Obama's Blame Game

By Alan Caruba

It hasn’t taken long for most Americans to figure out Obama’s blame game in which each new “crisis” requires a straw man to discredit and knock down.

Co-authors, Ken Blackwell, a senior fellow with the Family Research Council, and Ken klukowski, a widely published constitutional lawyer, have joined forces to write “The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency” ($22.95, Lyons Press).

“For Obama to remake our country into what he wants it to be, he must subvert the Supreme Law of the Land.”

Shortly after the passage of Obamacare close to twenty States’ attorney generals joined in a legal suit to challenge its unconstitutional demand that Americans buy government-issued health insurance.

Who can forget the euphoria that led to Obama’s election? “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” said Obama on October 30, 2008. He wasn’t just engaging in the usual overblown campaign rhetoric. He meant it!

Which raises the question, if it ain’t broke, why fix it? The United States of America has the oldest constitution in continual use. It has been amended only twenty-six times in 222 years since 1778. Ten of those amendments are embodied in the Bill of Rights.

In the fifteen months since he was sworn into office we have been witness to the way Obama, Pelosi, Reid and their Democrat cohorts in Congress conduct the business of government. It isn’t pretty.

To borrow from “The Blueprint”, here are the basic elements. We begin with the constant “crisis” factor.

I grant that the financial crisis that occurred in 2008, conveniently just before the election, was real. Suspiciously, it was trigged by sudden massive withdrawals from U.S. banks. To date, no investigation has been pursued, nor have those making the withdrawals been identified. The Federal Reserve stepped in to blunt the attack.

I hasten to point out that the crisis was entirely a creation of the government and its “social justice” programs that distorted to mortgage market. What was not needed, however, was a bogus $787 billion “stimulus” bill that, thus far, has been a failure of stupendous proportions. Passed rapidly with the promise that it would keep the unemployment rate at eight percent, we are now beyond ten percent and rising.

Pathetically wedded to truly bad ideas, the president and the Democrats had waited nearly two decades to “reform” Medicare in America. They took a stab at it during the Clinton years and failed. The Republicans had long offered common sense solutions to some of the obvious problems such as the need for tort reform and expanding the right of insurance companies to sell across state lines, but these were repeatedly defeated.

Instead, Obama insisted the problem was the nation’s physicians, people who devote years of their lives at considerable cost in order to heal the sick. As far as he was concerned they were in fact rapacious gangsters requiring children with a sore throat to get tonsillectomies. He told audiences that the reform was necessary to ensure that the poor were not turned away at the emergency room doors even though a federal law ensures that no one is ever turned away for lack of insurance.

The blame game was expanded to include both the pharmaceutical and insurance industries and this is the same tactic used to advance the horrid Cap-and-Trade Act. The oil, gas and coal companies are identified as the bad guys. This hides the fact that the bill is based on the bogus global warming theory that “greenhouse gases” are warming an Earth that is demonstrably cooling.

The latest “straw man” in the Obama crosshairs is Goldman Sachs, a respected bank that is being set up to advance legislation to further regulate the financial sector. An appearance before a congressional committee is the latest kabuki theatre. The government, however, has been running Ponzi schemes—-Social Security and Medicare—-for decades. Why would we take seriously the same people who are currently spending the nation into intolerable debt?

The final element of Obama’s chicanery is the identification of “victims” and this is always a ruse to infuse any argument with elements of class warfare. In his pitch to save Democrats from being turned out from office in November, Obama has identified with blacks, Hispanics, younger voters and women, presumably the party’s “base” these days, though one suspects even they are catching onto the game.

What the Founders wanted above all was a limited central government with clearly delineated powers. What Americans have gotten, under the spell of various “progressives” since the days of Theodore Roosevelt, is a monstrous government that intervenes and interferes with fundamental capitalism, the free market, is in full attack on private property, and increasingly encroaches on the most elemental of our personal freedoms.

“Barack Obama is waging war against the U.S. Constitution” as he pursues his bizarre agenda of “redistributing the wealth.” This is a fundamentally Marxist concept. It didn’t work for the former Soviet Union. Its economic elements have been abandoned by Red China. It is destroying oil-rich Venezuela. It has enslaved Cubans and North Koreans.

Obama’s blame game will not change. Americans must now unite to “change” our future by electing a Congress composed of men and women who value the Constitution more than the political power that has mistakenly been given to the Democrat Party and its socialist minions.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Obama: Repeating the Same Mistakes (and Lies)

By Alan Caruba

It is the duty of being a “pundit” to have an opinion on the events of the day and, of course, everyone has an opinion about President Obama’s State of the Union speech.

My most distinct impression while listening to it was that I had heard it all before.

It was a repeat of Obama’s 2008 campaign and a repeat of the past year’s failure to gain support for healthcare “reform” and the stalled “Cap-and-Tax” bill. It was a siren call to his fellow Democrats in Congress to continue supporting policies that will surely get them thrown out of office in October.

Some sage said that repeating the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results is a definition of insanity. I am no psychiatrist, but the narcissism that so defines Obama was on display. I kept count and he said “I” or some version of it at least 100 times in the course of the speech. He used the word “we” a lot, but that was a rhetorical “we”, not the one where we all pull together.

And we shall surely all pull together in November when we pull the lever in the voting machine for any candidate not on the Democrat Party line.

There is little to be added to the analysis of other pundits, but I did notice one particularly disturbing, albeit brief, reference to “climate change.” He wants the United States “to be a leader in the fight against climate change.”

