama does now in Ohio, and has wound up losing the state. That does not mean such misses cannot or will not occur: there have only been a few elections when we have had as much state polling data as we do now, which is why the model allows for the possibility of a 1980-type error based on how the national polls performed that year.
But the reasonably high level of confidence that the model expresses in Mr. Obama’s chances of winning Ohio and other states reflects the historical reality that the polling average normally does pretty well.
That brings us to Pennsylvania — where the forecast model puts Mr. Obama’s chances at better than 95 percent.
One poll of Pennsylvania on Saturday, from Susquehanna Polling and Research, showed a different result, with the two candidates tied at 47 percent. But in context, this is not such a great poll for Mr. Romney.
The polling firm has had a very strong Republican lean this cycle — about five percentage points relative to the consensus, a much larger lean than firms like Rasmussen Reports and Public Policy Polling that are often criticized for having partisan results. Susquehanna is the only pollster to have shown Mr. Romney ahead in Pennsylvania at any point in the race, as they did on one occasion in February and another in October (Mr. Romney led by four points in their previous poll of the state). Perhaps they will be proven right, but it is usually a bad bet to bank on the one poll rather than the many.
Still, Mr. Romney’s campaign is making a late play for Pennsylvania with advertising dollars and a visit there on Sunday.
That is probably a reasonable strategy, even though Mr. Romney’s chances of pulling out a victory in Pennsylvania are slim. What makes it reasonable is that Mr. Romney’s alternative paths to an Electoral College victory are not looking all that much stronger.
Today, Michael Bloomberg sprung a November surprise with his “endorsement” of Barack Obama. But it wasn’t exactly…wholehearted. Here’s a segment:
In 2008, Obama ran as a pragmatic problem-solver and consensus-builder. But as president, he devoted little time and effort to developing and sustaining a coalition of centrists, which doomed hope for any real progress on illegal guns, immigration, tax reform, job creation and deficit reduction. And rather than uniting the country around a message of shared sacrifice, he engaged in partisan attacks and has embraced a divisive populist agenda focused more on redistributing income than creating it.
Hm. But that still wasn’t as much of an eye-opener as this one by Likud-maniac Alan Dershowitz:
With regards to Iran, which poses the most immediate threat to the security of the United States and its allies, most especially Israel, the policy of the Obama administration is crystal clear: It has taken containment off the table and kept the military option on the table. Everyone hopes that the military option will not have to be employed, since it would entail considerable loss of life, especially among Israeli civilians who would be targeted by Hezbollah rockets fired in retaliation against any attack on Iran.
But the best way to avoid the need for military action is for the Iranian mullahs to believe that the United States will never allow them to develop nuclear weapons. If they believe that reality then the pain of the sanctions will pressure them to give up their nuclear ambitions. President Obama has clearly stated that he is not bluffing when he says that his administration will never allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. A secondterm president generally has more credibility than a firstterm president when it comes to threatening military action.
The Obama administration has strongly supported Israel’s security by helping to construct the Iron Dome anti-rocket system, by backing Israel’s responses to rocket attacks from Gaza and by coordinating closely with its military.
When it comes to reenergizing the moribund peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, Romney has said that he would do nothing other than kick the can down the road.
President Obama, on the other hand, would almost certainly try to bring the parties together to achieve a two-state solution that guaranteed Israel’s security while allowing the Palestinians to govern themselves.
Could be just Chris Christie continuing his role as the GOP’s Bill Clinton: the hell-raisin’, charismatic star that articulates his candidate’s vision more clearly and convincingly than the guy himself can. Or maybe it’s a sign of some as-yet-unknown rift between Mitt Romney and the New Jersey governor. Either way, Christie’s effusive praise of Barack Obama for his role in Hurricane Sandy relief efforts has raised some eyebrows:
Chris Christie was supposed to be one of Mitt Romney‘s most aggressive surrogates, constantly attacking President Obama in the waning days of the presidential campaign.
