I made this video because I could not help imagining Obama’s conversation with David Axelrod over making him a dog-eating meme laughingstock until the end of time.

The Obama campaign is working hard to create distractions from Obama’s record. The image of the Romney’s Irish setter, Seamus, having bouts of diarrhea in his kennel strapped on the roof of the family station wagon during a family vacation in 1983 must have looked like the perfect way to demonize Romney.

Then a Daily Caller commenter named “Flatfoot” ruined everything. He reminded the Daily Caller’s humor blogger, Jim Treacher, that Obama boasted of eating dog meat during his youth in Indonesia. When PETA and DogsAgainstRomney.com tried to whitewash this as cultural and/or a youthful indiscretion, Treacher published a YouTube video of the dog-eating passage being read aloud by Obama himself for the audiobook version of his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. (The link has a bonus video of the “Morning Joe” contributors on MSNBC barely able to discuss the topic for laughing.) Now #ObamaEatsDogs is a hashtag on Twitter.

Ace, et al., have collected some especially delicious Photoshops — here are a couple of samples:

See Treacher for many more hilarious Obama dog-eating Photoshops.

Dear Keith Koffler, the White House reporter who blogs at White House Dossier, has rounded up the best tweets on #ObamaDogRecipes.

Michelle Malkin notes this scandal has given a sinister “new flavor” to the Obama school chant from 2008 — and links to the coverage at her new site, Twitchy.

And Allahpundit turned up a new Downfall parody where Hitler discovers that Obama has eaten his dog:

If you enjoy this video, I would love to make more. However, Xtranormal charges for characters and scenery. I take care of my father for room and board while I’m recovering my health and creating a career that will support me in the future. So if this video made you laugh and you can spare a few bucks, I’ll use the money to cover some pressing medical issues, make more videos and to buy the tools I need to improve this blog and make money. Thank you!

Update, 4/20/12, Fri.: Thank you, Prof. Jacobson, for making me “Post of the Day” at Legal Insurrection. Welcome, Legal Insurrection readers! For my readers, if you click the link, you will see a car bumper decorated in a fashion often seen in areas with high concentrations of openly lesbian liberals. But not one “Obama 2012″ sticker. Hmmmmm. I wonder what to make of that.

Update, 4/26/12, Thurs.: Allahpundit at Hot Air features a delicious clip from MSNBC (!) of David Axelrod suddenly eager to change the subject from dogs.

This video is about 30 minutes, but it is a handy summary of Obama’s record on Israel. It is important because what Obama says and what he promises always have to be tracked. What he says must be checked to see if it is consistent with other statements on that issue — or if what he said was what a particular audience wanted to hear for him to get what he wanted. His promises must be tracked to see what he actually does since he often reneges or he fulfills his promises in a way that betrays its recipients. Obama’s track record on Israel is particularly appalling.

Dear Jeff Dunetz, aka Yid with Lid, asks, “Can you judge Obama by his Jew-hating friends?”

Yes, you can, and that judgment was very influential in my vote against Obama in 2008, thanks to the reporting of Ben Shapiro, who is now an editor for Breitbart.com — and whom I got to meet at CPAC last month (thank you, donors!).

“From the people who brought you hope and change“: White House reporter Keith Koffler explains how Obama is now setting up the Republicans to take the blame for all his failures:

Obama must make his proposals as big a deal as possible, so that everyone knows how hard he’s “trying to help.” That’s why he’s scheduled an address to Congress. No higher profile than that.

And he must calibrate his ideas as carefully as possible so that they seem like they should be palatable to the GOP. He’ll offer ideas that some Republicans have supported, but which in the current high-deficit environment will be rejected.

Then he will talk about his largely meaningless initiatives every chance he gets. And then later, every chance he gets, he will talk about how Republicans rejected them and ruined his noble crusade.