If you recall, during the campaign Obama promised that, if elected, the seas would begin to recede. One of the more absurd claims of global warming was the massive melting of the North and South Poles, thus causing the oceans of the world to rise and swamp the coastlines of nations.

You may also recall that the President went to the Copenhagen UN Conference on Climate Change that happily resulted in nothing at all. This was a good outcome and it occurred in the wake of the release of emails between a handful of rogue climate scientists who had labored for years to distort the actual data on climate in order to further the vast global warming hoax.

The President actually said there was “overwhelming evidence” of climate change. No, but there is growing evidence that Al Gore and everyone else who said that global warming was occurring was lying or seriously misinformed.

How the President of the United States could continue to assert that global warming was or is real is beyond any rational explanation.

The President also repeated the falsehood that “investment”, i.e., taxpayer subsidies and “stimulus” cash, in “green jobs” and “clean energy” was the way out of the nation’s current economic difficulties. This is so absurd as to constitute willful deception.

About the only thing that made any sense was his passing reference to the need for more nuclear plants to generate electricity for the nation’s growing population and the need to open up exploration of the nation’s offshore reserves of oil and natural gas. The Institute for Energy Research projects that developing oil and gas reserves has the potential to create 1.2 million jobs and provide an additional $70 billion in annual wages.

Everywhere around the world, nations are cutting back on their investments in wind and solar power. It is inefficient and impractical. In a nation that has several hundred years of coal reserves, it makes sense to build some more coal-fired plants as well, given the fact that coal provides fifty percent of all the electricity we use daily.

Beyond the environmental and energy issues the President touched upon, his favorite theme was an attack on the nation’s banking and insurance industries. This no doubt derives from his Marxist outlook that sees any form of capitalism as wrong.

Finally, in an administration overflowing with former and future lobbyists, the hypocrisy of blaming them for the failure of a Congress that for decades has been mostly controlled by the Democrat Party is yet another absurdity. Lobbyists have been part of the nation’s political structure almost from the first session of Congress in 1789.

In sum, President Obama has learned virtually nothing from his first year in office. He will not be a “great one term President”, but he will be a one-term President in 2012.

The Slaves of the Democrat Party

By Alan Caruba

It was a fitting symbol of the pack of lies that constitute “global warming.”

The President of the United States, along with the Speaker of the House, had to flee Copenhagen’s Climate Change Conference because of a snow storm of epic proportions for that Danish city and to return swiftly to Washington, D.C. because of a record-setting blizzard that hit the northeast.

In Copenhagen, the President continued to betray the will of the American people by blathering about “global warming” and the need to act swiftly to stop it by imposing limits on how much energy Americans could use. He also managed to anger the major environmental organizations by failing in this mission.

The Sierra Club sent a message to its members celebrating 2009 as a year in which they were instrumental in “stopping over 100 dirty coal plants” in a nation that depends on such plants for fifty percent of the electricity we use every day. They also took credit for “the protection of two million acres of natural spaces” that will never be used for timber, for mining, for any of the resources, minerals, oil, or natural gas the nation requires and which will likely be off limits for any form of recreation use as well.

Also returning from Copenhagen was California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who, as the Orange Country Register noted on December 17, “made the astonishing claim that the Golden State is evidence we need not choose between a clean environment and economic growth.” The editorial credited Schwarzenegger in part for the state’s “economic mess, largely thanks to taxes and government regulations. The governor’s pet environmental projects are chief culprits.”

One of those pet projects was “a Kyoto-type regulatory scheme to force California off fossil fuels” that the Small Business roundtable estimated would cost consumers $149.2 billion when it is fully implemented, small businesses $182.6 billion, and to kill about 1.1 million jobs in total.”

Sen. Harry Reid has managed finally to bribe the last Democrat holdout on Obamacare, Sen. Ben Nelson, in order to bring the bill to a vote. The brutal sellout included a White House threat to close a Nebraska Air Force base.

Obamacare is a complete betrayal of the American people, slashing a half trillion dollars from Medicare, a program designed to aid senior citizens respond to the illnesses and other debilitating effects of old age. It enables the federal government to take control of one sixth of the nation’s economy in the same way it has steadily extended its central control over education, energy and all other aspects of life in America.

Despite having beaten back a previous attempt to extend amnesty to the estimated twelve to seventeen million illegal aliens in America, another bill has been introduced in Congress to further undermine the nation’s obligation to protect its borders from millions of illegals who are sapping billions of taxpayer funds due to their use of our education system, our hospital system, and the need to respond to criminality of every description. In addition, illegals send home billions in remittances.

Environmentalism is an attack on the West, the industrialized nations of the world that, according to the Copenhagen conference, were supposed to transfer billions to “developing nations” that have been developing for as long as memory serves. The conference declared that their emissions of carbon dioxide were causing climate change. This is now a totally discredited lie.

Little wonder China and India would have nothing to do with the Copenhagen proposals as they apply themselves to providing more energy in the form of coal and nuclear plants in order to raise the standard of living for their billion-plus populations and bring about real growth and prosperity.

Meanwhile, in Europe, France relies on nuclear energy for 76% of its energy needs. In England, after shutting down its coal mines and nuclear plants, the government is in a frenzy to reinstitute them in order to avoid future energy blackouts after having spent billions on wind farms. The greening of Spain through subsidized wind and solar power has caused a financial crisis and destroyed 2.2 jobs for every alleged “green” job created.

And while this is occurring, the United States of America is being dragged into a Soviet-style centralized government by the most Marxist administration in its entire history; an administration that has no intention of paying heed to the will and the voice of the people.

The Constitution begins with the words, “We the People” but the people are no longer a component of the current government. The people are now the slaves of the Democrat Party.