Instead, Mr. Christie, the governor of New Jersey, has spent the last several hours repeatedly heaping praise on Mr. Obama as effectively leading the federal government’s response to the huge storm that slammed into his state on Monday.
Eight days ago, Mr. Christie described Mr. Obama as “blindly walking around the White House looking for a clue.” On Tuesday morning, he was effusive about Mr. Obama’s administration, calling the storm response “wonderful,” “excellent” and “outstanding.”
The overnight transformation of Mr. Christie from political slasher to disaster governor is a reflection of the magnitude of the devastation in New Jersey. Asked on Fox News whether Mr. Romney might tour damage of the state, Mr. Christie was dismissive.
“I have no idea, nor am I the least bit concerned or interested. I have a job to do in New Jersey that is much bigger than presidential politics,” Mr. Christie said. “If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don’t know me.”
Meanwhile, in the too-good-to-resist department, WorldNetDaily‘s Drew Zahnwent there:
Journalist and White House correspondent William Koenig explained to WND that some of the United States’ most catastrophic storms and events have correlated closely with the nation’s God-defying attempts to divide the land of Israel.
“When we put pressure on Israel to divide their land, we have enormous, record-setting events, often within 24 hours,” Koenig told WND. “Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 – we have experienced over 90 record-setting, all-time events as we have acted against Israel. And the greater the pressure on Israel to ‘cooperate,’ the greater the catastrophe.”
Some of Koenig’s examples are startling.
“Hurricane Sandy is expected to come ashore in the Northeast on the 21st anniversary of the ‘Perfect Storm,’” Koenig related. “That record-setting storm devastated the New England coast as President George H.W. Bush co-sponsored the Madrid Conference from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, 1991.”
At the Conference, Bush broke from President Reagan’s more pro-Israel policies in the attempt to forge an Arab-Israeli “peace” plan that included recognizing a Palestinian “right” to biblically Jewish lands. But while Bush was in Spain advocating a division of Israel, the “Perfect Storm” – so named for the ferociously destructive way in which a cold nor’easter combined with Hurricane Grace – was lashing the U.S. seaboard at home.
“The Perfect Storm sent 30-foot ocean waves into Bush’s Kennebunkport home as he was calling on Israel to give up the West Bank (Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem),” Koenig told WND. “The Madrid ‘land for peace’ Conference began the Israeli-Palestinian peace process that Mitt Romney advocated in the debates, even as yet another ‘perfect storm’ is brewing offshore.”
The original Perfect Storm formed on Oct. 28, 1991, and dissipated on Nov. 4 – correlating almost perfectly with dates of the Madrid Conference. The storm was blamed for 13 deaths and over $200 million in damages, including those to Bush’s vacation home.
Similarly, Hurricane Katrina, the deadliest and costliest hurricane in U.S. history, hit Aug. 29, 2005; the storm began the day President George W. Bush congratulated Israel for evacuating Gaza and called on the Israelis and Palestinians to move onto his two-state plan.
So what national iniquity specifically caused Hurricane Sandy, then?
“Both political parties have now accepted, specifically, a two-state solution to peace in the Mideast, dividing Israel’s land between Israel and a Palestinian state,” Koenig told WND. “And now this hurricane story is going to disrupt political campaigning and possibly affect voter turnout for both parties.
“There has been a lot of behind-the-scenes pressure on Israel by the Obama administration, to not act on Iran prior to the election,” Koenig continued, “but the most succinct correlation is that both parties have officially endorsed the two-state solution.”
Koenig also pointed to Romney’s statements at the last presidential debate, when the Republican declared, “Are Israel and the Palestinians closer to reaching a peace agreement? No, they haven’t had talks in two years. We have not seen the progress we need to have.”
Koenig, however, warned that making “progress” on the land-for-peace talks, which would see Israel surrender land to a Palestinian state, is exactly what could be prompting these catastrophic weather “acts of God.”
Nice to see Hurricane Sandy spared the nut jobs. Carry on as usual, gentlemen.
