Quote

Even non-democratic allies no longer trust America. Barack Obama has alienated our most important and longest standing Arab allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Both the anti-Muslim Brotherhood and the anti-Iran Arab states have lost respect for him.

Ronald Reagan said, 'Trust, but verify.' President Obama is 'trust, but vilify.' He trusts our enemies and vilifies everyone who disagrees with him.

Folks know that while I respect Barack Obama and do not cheap-shot the president, I am very skeptical of his big government, nanny-state philosophy.

Obama believes in a big central government, where the federal government controls everything in our lives. That's socialism.

Obama is trying to paint us as a caricature, as if we're some bizarre individualists who are hardcore libertarians. It's a false dichotomy and intellectually lazy. Of course we believe in government. We think government should do what it does really well, but that it has limits.

Every president to hold office has espoused some version of Americanism - the truths that we hold self-evident, even when those truths are not always in evidence. But for all their grand rhetoric and mostly good deeds, none was able to seal the deal on the trifecta of equality, plurality and socioeconomic ascendancy. Obama has.

Republicans rarely criticize Obama for lack of empathy - in part because liberals have traditionally been seen as standing up for the weak and the vulnerable. Conservatives can be just as empathetic. But they believe that, in most cases, it's not government's role to be the primary dispenser of empathy.

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.

The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama's view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N.

Many conservatives were openly angry with the Bush administration over enormous government spending and the chaos in Iraq. I don't see as much independent thinking on the left, where President Obama is rarely criticized by his acolytes.