As a sociopath, Obama takes advantage of the fact that honest people believe everyone is honest and don’t check out everything they’re told, especially when they believe the media will check for them. Since the mainstream media almost never check anything Obama says and ignore and suppress the reporting of the people who do, Obama confidently told one of his biggest whoppers this week, “I have continued to underscore the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover.” Jazz Shaw at Hot Air supplies a convenient list of the job-killing regulatory burdens and uncertainty imposed by the Obama administration:

This is the same administration which is about to cause rolling blackouts and skyrocketing energy costs in Texas because of cross state emission standards. It’s the same president who is jacking up the CAFE standards to the point where automobile prices will rise, assuming Detroit can meet them at all. This is the president who used overly burdensome regulations to create a de facto permitorium on gulf coast drilling costing us tens of thousands of jobs and God only knows how much domestic energy stores. And this administration has used the regulatory powers of the NLRB to effectively shut down an entire new production plant for Boeing.

Andrew Stiles at National Review Online has a more detailed list of “Ten Job-Destroying Regulations.” In addition, the withdrawal of Constellation Energy from a project to build a nuclear power plant in Maryland explained in this letter is another example of how the Obama administration uses regulations and bait-and-switch tactics to create uncertainty to advance an anti-jobs, anti-cheap-energy agenda with plausible deniability.

Last week Allan Lichtman, a professor at American University, renewed his 2010 prediction that Obama will win in 2012. Prof. Lichtman developed a system of 13 keys to winning the presidential election in 1981 that has correctly predicted the winner of the last seven elections. According to Prof. Lichtman, only six keys are needed to win and Obama has nine (or eight, if the $500 million squandered on Solyndra becomes Obama’s Enron scandal, as it should).

I think Prof. Lichtman is correct, although for different reasons. My observation is that the GOP field is more concerned with the social conservative determination to use government to deny equality to gays and lesbians and pregnancy choice rights to women. However, neither of those issues threatens the economy or the republic. I think the Left is correct in asserting that the social conservative agenda is identical to a promise to impose theocracy. The inability of the Right to see the totalitarian nature of social conservatism when it is a political agenda to use government force where persuasion has failed mirrors the inability of idealistic Leftists to grasp that you can’t have free markets (aka capitalism) and socialism at the same time because there is no correct way to have a socialist planned economy that isn’t immediately both totalitarian and corrupt.

Currently the Right is treating these concerns with dismissive contempt — much to its peril — see Kathy Shaidle, Sister Toldjah and Byron York — perhaps because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Progressives fear theocracies, not socialism. Since they believe the forces that create prosperity are unknowable and have a cargo cult mentality, they will never believe that Republicans reject Obama’s proposals based on sound economic principles of how wealth is generated. As for independents: they hate theocracies and have a childlike faith that the media are unbiased and will warn them when any candidate or politician is lying. Plus, they only tune in to the political process to find out who is the highest bidder for their vote. Add in the social conservatives who love big government and therefore won’t vote for fiscal conservative Republicans and Obama has his winning coalition.

Update, 9/16/11, Fri.: My thanks to M. Simon, who blogs at Power and Control and Classical Values, for writing about this post and linking it. I particularly appreciate that the text chosen chosen for emphasis is, “The inability of the Right to see the totalitarian nature of social conservatism when it is a political agenda to use government force where persuasion has failed ….”

Note: This was originally posted on Sept. 3, 2011. My web host lost it on Sept. 17, so I am manually restoring it. The following are the comments from the original post:

Liz, 9/4/2011, 2:15 am:

“…to use government to deny equality to gays and lesbians and pregnancy choice rights to women.”

Piece of friendy advice: don’t equate abortion and marriage equality. From personal experience, I know many lovely, hardworking people, especially in my extended family, who happen to be the saner brand of socons. And, particularly among the young, they’re having a hard time seeing what’s so bad about gay people and same sex marriage. They also can’t see how it *wouldn’t* strengthen the family.

They do, however, genuinely see abortion as murder, and putting the two together as equal rights just weakens the arguments for marriage. As does the idea that the leftists promulgate: that to support one, you have to support the other.

Plus, I know a lot of pro life, traditionally minded gays who simply want the same lives as the rest of their communities. (To be virgins until marriage; marry at around 20,21; have a big family and stay married and work hard all their lives.) This is especially true since the mainstream pro life movement has stopped whining about “The Homosexualist Agenda”. And these gays find it incredibly alienating when *some* people fighting for marriage equality try to tack on something they find completely abhorrent.

