Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
As indicated in a previous post, President Obama’s reelection effort depended on him walking a tightrope that required him to stem the hemorrhage of independent supporters while keeping the livid left on his side. His State of the Union address showed him confidently stepping out on the high wire, with lofty language extolling the virtues of America. But by the end of the speech it looked like the aerialist was leaning to one side, sticking his leg out on the other as a counterbalance while starting to pinwheel his arms backwards to avert a fall.
On the surface, President Obama’s State of the Union address was like many others, long on platitudes, short on substance. I had the opportunity to witness it at the studio of WNYC in New York. We were a handful of Tea Party members is a sea of progressives.
The imagery in my mind was triggered by an editorial in the Wall Street Journal by John Fund, when he described Obama in a “political tailspin.” Close your eyes and picture the pilot Barack Obama screaming, “I’ve never flown a plane before!!!” as he furiously toggles switches and twists dials. Biden in the co-pilot seat is flipping through a copy of Piloting for Dummies, shouting back, “Neither have I. I always sat in the back!!!” At the same time, Jimmy Carter is trying to calm Obama down and talk him through pulling plane out of its deadly dive while muttering as an aside, “It’s all Fox News fault.” Then together they all scream, “WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!”
Such is the political landscape this bright Wednesday morning. The sky is clear here in New York, but politically it is anything but that. The news came out yesterday that the recession ended eighteen months after is started in December 2007. That means it was about five months after Obama took office and just three months after the massive stimulus package passed, which means the economy recovered on its own, without the stimulus.
In Greece today riots are breaking out with three reported dead thus far. Millions of Greek workers are striking, led by Greece’s two major umbrella unions, one each from the private sector and the public sector. Stock markets around the world have tanked, the Euro is sinking and other European countries are facing a similar fate.
Is There a Silver Lining?
As President Obama continues to march our country toward cloning the European model, there is a warning to be gleaned from the Greek Tragedy unfolding in the news. They are giving us a gift of their experience. The European model doesn’t work. The Welfare state doesn’t work. There is not enough money that can be taxed from the citizenry to continue to expand the nanny state. At some point the bill comes due. That is happening now in Europe.
So here is an opportunity for President Obama to see into the future. If he doesn’t walk back from the brink of financial ruin he is leading us, what is being plastered on the TV screens in our living room will be his legacy. If he does not turn away, we must re-take control of Congress this fall and retire President Obama in 2012. He likes to talk of eight years of failed Bush policies, but he wants to replace them with thirteen years of failed Roosevelt policies. The difference is that some of the poor decisions that Bush made have a minor lasting impact compared with the enormous unpaid bill coming due from FDR’s policies.
It’s time to turn about, while we still have room to maneuver. The Greeks are relying on the Germans, the French and others in the EU. Who will we call to bail us out if we don’t stop this madness?
I was watching Mike Huckabee’s show this weekend when a curious exchange took place. Governor Huckabee tried to be fair to President Obama by saying “I believe in his heart that President Obama believes he is doing what is best for the country.” The governor is not alone among those who oppose President Obama who graciously say this. Perhaps it is a preemptive strike to avoid being tarred as a racist. At the same time, however, they will say they think President Obama is a smart man. How do you reconcile those two positions?
Either the man is an idiot and he is stumbling toward socialism without realizing it, or he is an intelligent man who is taking the country to socialism by design. I don’t see a middle ground. The only possibility is that he is a man with an arrogance so breathtaking in scope, that he ignores the will of the people and is implementing programs and policies that he believes is better for the unintelligent masses, and mistakenly thinks it is still capitalism. I can’t square the man’s intelligence, which I believe he has, with him not knowing the difference between capitalism and socialism/Marxism.
Okay, so what prompted this train of thought? It was prompted by some little know activity south of the border and I don’t mean Mexico. Earlier in his term, President Obama, Secretary Clinton and others tried to help return a Hugo Chavez puppet to the presidency in Honduras. Manuel Zalaya was following tactics of Chavez and Castro, to remain in office beyond his term which is limited. By doing so, he was immediately in violation of Honduran law and their constitution. He was removed by order of the Honduran Supreme Court with the backing of the Honduran legislature. The only step they might have taken which was too far was they put him on a plane out of the country.
