How to Listen to Obama's State of the Union Speech

By Alan Caruba

The Tuesday morning post of the Heritage Foundation’s “Morning Bell” is worth sharing in part. You can read the whole post here.

“Tonight, Americans who tune in to the State of the Union will watch the work of a rhetorical master with a flair for illusion,” says Mike Brownfield. “President Barack Obama will take the to the floor of the Capitol in hopes of laying the groundwork for a political debate on his terms—one where he stands on emotional appeals, populism, and class warfare, not the shaky ground of his crumbling record.”

“And looking right back at him will be the U.S. Senate, which has for the past 1,000 days failed to pass a budget—a total shirking of their fundamental duty to be diligent stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars.”

That about sums up the situation in which voters on both side of the political spectrum, from liberal to conservative, find themselves and for both it is a portrait of failure of spectacular dimensions. Government, as we envision it, is not functioning.

Instead, Americans will have to listen to a great deal of nonsense about “fairness” and Obama’s view that government, as Brownfield warns, “should be the guarantor of equal outcomes and that ‘fairness’ of achievement should be decided by legions of bureaucrats in Washington.”

The Founding Fathers knew that life is not fair and that government can only provide the circumstances under which Americans are provided not happiness, but “the pursuit of happiness” based on a host of factors that include the good luck of being born to good parents, receiving a decent education, and being willing to work hard for a portion of success in life. Even without these factors, many Americans succeed while most just settle.

Joe Wilson, a Republican Representative of South Carolina’s Second District, gained fame at a previous State of the Union speech when in 2009 he shouted out “You lie!” at the president. He has said that “Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.”

That kind of straight talk is rare in politics. Commentators and political pundits are more free to express themselves than politicians and Charles Krauthammer has said that “Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism.”

I doubt that Americans want to be equally poor, but that is the end result of Obama’s socialist policies.

Most certainly, a large element of the mainstream press has bought into Obama’s policies and the result is a growing distrust and disdain for it. Fox News’ Brit Hume has said that “Fairness is not an attitude. It’s a professional skill that must be developed and exercised.” It is reflected in Fox’s famed “fair and balanced” motto, though any journalist will tell you it is a very high standard to achieve.

We would do well to keep in mind Lincoln’s advice:

“You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.”

At the heart of Obama’s State of the Union speech will be the direct opposite of the values expressed by Lincoln.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Civil War Began 150 Years Ago - April 12, 1861

By Alan Caruba

The American Civil War began one hundred and fifty years ago on April 12, 1861.

Historians will tell you that the South never had a chance of winning it. Theirs was an agrarian society, heavily dependent on millions of slaves. How many millions? An 1860 census found that slaves constituted 13% of the population, numbering 3,950,528, most of whom were in the South.

Even the Founding Fathers knew that slavery was an issue that would one day create a terrible problem, but their priority was to come up with a Constitution that would rectify the problems that the Articles of Confederation posed.

Perhaps at no other time in the nation’s history did it have such an astonishing collection of brilliance gathered in one place. They needed the Southern States to secure ratification so the problem of slavery was pushed off to the future.

Depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line you’re on, you will still get a dispute over why the Civil War was fought. The South says it was about state’s rights and, indeed, had expectations that they could secede lawfully. The North said it was about the issue of slavery and most agree it was.

Lincoln’s first inaugural speech on March 4, 1861 began with an assertion rarely noted.

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

Lincoln ended, saying, “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

On April 12, 1861, Confederate Brig. General, P.G.T. Beauregard, an expert artilleryman, graduate of West Point, laid siege to Fort Sumpter in the harbor of Charleston, S.C., where federal troops had been withdrawn in anticipation of war.

The War of Independence that had concluded after eight years in 1783 had cost about 25,000 lives. The Revolution was still relatively fresh in the minds of Americans in that era. Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had both died on July 4, 1826,

The Constitution went into force in 1788. The Civil War began 73 years later. It is regarded as the first “modern” war for its use of locomotives, the telegraph, and the development of new weapons.

It was surely the first modern war in terms of its casualties. Between 1861 and 1865, they totaled 618,222. The slaughter in some battles was so vast one could walk across a field of battle on the bodies of the dead. The Civil War battle in The Wilderness killed 17,666, Spotsylvania killed 10,920, and Petersburg cost 16,569. Total battle deaths for the Union, including disease, numbered 360,222. For the South, it was 258,000.

By contrast, U.S. casualties in World War Two, 1941 to1945, numbered 407,316. The toll of the Iraq conflict, 2003-2011, was 4,430. Afghanistan has cost 4,430 lives.

It is not until one grapples with such numbers can one understand the price paid to keep the Union intact. Three Presidents played key roles. James Buchanan did little to avert the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln pursued it for the entirety of his two terms, the latter cut short by assassination. Andrew Johnson allowed Reconstruction to fall into corruption and resentment. It matters who is President.