I’m pro choice as well, and I’m not trying to rag on you. But I’m approaching this from the perspective of someone who is a small town red stater, and I have to work with these people in order to gain equality. It’s a problem I have with a lot of people fighting for marriage equality who don’t have to spend Thanksgiving with these people as family and friends.

My reply to Liz, 9/4/2011, 1:59 pm:

Megan McArdle also pointed out this week that younger voters increasingly support marriage equality because they see the good of it, but have not increased their support for abortion rights because it is easy to see that abortion kills the fetus.

I’ve gone back and forth on choice because of the members of the pro-choice movement who try to extend their arguments to rationalize assisted suicide, especially for vulnerable people like my late life partner, who was quadriplegic. I oppose assisted suicide because assistive devices, assisted living, the right to refuse heroic measures and hospice care eliminate all the arguments advanced for assisted suicide.

I am pro-choice and want abortion opposed through voluntary measures that respect the liberty of women to control their own bodies. That means birth control must be legal, teenagers must receive sex education (subject to their parents’ permission), religions are limited to the realm of persuasion and welfare is reformed so parents aren’t being rewarded for having babies they can’t support.

There is no middle ground where religions are concerned. They must rule all. Only secular governments can preserve liberty. Without choice, and the fetus as a hostage, at least until it can survive outside the womb without intensive care, women will never have equality and liberty because religions view women as baby makers created to service men and be subservient to them. Only choice secures equality and liberty for women.

It is the relentless determination of religions to control the reproductive lives of everyone to serve their own greed and lust for power that is the common ground for gay equality and choice. Their goal is always a theocracy and nothing less will satisfy them. I want liberty and equality and nothing less will satisfy me. However, while the two issues have the common ground of who gets to control whose reproductive life, you are correct, they must be separate issues at the ballot box and the dinner table. Thank you for pointing that out.

And here I thought National Review Online was a family-friendly opinion blog:

They're big.

Update: The screen capture is from National Review Online’s home page from Thursday, July 14, 2011, and does not have its own link, so I linked the story.

It’s a fair question. And dear Stacy was and is right, right, right, while Prof. Althouse was and is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Here’s what Prof. Althouse wrote that set dear Stacy off — and gave me a big enough shot of adrenalin that I’m up past my bedtime writing about it, too:

This is how people* got hooked into voting for Obama in the first place! Plouffe and company massaged people into the place where they had a feeling about Obama. Hope. Change. Yes We Can.

[snip]

*Not me. I voted for Obama, but I coolly observed all this emotionalism, soberly examined the 2 major party candidates, and made a rational choice.

Oh, for heaven’s sake! I pity the fool who didn’t have Obama’s measure from the moment the preaching and character of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright were revealed along with the fact that Obama spent 20 years attending his church and had Rev. Wright perform his marriage and baptise his children AND the fact that as soon as he was no longer useful Obama threw him under the bus. That one episode epitomizes Obama in all his sociopathy. I was a lifelong Democrat and liberal and I still figured it out. By the time John McCain chose Gov. Palin as his running mate, I was ready to vote for him. By October I had finally pierced the liberal media’s veil over fiscal conservativism and in December — just as Stacy predicted — I registered as a Republican.

Stacy’s shellacking of Prof. Althouse is apt and richly deserved. I only have one thing to add. Here is the point Prof. Althouse was making:

You can savage Plouffe all you want for his seemingly stupid remark, but don’t miss the opportunity to see what he revealed about the theory of the reelect Obama campaign [that David Plouffe will shape Obama's message to create the feeling in voters that Obama cares about them and makes his decisions based on them personally, no matter who they are].

OK, yes, the Obama campaign will try to evoke feelings — all smart campaigns do. But it appears to me that Obama’s sociopathy is still in a blind spot for Prof. Althouse. What Obama will do, shamelesssly, is tell any audience he’s facing whatever they want to hear, regardless of whether that is the opposite of what he just told another audience. The only reason Obama says anything is to get what he wants without any intention of keeping his promises. This is his lifelong pattern. That is what you need to know about the theory of the re-elect Obama campaign. And if Obama wants to make this election about the decisions he’s made and how they affect American families — yippee! Game on!

