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President Obama appears to be able to suffer any insult to his country, with the limitless ability to respond to sharp criticism of America with quick apologies for the faults of his countrymen. But as Robert Gibbs tells us, he is “furious” when personally criticized by a general or his staff.

Hot Air reports that Obama’s popularity rating in California, one of the most reliable of the blue states, has fallen below 50%. A floundering war in Afghanistan (still!), Guantanamo alive and kicking (still!) and his professorial attitude toward the BP oil spill have the left demoralized. Some are calling for Obama to adopt the Bush Attitude (although they use terms like “kick butt” rather than “emulate Bush”.) I think the left is too hard on Obama. Poor Barack. His only self-described management skill was running a “pretty good campaign”. He is still learning the job, and unlike Clinton, Carter, or FDR, he’s a legislator at heart. Legislators make lousy managers, and the President is Manager in Chief. Perhaps another blue ribbon commission can be formed to determine what on the job training courses we can give the boy President.

General McChrystal is out, having done the unspeakable. No, not insubordination; he agrees with his orders and has been dutifully carrying the water assigned to him. No, he didn’t directly criticize the Obama-COIN policy; he agrees with it. He’s out because he criticized the President. One thing Obama evidently has learned is that he can fire his people. At least he did it with some class, recognizing that the General is a true American hero, with the attendant courage and valor our heros exhibit. Too bad this hero criticized Obama and company.

I guess if you have to have one fault, that may be the one to have.

Richard Fernandez has a good review of the situation, including the problems facing Obama now that he has turned to another American hero, General Petraeus, to pick up the slack:

Military doctrine was probably never Obama’s strong suit. Politics was his primary concern. One of the reasons McChrystal had been selected in the first place, as Glenn Reynolds has pointed out, was that he was not General “Betray-Us”, burdened with the baggage of the Iraq Surge. But now Petraeus military talent may be more important than his political associations. The Washington Post’s description of the flurry of crisis meetings before and after McChrystal’s resignation shows the depth of the crisis into which the administration had been plunged.

In Iraq, Petraeus was able to balance the COIN strategy against military requirements, and the military personnel charged with the tasks respected and honored him. McChrystal hasn’t earned the same respect. One of the criticisms of McChrystal from the fighting men and women is the strict rules of engagement:

McChrystal has issued some of the strictest directives to avoid civilian casualties that the U.S. military has ever encountered in a war zone. It’s “insurgent math,” as he calls it – for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies. He has ordered convoys to curtail their reckless driving, put restrictions on the use of air power and severely limited night raids. He regularly apologizes to Hamid Karzai when civilians are killed, and berates commanders responsible for civilian deaths. “For a while,” says one U.S. official, “the most dangerous place to be in Afghanistan was in front of McChrystal after a ‘civ cas’ incident.” The ISAF command has even discussed ways to make not killing into something you can win an award for: There’s talk of creating a new medal for “courageous restraint,” a buzzword that’s unlikely to gain much traction in the gung-ho culture of the U.S. military.

But however strategic they may be, McChrystal’s new marching orders have caused an intense backlash among his own troops. Being told to hold their fire, soldiers complain, puts them in greater danger. “Bottom line?” says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers’ lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing.” …

McChrystal may have sold President Obama on counterinsurgency, but many of his own men aren’t buying it.

It doesn’t help that the General, asking for up to 150,000 troops, was given 21,000, a politician’s idea of “compromise”. While General Petraeus may be able to pull Afghanistan back from the brink, we shouldn’t invest too much hope in the prospect: without the resources, and a time-line of about a year, the outlook is pretty grim.

Thin skin helps you peel potatoes, so perhaps Obama’s thin skin will help us win in Afghanistan. As long as General Petraeus refrains from saying bad things about him or his buddies.

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Dana the Magnificent, aka Dana Loesch, is one of the new faces on the political scene, and a leader in the nascent Tea Party movement. Prior to the demonization of dissent by the left, Dana was best known as a “mommie blogger” with wit, wisdom and a realistic outlook. She suffered the slings and arrows of intense hate from the left after expressing her political views, and now has settled into her role with calm determination. There was a time I was afraid she would hang up her blogging pen, but she survived the onslaught and soldiers on.