Chavez, Castro, et al, were outraged. Did the Obama administration come down on the side of democracy and democratic institutions? No, they tried to strong arm Honduras to put Zalaya back in office, by cancelling visas, affecting trade and other measures. Honduras proceeded, ignoring these threats, to hold a general election to peacefully choose a new president which they did. The United States has reluctantly agreed to recognize the new president, but it was not easy for small Honduras to stand up to the United States and based on what they were fighting for and they shouldn’t have had to.
What other signs do I find troubling? After going against the will of the American people in forcing through ObamaCare, Fidel Castro heaped praise upon Obama for the law’s passage only criticizing him for taking so long. In April of 2009, President Obama embraced Hugh Chavez. Today Hugo Chavez is in the process of shutting down the last television outlet that is critical of him while forming closer ties to Ahmadinejad of Iran.
In Ecuador, President Rafael Correa is following the Chavez model. He is also chummy with Iran, is constantly threatening the free press, and the economy is in shambles. He fired congressmen who disagreed with him and replaced them with others who saw things his way. When the constitutional court said the fired congressmen had to be reinstated, Correa took to the airwaves to declare he was ignoring the court’s decision. Shortly thereafter an angry mob marched on the court, the police who are supposed to protect them stood aside. Do we have a statement of concern from the White House regarding this trampling of democracy? No, we have the State Department’s Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Arturo Valenzuela, calling on President Correa. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady:
During Tuesday’s meeting before television cameras, Mr. Valenzuela expressed concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its budding relationship with Ecuador. According to Reuters, Mr. Correa told him: “We don’t want to get involved in that discussion. But what does it have to do with selling bananas to Iran or with Iran financing our hydroelectric plants?” Translation: Ahmadinejad is my friend. You butt out.
The U.S. response? Mr. Valenzuela would not rule out a meeting between Mr. Correa and Barack Obama. If that happens, prepare for a redux of the Obama embrace of Hugo Chávez in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in April 2009—more humiliation for Americans who used to think of their government as a noble defender of liberty against despots.
Creeping Socialism
Obama has given government control over one-sixth of the U.S. economy with the implementation of ObamaCare. He has nationalized two automobile companies. He has nationalized the student loan program. Unions, for the first time, have more members in the government than the private sector, but President Obama wants to increase their numbers in the private sector as well with Card Check. Who are the unions beholding to and vice versa? The Democratic Party. With more union members to do his bidding where does the average citizen stand? In a July speech President Obama said the following:
”We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” (emphasis added)
If this doesn’t send chills up your spine conjuring up dark images from the 1930s, you need to put down the Playstation and pick up a newspaper or a book. Consider that when he graduated from Columbia he became a follower of Saul Alinsky, a Marxist community organizer. Barack Obama did not cut his teeth by starting a small business. He cut his teeth learning how to take down capitalism using Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. As he gets chummy with America’s enemies, he gives the back of his hand to our allies: Israel, Great Britain, Poland,and the Czech Republic. Do you still believe this is a coincidence Governor Huckabee?
When will our President come to the realization that the government does not have any money save that which is provided by its citizens? If he understood that, he wouldn’t have said this:
“Just as it would be a terrible mistake to borrow against our children’s future to pay our way today, it would be equally wrong to neglect their future by failing to invest in areas that will determine our economic success in this new century,” Mr. Obama said at the White House.
Let me posit a translation: we shouldn’t borrow against our children’s future, so we should borrow against our children’s future. And let me add another pet peeve and that is how the statists have redefined the word “invest”. What they really mean is spend, but invest sounds so much more grown up. However, most intelligent people understand invest to mean when you put your money into something with the belief you will get all your money back plus a premium. You don’t invest in the stock market with the idea you will never see your money again and will subsequently put more money into it next year. You invest in a house with the idea that you will sell it later for more money. You don’t invest in a house if you expect it to go down in value. But our elected representatives would have you believe that pouring money down a rat hole is an investment.
Immature and Irresponsible
Like a child caught standing over his mother’s prized china lying shattered on the floor, President Obama wants us to believe it’s not his fault, no, we are going to have trillion dollar plus deficits for the next ten years because of Bush and the Republicans. He is one year into his presidency. This is his budget, not Bush’s. If he can’t handle the job he should resign and turn it over to, er, Biden? Check that. Perhaps he can just go watch television in the White House for the next three years and leave the rest of us alone. Doing nothing would cause less damage than what he has planned. He jacked up spending 24% and then “courageously” instituted a freeze on that spending for three years. Think about it. If I gave you a 24% raise on Monday and then came back on Friday and said, “Gee, I’m really sorry to have to do this, but times are really tough. I’m going to have to freeze your new salary for the next three years. Can you ever forgive me?” Could you not burst out laughing?