Update: One of Stacy’s commenters links an essay at Reason from 12/29/06 by Ronald Bailey, “Grande ‘Conservative’ Bloggress Diva Ann Althouse Among the ‘True Believers’ — What Really Happened?,” which is well worth reading, if only for the quick overview it provides of the principles at the foundation of conservative and libertarian thought.

Also, Stacy’s post is now linked at Memeorandum.

From the FreedomWorks Blogcon in September 2010, Cynthia Yockey stands with Stephen Green, Vodkapundit, the handsomest man in the blogo...--no, that's not right: Cynthia Yockey and Vodkapundit, Stephen Green, the handsomest man.

I don’t drink and seldom take painkillers stronger than ibuprofen or Excedrin Migraine, so sometimes I don’t listen to Obama’s speeches because there is only so much pain I can bear without chemical assistance. But dear Vodkapundit is made of sterner stuff. After fortifying himself for the task, Vodkapundit posted this contemporaneous account of Obama’s speech on Libya on Monday, and here is a delicious sip:

4:41PM In just one month we’ve done everything but get permission and money from your elected representatives.

Obama bragging about diplomatic and military speed. Dare we call it… a rush to war?

4:42PM NATO has taken command. And who has effective command of NATO? This is like a naked Ron Jeremy grabbing a pine needle and calling it a fig leaf.

It’s a lovely paradox that while Vodkapundit can blog while drinking,  you can’t drink while reading Vodkapundit’s blog or you’ll be spraying your beverage all over your keyboard.

From Memeorandum I see that the Washington Post reports that the Obama administration has killed a new nuclear reactor at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland by setting terms for approving it that made it economically unfeasible in order to force Constellation Energy to cancel the project. Or, that’s what actually happened if you know how to read the letter below from Constellation Energy, and what WaPo reported instead was that Constellation Energy dropped its plans because nuclear reactors are just too expensive to build, even though the Obama administration was giving the company a $7.5 billion loan guarantee (never mind the small print), those ungrateful, greedy bastards:

Constellation Energy Reactor 10-8-10

I live in Maryland and energy prices already have skyrocketed here. Another nuclear reactor in Maryland would lower energy prices and bolster our nation’s energy independence. WaPo’s story adds insult to injury by noting that the Obama administration DID approve and set tolerable conditions for a huge wind farm even though wind energy requires 100 percent redundancy, is inefficient, is hideously ugly, and kills both beneficial wildlife — birds and bats — and beneficial insects on a horrific scale.

In 2008 Obama’s last chance to get me to vote for him passed when he selected Joe Biden as his running mate instead of Hillary Clinton. The hot button issue that made me look to McCain/Palin was my hope that McCain would be more supportive of strong borders and against illegal alien amnesty than “Open Borders” Obama. Stop laughing.

Since I was a lifelong Democrat and proud liberal and so were all my friends, I figured I had better do my homework to explain my heresy so I started reading Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg and before I knew it, I got hooked on the hard stuff: conservative blogs. I kept an annotated list of links to stories that I thought were particularly persuasive for conservatism, or damning about Obama. However, I lost one of the most important ones and could not find it by Googling. I am very glad that it caught neo-neocon’s eye, too, on July 23, 2008, and I found it again when she linked it this spring. I am cleaning house of tabs in Google Chrome I’ve been saving to write about one day — my Firefox tabs are another story — and I just want to get it into my blogstream, as it were (boldfacing mine):

He bows to nobody

Obama was arrogant to begin with, but it seems that the adulation he has gotten from the press and the public in his race towards anointment as Democratic Presidential nominee has driven him and his crew to new heights of self-admiration. I don’t think the proper word is “narcissism” in this case; it’s megalomania.

Here’s one quote, from spokesperson Susan Rice, after citing what a world traveler Obama is as his qualification for comprehending international affairs:

He bows to nobody in his understanding of this world.