While I’m more of a libertarian Republican, and not a member per se of a tea party, I’m more than happy with the movement itself. Not because I agree with everything everyone in that diverse movement says, but because of what Dana the Magnificent has identified:

Not only has this movement affected Democrat primaries (embattled Reid? Moderate Lincoln?) and dragged them back to center but now we’ve also co-opted K Street. Yes. We did it. No one except for perhaps a group at which I’ve thrown some daggers at previously sits down at a table and does anything they don’t want to do. Grassroots doesn’t compromise. You can’t play by the Constitution? You get bulldozed (Scozzafava). This is something utterly foreign to the left, who, in exchange for notoriety and favors, traded movement sovereignty and now operate as blatant shills for The Man.

Dana’s post is due to a mention in a Playboy article titled “The Rogues of K-Street“. Playboy has articles? You learn something every day.

The reality is the Tea Party as we know it will cease to exist within an election cycle. Its ideas won’t go away, but most of its leaders will. That’s because most self-appointed leaders in this world simply don’t know how to win.

Dana’s quote is clarified in her blog. While publications like the Economist fret that the Tea Party movement will move Republicans to the dreaded right and political obscurity, Dana recognizes a hard truth: the Tea Party movement will force Republicans back to their roots. And in so doing will kill itself.

Somehow, I think Dana the Magnificent will survive.

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And the political class wonders why there’s an anti-incumbent mood in the country …

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While President Obama continues the blame game, creatively finding new and different ways to say “it’s Bush’s fault!”, economists are starting to note how much the Obama Administration has done to prolong the recession.

Cato’s Markk Calabria notes that economists from the Federal Reserve banks in New York and San Francisco and the University of Michigan have mapped the problem:

For instance the authors find that during the first part of the current recession, labor force participation remained high, despite increasing unemployment, yet starting in May 2009 the labor force participation rate fell at its steepest rate since the 1950s.

The authors also focus on what economists call “Okun’s Law” – which shows a relationship between GDP growth and employment. Historically that Okun’s Law has shown that for every 2% GDP falls below trend, unemployment increases about 1 percent. Under the Bush half of this recession, that historical relationship continued to hold. Yet under Obama it broke down, and not in a good way.

The paper also examines the relationship between unemployment and posted job vacancies, called the “Beveridge curve” by economists. They also find that the Obama economy has been far outside of this historical relationship, so growth in vacancies but little improvement in the unemployment numbers.

Last month’s dismal unemployment numbers showed the ineptitude of this administration in managing the economy, even given super majorities in Congress and getting every piece of their “stimulus” plan passed. Hearing the “Bush did it!” mantra is getting old.

A double dip recession would damage our country in deep and serious ways. It is time for the administration to turn from their rush headlong into the folly of excessive government spending and bring some stability to the financial and regulatory systems. That is the only way to inspire some confidence by business. And create jobs.

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Corey Chambliss notes a few interesting things about this year’s crop of minority GOP candidates:

Are these Republican candidates masochists, or worse, “confused”? The latter condescension is worthy of abject contempt for its implication: Conservative minorities must be somehow led astray by distracting red herrings, in turn violating their own political self interest. Djou, a graduate of the Wharton School and the University of Southern California Law School, is presumably aware of the two parties’ distinctions. Marco Rubio may have become familiar with our political system while serving as the Speaker of Florida’s House of Representatives. West—a retired Army lieutenant colonel and one of 32 African-American Republicans running for Congress this year—presumably learned the tenets of the Republican Party while earning at least one of two master’s degrees.

All three of these candidates will appear on a general election ballot this November for reasons other than some sort of collective confusion. What drew these disparate men from varying backgrounds to the so-called “Party of No”? In examining the ideas that encompass these broadly diverse candidacies, the keys can be found to the intellectual rebirth of the Republican Party. Some may consider a person’s race and party label to be two oppositional ideas, but a national discussion of how the two are reconciled would be a conversation of first-rate intelligence.

Chambliss’ entire post is certainly worth reading, so take a look.