We’re Going to Make Some Tough Decisions…Next Year
We are in a fiscal crisis, but don’t think for a moment you are going to see any tough decisions in an election year, particularly when so many Democrats are in danger of having to find jobs in the real world. So this year is tough talk. Next year we get busy!
Democrats or Republicans or maybe the Tea Party movement is going to have to act, sooner rather than later. Here is how the federal government breaks down:
The first three items continue to grow with no signs of slowing and interest will really take off when the Fed stops the easy money program. Defense can shrink as Iraq and Afghanistan stabilize, but not a lot as this is still job number one for the federal government. So do you see the problem? You can thank Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson for the first ticking time bomb above. You can thank Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the second ticking time bomb. You can now thank President Barack Obama for what is becoming the third ticking time bomb and that is without his Health Care, and Cap and Trade.
So how is President Obama going to “solve” this problem? By tinkering with the last item, Non-Defense Discretionary spending. But don’t worry, he will also tax those evil rich and make sure they pay their fair share. But before he goes too far down that path I have a suggestion for him:
High tax states like New York and California are finding that a significant number of their wealthy citizenry are moving to lower tax states, exacerbating those states’ fiscal problems. If you look at the percentage of the population that pays the lion’s share of the taxes you will quickly see that if a relatively small percentage of the population, who can afford to live anywhere, actually decide to leave the United States of Tax the Rich, the resulting fiscal problem will be very, very severe. Obama can only poke his tax stick in that cage so long before he gets a nasty reaction.
We’re All Standing On the Third Rail
Social Security has been called the third rail of politics, but the reality is that we are all standing on the third rail trying to keep our balance and if anyone slips and touches the ground, we’re all fried. We have to suck up the courage to address Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If we can’t slow the growth of these programs so that they take a smaller amount of the budget pie each year, we are toast. None of those programs is in the Constitution, but the liberals/progressives created them with empty promises of benefits without costs. This should have been the first clue:
“Ida May Fuller worked for three years under the Social Security program. The accumulated taxes on her salary during those three years was a total of $24.75. Her initial monthly check was $22.54. During her lifetime she collected a total of $22,888.92 in Social Security benefits.”
Ida May Fuller was the first recipient of monthly S.S. checks when she retired in 1940. She lived to be 100.
She almost got paid back in full with her first check. She got 926 times more than what she paid in. That’s a 92,600% return on “investment.” Not bad, huh?
She got back almost everything she paid in with her first check. Instead of ringing alarm bells all over the country, politicians patted themselves on the back for the great system they created. We sent Bernie Madoff to jail, why should Congress be exempt? What Bernie Madoff did was child’s play in comparison. Where he fell short was that he couldn’t force people to participate through payroll taxes, and he couldn’t print money. So why is what he did criminal and what Congress is doing not? He had to get his participants to voluntarily turn over their money. He promised returns of 40% per year. Ida may got 92,600% return on her investment.
Burn the Ships
There is the story of a general who landed on a beach to face an formidable enemy. He ordered that the ships that brought them there be burned. By doing so, he knew his men would fight ferociously because there was no escape, either they fought to win or they died. Perhaps we should do the same with Congress and President Obama. Fix Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid or you join Bernie Madoff in Cell Block “C”, for running a massive Ponzi scheme. What has kept Congress from fixing this in the past is the fear of not getting reelected. Let’s raise the stakes so that not getting reelected would pale in comparison to incarceration. It’s time our elected officials started paying attention to the people and not their perks. The disaster train is going downhill and picking up speed, headed for a cliff. It’s time ALL politicians put the country first and fixed this problem that, after all, they created. It’s fun to give out the goodies, but this is a crisis that cannot be shunned. It must be dealt with head on.
Do you remember the scene in the movie “Saving Private Ryan” where after storming a machine gun nest and losing their medic, the Americans have to deal with how to handle a prisoner they captured? Some say shoot him on the spot others disagree. They know they can’t take him with them as he will slow them down. After much vigorous debate Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) decides to untie him, point him toward the American line and tell him to keep walking, with the hope that he will be captured by the advancing American forces.
