Barak Hussein Obama’s State of the Union address to the Nation reminded me of the Emperor’s new clothes. You must know the tale by Hans Christian Anderson about two weavers who promise an Emperor a new suit of clothes that are invisible to those unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. When the Emperor parades before his subjects in his new clothes, a child cries out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all! He’s as naked as the day he was born (sic Danny Kaye.)”
I don’t care what your political leanings are, but Obama is not a liar. This guy is delusional! Unfortunately the American voting public bought into his rhetoric; hook line and sinker. Ironically it is virtually impossible these days to find someone who will admit voting for him . The buzz word throughout Obama’s election campaign was the need for “change.” The primary change appears to be image and no substance.
Declaring in his State of the Union address that the United States is “a light to the world,” President Obama joined the pantheon of presidents who, in turbulent times, wrapped their political agenda in the comfortable cloak of “American exceptionalism.”
The term, first used with respect to the United States by Alexis de Tocqueville, refers to the notion that America differs qualitatively from other developed nations because of its national credo, ethnic diversity, and revolution-sprung history. It is often expressed as superiority: The United States is the biggest, most powerful, smartest, richest, most-deserving country on earth. In times of great change and tumult, presidents seek to inspire beleaguered Americans by reminding them of their national identity.
This is how Obama expressed the sentiment at the opening of his address, while reflecting on the shooting spree in Tucson, Ariz.: “We are part of the American family. We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people; that we share common hopes and a common creed; that the dreams of a little girl in Tucson are not so different than those of our own children, and that they all deserve the chance to be fulfilled.”
The trouble is, for too many Americans the dream is slipping away. The unemployment rate is nearly 10 percent and even before the recession, real middle-class incomes fell from $58,500 in 2000 to $56,500 in 2007. Even as Republicans clamor for budget cuts and voters grow weary of the nation’s mounting debt, Obama called for more investment on new technologies, new energies, education, and infrastructure. What he requested isn’t really new—Obama and other Democrats have made similar requests in the past—but the frame was: Rather than a blunt appeal for money, Obama challenged the country “to sacrifice and struggle and meet the demands of a new age.” He dared Americans to turn their backs on the American dream. He really meant oodles of more spending but investment sounds more amenable.
After going through a series of measures he put under the category of freezing or limiting domestic discretionary spending, Obama told us with great enthusiasm that these measures would trim $400 billion off the deficit over the next ten years which in reality is a drop in the economic ocean.
This is so ridiculous when you realize that the deficit this year alone is $1.5 trillion. Even if Obama found a way to reduce the deficit by $400 billion all in one year, it still would leave us with a deficit nearly three times as massive as anything we ever saw before Obama took office. He admitted that the spending areas he mentioned are not the key drivers of the deficit, and asked Congress to come up with “bipartisan solutions” to the things that are which means entitlement spending (social security, Medicare, Medicaid) and defense spending.
But last year, Obama asked a bipartisan commission to come up with ideas of the very same kind. They did, and he hasn’t asked Congress to implement a single one of their ideas. So now he’s asking another group of people to come up with a new swathe of ideas. Obama has been president for more than two years, and he still hasn’t taken a single action to get entitlement spending under control.
All he has offered is supposed deficit reduction of $400 billion over 10 years. Even if Obama’s proposal resulted in the savings he described, we would be trimming $2 off every $75 of deficit. Applied to this year, it would mean the $1.5 trillion deficit dropped to $1.46 trillion.While he’s basking in his $40 billion in annual deficit savings, and not taking entitlement reform the slightest bit seriously, we’ll see the national debt soar during that period from the present $14 trillion to nearly $30 trillion in one decade.
Two days after Obama’s speech, we learned that Social Security has gone into permanent deficit. George W. Bush warned about these six years ago and proposed a solution. Democrats made light of the issue and insisted Social Security was in no danger whatsoever. Now it’s reached the crisis stage, and all Obama can do is ask Congress to give him some ideas, because the last group of ideas he asked for and received actually represented serious action – raising the retirement age, means-testing, cutting benefits – and Obama isn’t interested in that. How does anyone take this man seriously?
Fear not, for this is a glimmer of home on the lost horizon. On January 31st. Judge Vinson, a federal judge in the northern district of Florida, struck down the entire health care law as unconstitutional; though he is allowing the Obama administration to continue to implement and enforce it while the government appeals his ruling.
In ruling against President Obama‘s health care law, Judge Vinson used Mr. Obama‘s own position from the 2008 campaign against him, when the then-Illinois senator argued there were other ways to achieve reform short of requiring every American to purchase insurance.
“I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that, ‘If a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house,’” Judge Vinson wrote in a footnote toward the end of his 78-page ruling Monday.
The footnote was attached to the most critical part of Judge Vinson‘s ruling, in which he said the “principal dispute” in the case was not whether Congress has the power to tackle health care, but rather whether it has the power to compel individual citizens to purchase insurance. Other states that joined the suit are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
Turning to international issues, in the wake of the outpouring of protests in Egypt against President Mubarak’s 30 year regime, Mr. Obama meekly suggested in a recent speech that there should be a smooth transition to Mubarak’s successor but failed to mention who that should be. In reality, The Muslim Brotherhood, dominated by Iranian Islamic fundamentalism, will doubtless emerge as the winner should the government of Egypt fall. The Obama administration, in failing to throw its weight against an Islamic takeover, is guilty of the same mistake that led former President Jimmy Carter to fail to support the Shah, opening the door for the Ayatollah Khomeini to take over Iran.
The danger lies with the sobering fact that America provides Egypt with upwards of $2 billion a year in foreign aid, and the Egyptian military, the tenth largest in the world, receives $1.3 billion of this money. Clearly, America needs to send a signal to the military that it will be supportive of its efforts to keep Egypt out of the grip of the Islamic fundamentalists.
It would be catastrophic for the Middle East, and indeed for World peace, if the Egyptian military armaments fell into the hands of the Islamic fundamentalists. Instead, Obama has placed our military aid to Egypt “under review” to pressure Mubarak to mute his response to the demonstrators and has given top priority to “preventing the loss of human life.” Perhaps I should change the title of my blog to “Obama fiddles while Egypt burns.”
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