It took another century into the 1960s for blacks in America to finally secure their civil rights. In that decade, Americans endured riots in their cities and the loss of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. along with a number of generally forgotten martyrs.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the Civil War was the belief on both sides that it would be over quickly. All people in all times want wars to be short, but they rarely are. Their aftermath can last a very long time. A Cold War followed the end of World War Two and lasted for nearly a half century.

Within and beyond nation’s borders, wars have raged somewhere since what we call civilization began around 5,000 years ago. They have various causes for good or ill. They are, however, the way nations have settled their differences.

Anti-war protesters and those who disrespect our Armed Forces will never understand this, but they owe a debt called liberty to those who do.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Barack Obama, Shape-Shifter

By Alan Caruba

With the advent of the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birthday on Sunday, it was perhaps predictable that Time Magazine would photoshop a picture of Obama and Reagan as if they were standing together. “Why Obama (Hearts) Reagan” was the cover line.

Obama would have been twenty years old when Reagan took office and, of course, he not only never met Reagan, but he was no fan of his conservative policies.

In a stinging rebuttal to the Time cover, Sean Linnane, a blogger at Stormbringer, noted that, in Obama’s memoir, Dreams of My Father, Obama wrote “When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly. Instead, I’d pronounce on the need for change. Changes in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds…”

One of those “dirty deeds” involved hastening the fall of the Soviet Union; the mother ship of all liberals and crypto-communists.

No surprise that Obama couldn’t answer his classmates “directly” because Obama had been against many of the policies of Reagan and Bush before he was for them. He has virtually replicated Bush’s Mideast policies and now it appears he is going to make the same errors with Egypt as Jimmy Carter did with Iran.

Obama has been on the cover of Time Magazine so many times that they ought to change the name of the magazine to Obama. Back in 2009, a cover showed him as the reincarnated Franklin Delano Roosevelt, offering America a New Deal.

FDR’s New Deal stretched out the Great Depression that began in 1929 over ten years until the U.S. declared war on Japan and Germany in 1941. His Social Security program has been looted by Congress and now is on the brink of insolvency along with the later Medicare program. The Supreme Court threw out elements of FDR’s stimulus programs as unconstitutional. Yes, history can and does repeat itself.

When Obama announced his run for the Democratic Party nomination, he did so on the steps of the Old State Capitol in downtown Springfield, Illinois to launch his campaign on Feb.10, 2007. The conscious effort to identify with Abraham Lincoln was and remains a part of the constant “packaging” and “branding” of Obama.

So we have Obama as Lincoln, Obama as FDR, and now Obama as a fan of Ronald Reagan just in time for the latter’s birthday centennial.

Obama is the ultimate Star Trek “shape-shifter.” Depending on the place and the circumstances, Obama consciously seeks to present himself as a reflection of whomever he is addressing.

A quick search of Google images will produce a photo of Obama wearing a yarmulka (skull cap) while standing at the Wailing Wall in Jeruselem, placing a small written prayer in it as is the custom for Jews!

Millions of words have been written and uttered to describe who and what Obama is, but aside from being a dedicated Marxist intent on destroying the United States with intolerable debt, unrelieved unemployment, and naked support for powerful unions, Obama does not appear to have many core values other than the empowerment and enrichment of Barack Hussein Obama.

The role of Time Magazine and other mainstream media in this manipulation of the American public’s perception of Obama is obscene.

Obama, however, has a problem. Americans have rejected Obamacare. The House has voted to repeal it. And Senate Republicans are getting help from disaffected Democrats in dismantling it. His “green” policies for electric cars, high speed rail, and power generation by wind and solar are a laughingstock.

On the world stage, he is seen as a weakling and friend of Islam to the detriment and endangerment of Israel, the most steadfast ally of the U.S. in the mideast.

All this Hollywood-style imagery that Obama has depended upon for so long no longer works as it did during the giddy days of his campaign for the presidency. His speeches ring hollow on the ears of all but his most besotted supporters.

Long after he’s gone from the public stage, people will be asking who was Obama? And who is Obama?

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Obama Shamelessly Used Lincoln

By Alan Caruba

As we close in on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, it is safe to say that there will be no Obama memorials in Washington, D.C. for the same reason there are no statues of Jimmy Carter except in the Capitol building where statues of former presidents are a tradition.

I read a book some years ago about the many statues of Lincoln that are to be found throughout the nation. They are a fitting tribute to a president credited with keeping the Union intact. The only thing Americans are presently united upon is reflected in Obama’s falling approval numbers in the polls taken to measure such things.

Back in 2008, I took note of the shameless way the national memory and regard for Abraham Lincoln was used in marketing/advertising terms to “brand” young Obama as someone with the same greatness of character and wisdom as the sixteenth President, 1861-1865.