And then there’s Obama himself, in Monday’s interview with Lara Logan:

Logan: Is this trip partly aimed at overcoming that perception that, you know, there is doubt among some Americans that you could lead a country at war as commander in chief from day one?

Obama: You know, the interesting thing is that the people who are very experienced in foreign affairs I don’t think have those doubts. The troops that I’ve been meeting with over the last several days, they don’t seem to have those doubts.

So the objective of this trip was to have substantive discussions with people like President Karzai or Prime Minister Maliki or President Sarkozy or others who I expect to be dealing with over the next eight to 10 years….

[and a bit later] Logan: Do you have any doubts?

Obama: Never.

Show me a person without doubts and I’ll show you an arrogant—and dangerous—fool.

The link in neo-neocon’s piece doesn’t go to the original story at Fox News any more, but waddaya know — with the exact quote from neo-neocon and Google I see that Rick Moran also wrote a piece about this for American Thinker:

No presidential candidate in memory has had the unmitigated arrogance to assume he will be re-elected for a second term. The example of Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush should be all that is necessary to disabuse a candidate from entering that territory.

But Obama is oblivious. And not only about arrogant remarks that reveal his casual relationship with the facts. After all, unless he believes he can get Congress to repeal the 22nd Amendment, his two terms will end after 8 years.

Obama taught Constitutional law — and he didn’t know the maximum a president can serve is eight years? If anyone ever wonders why I started writing about the best unifying explanation of Obama’s behavior as president — besides his being a sociopath — is that his destruction of America’s economy is his fire in the Reichstag and that his Enabling Act is coming — this “others who I expect to be dealing with over the next eight to 10 years” is what launched me down that path. Whenever Obama says he will back a program over the will of the American people even it it means he’ll just be a one-term president, it gives me the shivers, because when you feel secure that you will be president-for-life, you only need the one term.

Well, that’s MY take on Obama’s motives. June is Gay Pride month, which Obama observed last year by tossing an even smaller crumb to gay and lesbian employees. He’s not trying the same gambit this year that he used successfully last year, though — he trumpeted a list of benefits gay and lesbian federal employees would get — and here is the weasel escape clause — as long as they did not violate federal law. Since the 1994 Defense of Marriage Act passed with the support of Democratic President Bill Clinton is federal law and was written to prevent both same-sex marriage AND the incremental enactment of legal rights for lesbians and gays, pretty much everything on the menu Obama and his proxies waved around was never going to be served at the separate and non-equal lunch counter for lesbians and gays. They must have caught onto this trick, or Obama would be using it again.

The San Francisco Gate has Obama’s full statement — the following excerpt is the closing paragraph. I think it reveals that Obama’s true goal is to appease lesbians and gays enough so they stop being so uppity and and quit demanding the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act and the passage of a law that ensures our full equality under the law:

“While this Memorandum is an important step on the path to equality, my Administration continues to be prevented by existing Federal law from providing same-sex domestic partners with the full range of benefits enjoyed by heterosexual married couples. That is why, today, I renew my call for swift passage of an important piece of legislation pending in both Houses of Congress — the Domestic Partnership Benefits and Obligations Act. This legislation, championed by Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins and Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, would extend to the same-sex domestic partners of Federal employees the full range of benefits currently enjoyed by Federal employees’ opposite-sex spouses. I look forward to signing it into law.”

Why isn’t Obama calling for the swift REPEAL of the Defense of Marriage Act? “Domestic Partnership” is NOT marriage. It is NOT equality. Yo! Obama! Pelosi! Reid! ONLY equality will do!

Update, 6/3/2010, Thurs.: It would not take the military nearly so long to figure out how to implement the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) if Congress also repealed the Defense of Marriage Act and enacted legislation ensuring equality for lesbians and gays. Without equality for lesbians and gays, the military services are creating their own separate-and-gallingly-unequal patchwork of who gets what and when.

Oh, all right, not really. But the last time I remember the Washington Post quoting a president at length, it was when George Herbert Walker Bush was running for his second term against Bill Clinton. Pres. Bush had undiagnosed Grave’s disease, which makes your thoughts race, and he could not speak in coherent paragraphs.