Later in the movie as Miller’s unit is in a pitched battle to the last man, the released German prisoner is among those killing Miller’s men. After reinforcements arrive to turn the battle in the Americans favor and the remaining Germans surrender, the former prisoner smiles and nods to the soldier in Miller’s unit that acted as translator and argued for sparing him as if to say, “Hey, how’s it goin’ pal?” The soldier lowers his rifle and kills the German.
I am reminded of this by the current situation with Yemen. Started under President Bush was the insane idea of releasing enemy combatants where they can find their way back to the battlefield. This stupid policy was, until recently, going to be accelerated under President Obama. Either we are at war or we are not. You can’t fight a war with half measures. Either you fight it to win or let the enemy have their way. If we are in a war and we capture the enemy they stay captured until the war is over. We don’t need a bunch of lawyers standing on the sidelines tapping their foot and their watches and saying, “how much longer are you going to hold these people without charging them?” Answer: until the war ends or hell freezes over, whichever comes first.
Is It a War Yet Mr. President?
Backed into a corner, on his fifth (?) try to explain what his administration is doing on the War on Terror (am I allowed to call it that?), he actually called it a war, at least against Al Qaida. He has spent the better part of his first year in office giving the back of his hand to the Bush administration. But after seven years of Bush keeping us safe and two terrorist attacks on our soil this year with Obama at the helm and his poll numbers sinking, he has come to the realization that he owns this now.
The tough Harry Truman talk is nice (“The Buck Stops Here”), but it is just words until you actually do something with the buck that just stopped on your desk. Why is the spectacularly incompetent Janet Napolitano still drawing a salary? In Obama’s world it seems to be that what he means when he says the buck stops here is that he is the only one subject to firing and since we can’t fire him, everyone under him keeps on keeping on. But who appointed these people? It was Obama. So he should recognize that he blundered and if the underlings don’t have enough sense to fall on their swords and resign, he should flat out fire them.
Vacations are Important. Anti-terrorism, Not So Much
After the terror attack at Fort Hood, you would think that perhaps President Obama would be a little more responsive to another attempted attack, but hey, he was on an Hawaiian vacation. Nobel Prize? Chicago trying to win a bid for the Olympics? President Obama will travel across the sea for that. But an attempted attack on America? Chill, baby, chill. How about his director of National Counterterrorism, Michael Leiter, taking a ski vacation? Just because stopping such an attack might be considered counterterrorism and just because that organization just failed miserably at stopping such an attack, and just because we didn’t know why it failed or if another attack might be on the way, why interrupt time with the family over that? Family time is important, so said his boss. Don’t worry, Mike, we’ll wait.
Behind the Curve
It seems that with each attempt the enemy is one step ahead of us. So discussions heated up about these new body scanners that can find anything, so it is claimed. Don’t get me wrong, I am a big advocate of technology, but I guess the real problem is best summed up by one pundit comparing our methods to the Israelis:
“The Israelis look for terrorists, we look for tweezers.”
Instead of reading body scanners, perhaps we should be training the TSA agents in reading body language. That’s what the Israelis do. If you are a Palestinian, sorry, but you go in a different line and you get more closely screened and questioned. You may pass, but you are going to be thoroughly checked out. We should do the same. Where is your passport from? What visa stamps do you have in your passport indicating where you have been? Why don’t you have any luggage Mr. Abdulmutallab? Why did you buy a one way ticket? Who are you staying with in Detroit? I see you paid cash for your ticket, how much cash do you have left for your trip after you land in Detroit? Do you have a credit card? No? Hmmm…maybe you should wait over there, while we check further.
No technology is foolproof. Having worked in technology for over thirty years I can say that with some degree of confidence. It only takes one failure of the technology for a disaster to strike. But if we spend less time trying to find that box cutter, shampoo bottle, tweezers, jar of honey, etc., and spend more time spotting someone who doesn’t look like they are on a nice business trip or a visit to relatives or who otherwise fit the profile of a terrorist, that’s right I said it: profile, we could probably become a lot safer without having to lock the bathrooms for the last hour of the flight. If we had pulled the young Abdulmutallab aside and questioned him, he probably would have cracked like an egg. Does anyone think for a minute that this kid would have given off no body language signals if questioned by a trained professional? The right combination of skilled human observers and questioners along with technology, is what we need to be safer. Rather than this: We”re the TSA and You Can Count on Us!
