From Monday night’s Fox News All-Stars.
On President Obama’s Rose Garden remarks on the economy Monday:
It’s classic Obama. First of all, it’s about targeting tax cuts.
This is how liberals operate. You raise rates across the board, and then the government will deign to return some of the money on a targeted tax cut, meaning — if you do exactly as they say. … The government thinks it know how to redirect your capital in a superior way. So that’s number one, it’s a classic liberal way to operate, whereas Republicans want lower rates across the board and eliminate the targeting of tax cuts, as you had in the ‘86 tax bill, the Reagan-Bradley bill.
But secondly … is the way Obama dealt with this. He said Republicans have to consider whether they want to act in the national interest or pursue their political interest in November. This is how he treats every issue. He never will credit the sincerity or the logic of an opposition argument.
On whether ideology will keep Obama from changing his position on allowing the upper-income Bush tax cuts to expire:
I’m not sure it’s entirely ideological. I think part of this is pure narcissism. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say I changed my mind or I was wrong.
On Obama’s recent reaffirmation of support for the Ground Zero mosque:
He is walking back his walk-back. At the beginning … he said he supports the mosque. He was understood as a supporter of the mosque. A day later, after there was a lot of reaction against that, he said he wasn’t speaking about the wisdom [of building it], only about defending rights.
Now it looks as if … politically he decided he’s been placed in the camp of supporters of the mosque one way or another, despite his alleged ambivalence or agnosticism on the issue of whether it’s wise or not. So he might as well jump in whole hog if he gave the impression of supporting it. This is a guy who has been generous in giving advice and wisdom to everybody from the Cambridge police to the Honduran Supreme Court, so it’s odd that on this issue he husbands his idea about the wisdom of the mosque.