Anyway, on April 3, Obama gave a 17-plus-minute answer to a question on his recently enacted healthcare law. And the Washington Post reporter, Anne E. Kornblut, was less than reverent in dissecting his peroration:

Toward the end of a question-and-answer session with workers at an advanced battery technology manufacturer, a woman named Doris stood to ask the president whether it was a “wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care” package.

“We are overtaxed as it is,” Doris said bluntly.

Obama started out feisty. “Well, let’s talk about that, because this is an area where there’s been just a whole lot of misinformation, and I’m going to have to work hard over the next several months to clean up a lot of the misapprehensions that people have,” the president said.

He then spent the next 17 minutes and 12 seconds lulling the crowd into a daze. His discursive answer — more than 2,500 words long — wandered from topic to topic, including commentary on the deficit, pay-as-you-go rules passed by Congress, Congressional Budget Office reports on Medicare waste, COBRA coverage, the Recovery Act and Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (he referred to this last item by its inside-the-Beltway name, “F-Map”). He talked about the notion of eliminating foreign aid (not worth it, he said). He invoked Warren Buffett, earmarks and the payroll tax that funds Medicare (referring to it, in fluent Washington lingo, as “FICA”).

Always fond of lists, Obama ticked off his approach to health care — twice. “Number one is that we are the only — we have been, up until last week, the only advanced country that allows 50 million of its citizens to not have any health insurance,” he said.

A few minutes later he got to the next point, which seemed awfully similar to the first. “Number two, you don’t know who might end up being in that situation,” he said, then carried on explaining further still.

“Point number three is that the way insurance companies have been operating, even if you’ve got health insurance, you don’t always know what you got, because what has been increasingly the practice is that if you’re not lucky enough to work for a big company that is a big pool, that essentially is almost a self-insurer, then what’s happening is, is you’re going out on the marketplace, you may be buying insurance, you think you’re covered, but then when you get sick they decide to drop the insurance right when you need it,” Obama continued, winding on with the answer.

Halfway through, an audience member on the riser yawned.

But Obama wasn’t finished. He had a “final point,” before starting again with another list — of three points.

“What we said is, number one, we’ll have the basic principle that everybody gets coverage,” he said, before launching into the next two points, for a grand total of seven.

His wandering approach might not matter if Obama weren’t being billed as the chief salesman of the health-care overhaul. Public opinion on the bill remains divided, and Democratic officials are planning to send Obama into the country to convince wary citizens that it will work for them in the long run.

It was not evident that he changed any minds at Friday’s event. The audience sat politely, but people in the back of the room began to wander off.

Even Obama seemed to recognize that he had gone on too long. He apologized — in keeping with the spirit of the moment, not once, but twice. “Boy, that was a long answer. I’m sorry,” he said, drawing nervous laughter that sounded somewhat like relief as he wrapped up.

But, he said: “I hope I answered your question.”

I predict that as Obama goes on the road he will deliver similar performances and get similar coverage because what he reveals about himself is both frightening and appalling. First of all, Obama displays his laziness and dislike of mastering policy. He lurches from buzz phrase to jargon, apparently believing he is dazzling the crowd. This is an alarming level of self-deception. Even modestly well-informed people know immediately he has no idea what he is saying. Second, Obama reveals his contempt for the intelligence of his audiences and/or his absolute faith in his ability to snow people. Either way, that’s not reassuring. Third, people are onto Obama’s habit of filibustering to run out the clock. He’s already had problems attracting crowds and this will accelerate the trend — well, until ACORN and the SEIU are hired to fill the chairs.

I’m looking forward to stories comparing what Obama says is in his healthcare legislation and what’s really in it, and what he said was in it that isn’t. Definitely America has a fee-vah and all it needs to see the wisdom of swallowing Obamacare is more cowbell:

Eek! — the Blue Oyster Cult song title is a little too appropriate: “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”

Oh, and I hope Ms. Kornblut likes her new beat monitoring the police scanner on the graveyard shift.