Living in Obama's Mad House

By Alan Caruba

Like everyone else I get up each day and do my best to make sense of my life. I turn on “Fox and Friends” while I pour a cup of my morning coffee. I give a quick read to The Wall Street Journal’s editorials and scan the news until later in the day when I devote more time to its content. I spend about an hour at the beginning of each day, reading and responding to those emails I have not deleted as fraudulent schemes or matters of no interest.

I “surf” the news and opinion sites to which I contribute and move on to The Drudge Report, a news aggregator that has an influence on the day’s issues comparable to Rush Limbaugh.  The news is invariably bad whether it is about the nation’s imperiled economy, the gridlock in Congress, or events around the world. As an old journalist I understand well that bad news sells and good news is relegated to the “lifestyle” or “entertainment” sections of the newspaper or news sites.

Rush caught a lot of heat recently when he said he was “ashamed” of America, but I think a lot of us are ashamed of a nation being run by people of low-to-no character that we elected to office. We are ashamed of ourselves for being duped by some Republicans who are more closely aligned with Democrats, of a Republican Party that seems hapless and unable to unite around its values with a strong message of fiscal prudence, strong defense, and a host of other issues upon which we generally agree.

The United States used to feel like a rational place where, even when we had differences, they would be negotiated, compromises would be made, and our general welfare would be the guiding principle. We used to have cause to believe that the Constitution would determine our governance, but after four years without a budget and government still funded by “continuing resolutions”, there is cause to believe otherwise.

We used to have confidence that the Supreme Court would interpret that Constitution in ways that even the average citizen would if they took the time to read it. Obamacare blew that up. Declaring it a “tax” and ignoring its totally unconstitutional mandate to purchase insurance or be fined if you do not, the Court left the door open for worse mischief.

We now lurch from crisis to crisis with no resolution in sight. The cliché of “kick the can down the road” has become an everyday expression to describe a government that governs via presidential executive orders, ever more regulations, and the aforementioned continuing resolutions.

Americans cannot buy guns fast enough in the face of a government trying to negate the Second Amendment. It says “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” That’s definitive. The people is us!

We wonder why the Justice Department can unilaterally decide that it does not intend to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act and seeks to get it overturned by the Supreme Court.

We wonder why the Department of Defense can no longer afford to send a second carrier group to the Persian Gulf in the face of Iran’s impending acquisition of nuclear weapon status. How weakened has our defense capability become?

We know our economy is burdened by more than $16 trillion in debt that it is mounting by the hour. Yet President Obama cannot find any waste in government to cut despite ample evidence of multi-billion dollar waste. Stop White House tours? Who is he kidding?

A year ago the government gave $3 million to researchers at the University of California to study video games. The U.S. Department of Agriculture once gave researchers at the University of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas emissions from dairy costs.  Despite borrowing billions from China, the government gave it $17.5 million for social and environmental programs and once spent $2.6 million to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly. The list of insane expenditures defies the imagination.

Obama’s answer is that taxing anyone who has earned any level of wealth from $250,000 a year and up—deemed “rich”—will close the gap, but he cannot spend the nation into growth. He tried that with the failed stimulus, with the idiotic “cash for clunkers” program, and with the increase in tax revenue he wrung out of the Republicans while demanding more and more. He could take all the money from the “rich” and it would not run the government for more than a month.

Despite this consumer confidence is up. Banks made large profits last year. Housing prices are increasing.  Wall Street responded to the sequester cuts with a surge. And the President’s popularity continues to hover around fifty percent even though he lies about everything including promises to control the climate!

When veteran Washington, D.C. journalist, Bob Woodward, described Obama’s claim that he could not defend the nation as the result of the sequestration cuts he called it “madness.”

We are living in a mad house called America, courtesy of Barack Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2013