Obama announced his candidacy on Lincoln’s birthday and he did so in front of the Old State capitol in Springfield, Illinois where Lincoln had delivered his famous “House Divided” speech in 1858.

Immediately, the fawning mainstream media seized upon the image of Obama as a new Lincolnian figure on the American stage. As someone who has spent a long career in public relations I can tell you that this use of imagery and association with Lincoln by Obama’s handlers was masterful. They surely knew that the media would, like Pavlovian dogs, salivate at the opportunity to equate the young half-black Senator from Illinois with the iconic Civil War President.

This imagery included having Obama “arrive” in Washington, D.C. on a train to mimic the way Lincoln had arrived to take office.

Reams of adoring analysis of the Lincoln-Obama connection were written. Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe of Newsweek magazine, on November 15, 2008, wrote a lengthy and largely nauseating commentary. During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball” with Chris---a tingle ran up my leg---Matthews, Thomas actually said, "In a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God."

In his Newsweek piece, Evans wrote, “If there was any one message that defined the Obama campaign from the beginning, it was his promise to rise above the petty politics of division and unite the country. But now comes reality.” The reality, it turned out, was that Obama could not even unite his own party despite a majority control of both houses of Congress.

From my perspective, there is nothing about Barack Obama that can be compared to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln put some of his rivals in his cabinet. An argument could be made for his selection of Hillary Clinton to be his Secretary of State, but Obama after a series of embarrassing selections that included tax cheats filled his cabinet with slavish loyalists, and then added a layer of advisors, “Czars”, to circumvent congressional oversight.

Lincoln possessed real humility and there is no evidence that Obama has any to call upon. If anything, there is hubris and a narcissism that is increasingly obvious to all and generates derision.

It will not surprise me if some in the media drag out the tarnished Lincoln-Obama comparisons, but like so many other aspects of political reporting, it will just be vacuous blather.

Of Presidents, Living and Dead

By Alan Caruba

No, it’s not just an excuse for a three-day weekend, another federal holiday. President’s Day, combining the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, exists to make us think about these two extraordinary men in terms of something more than sales at the mall, auto dealers, and furniture outlets.

The cookie-cutter biographies we are provided with in school barely scratch the surface of what remarkable people these two men were. They have become myths obscured by the many facts that have been collected by historians, but they were perhaps mysteries even to those who were their contemporaries. Both possessed unusual qualities though. They were not so much elevated to leadership as recognized for it.

For their times, both men were taller than most. Lincoln, most certainly, but Washington was an imposing figure as well and both knew it. Washington was an extremely successful farmer-entrepreneur, a wealthy man by any standard. Lincoln was a well-to-do corporate lawyer.

Washington, like those of his generation and especially his contemporaries in the Continental Congress, was concerned for what was then called “virtue”. What we now call honesty, ethical behavior, and similar terms regarding behavior that we all recognize as evoking confidence and respect.

Lincoln was concerned with the moral obscenity of slavery. It was the issue of his times and he felt compelled to end it. Beyond that, I suspect both men were as different as night and day. Lincoln was “every man”, approachable, folksy, and fortunately for succeeding generations of Americans, a canny politician and intellect. The Gettysburg Address is virtually a poem.

President’s Day always seems to involve those awful lists of who was a great President and who was the worst. That reduces the achievements of some or the failures of others to a parlor game. Presidents reflect the times in which they serve as well as their own personal traits. They were not cardboard cut-outs, but flesh and blood men grappling with events.

Washington put his enormous wealth and personal honor on the line to serve for seven long, discouraging years as the general of what can only charitably be called a continental army. It took a Prussian officer and immigrant to whip them into being a real fighting force, but it took the extraordinary courage and determination of Washington to see them through to independence from England, the greatest power of his era.

To understand the presidency of Abraham Lincoln it is essential to know that he became President on March 4, 1861. This is important because by the end of February 1861 seven southern States had already made it clear they intended to secede and had already convened a confederate congress in Richmond, Virginia. Quite literally, Jefferson Davis had taken his oath of office before Lincoln had arrived in Washington, D.C., to take up his duties. He took office with the sole task of preserving the Union. He was reelected during the course of the Civil War. He gave his life in that cause.

This is what each new generation of Americans needs to know, to understand, to absorb into their understanding what it means to live in a republic composed of separate and sovereign republics.

As this is written, millions of Americans are looking to the nation’s capitol and wondering what kind of man they have elected to be the 44th President of the United States and how the current Congress could so insanely burden the nation with enormous debt, piled upon an already existing one, because he deems these times to be "catastrophic."

The current financial crisis would, economists tell us, have eventually resolved itself on its own. If Washington gave us a nation and Lincoln preserved the Union, then Obama has rendered future generations of Americans mere serfs, born with a vast debt the moment they first draw breath.