Intelligence Sprawl
We also need to collapse the intelligence arms of our government back into one and shut the others down. Roll back Homeland Security into the Department of Defense, put the myriad intelligence gathering arms back into the CIA, make people accountable and lessen the need for a coordinating center to gather intelligence from a dozen agencies correlate it and send it back out to the dozen agencies. All that does is create more fiefdoms that don’t want to talk to the dummies in that other agency who aren’t as smart as we are. As the old saying goes, “When everyone’s responsible, no one is responsible.” Government is neither nimble nor overly cooperative. The fewer handoffs between agencies necessary to connect the dots, the better off we will all be.
Daniel Henninger wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tells of congratulating freshman Sen. Obama on a phenomenal speech. Without a hint of conceit, Mr. Obama replied, “Harry, I have a gift.”
In the article he also describes this observation:
Harvard Law Prof. Charles Ogletree told how Mr. Obama spoke on one contentious issue at the law school, and each side thought he was endorsing their view. Mr. Ogletree said: “Everyone was nodding, Oh, he agrees with me.”
That’s essentially how he got elected. With a heaping helping hand from the popular media, many people saw Obama as a blank screen upon which they could project their own views and see those as Obama’s own. He’s our man! He listens. He cares deeply. For a politician it is a phenomenal gift. For a legislator it is an extremely valuable gift. For an executive it is poison.
Pulling the Trigger
As a politician or a legislator you are in the role of persuader; somebody else makes the decision to vote for you or vote with you, respectively. As an executive you are in the role of the decider. You must make a decision and every decision, especially the tough ones are going to make a good many people unhappy. Perhaps that explains why, in the Illinois Senate, Obama voted “Present” so many times. Voting “Present” rather than “Yea” or “Nay” allowed him to hold that special place where everyone felt he agreed with them. Too many decisions one way or another would have tarnished “the gift”. So why is “the gift” poison for an executive? If you don’t have “the gift” and you make a decision your opponents may disagree with you, but they are not surprised. If you have “the gift” and you make a decision, those on the short side feel betrayed and angry, because they thought you agreed with them and then “sold out” and decided the other way.
Obama is in a tight spot where he has to make decisions and decisions have consequences. When you make a decision it is very hard to make it seem like everyone got their way. His complete lack of executive experience is telling. If he had some executive experience, such as a mayor or a governor, he might have had enough practice learning how to make his decisions appear to satisfy everyone, as his campaign speeches did. But that’s the thing about decisions. If everyone supports them, they’re not much of a decision, like deciding to pardon a turkey on Thanksgiving. Everyone enjoys the decision, but it’s really not what we elect presidents for.
I’ll Have the Waffles, Please
If you watch closely, you can see that Obama is struggling to preserve “the gift”. He said he is for closing Guantanamo, but not yet. He is for pulling out of Iraq, but no timetable. The general he put in charge of Afghanistan, McChrystal, said he needed 40,000 more troops, but Obama could not bring himself to say yes or no. He had to ponder, think, consult, weigh alternatives, and three months later, he gave McChrystal what he asked for. Those on the left complained that he was not pulling out. Those on the right complained that he wasted precious time while our troops were on the battlefield. His backers tried to give him the fig leaf of showing gravitas. He can’t seem to find the magic formula where everyone applauds him. From “the gift” he has gone to “the anti-gift”. Instead of satisfying everyone, he is finding that he is satisfying no one.
Move On
It’s time for Obama to “Move On”. He should put “the gift” in his trophy case right next to his Nobel Peace Prize. It got him to the White House. How much more can he ask of such a thing? So drop the pretense. We all know he is a hard left guy, so he should just be who he is. He may suddenly face a more hostile press, or they may love him more, although that would be hard to believe. But when he makes a decision he will at least please his base, and then his opponents can fight his statist goals without being branded as racists. As a hard left guy he will probably not get re-elected because America is not a hard left country, on the contrary the majority of Americans describe themselves as conservative. But by choosing he can try to do what he can within one term. It will be a battle. Obama’s poll ratings have dropped steadily since his inauguration and the Democrats are likely to lose seats in Congress this fall. As an old acquaintance once said to me, “It’s like standing in the middle of the road. Choose left or choose right, but choose; otherwise you get hit by traffic coming in both directions.”
