Showing posts with label stimulus spending. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stimulus spending. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Who Are You Calling "Soft"?

By Alan Caruba

Barack Hussein Obama’s contempt for Americans is so huge he cannot hide it.

Recall his view that some Americans are so backward that they “cling to their guns and religion.” Some historians might argue that America was built on its preference for guns and religion. There is a reason why, after guaranteeing the rights of free speech, the press, and the right to peacefully assemble for the redress of grievances in the First Amendment, the Second Amendment makes it abundantly clear that those same citizens have a right to own and bear arms.

Religion has played such an essential role in our history that, if were it not for a group of very religious people we now call the pilgrims, America might be a very different place. The right to worship freely and in the manner of our choice is deeply embedded in the national culture.

Most recently, Obama said that Americans have gone “soft”. Imagine that?

This from a man who has a fleet of limousines, a helicopter, and a jet plane at his disposal; a man that lives in a mansion provided by his fellow citizens, fully staffed to ensure that all his personal needs are attended to and one who gets to attend events in that mansion where celebrities provide the entertainment.

If anything, we are being led by the first metrosexual who’s more concerned about the crease in his slacks than the fact that his policies have done nothing to lift the nation out of its most recent financial crisis (we have had many before).

Obama, whose memory seems to extend no further back than his last speech, is an idiot.

We recently recalled the loss of three thousand fellow Americans on 9/11 ten years ago, but Obama is oblivious to the fact that Americans who he considers “soft”, repaired the damage done to the Pentagon, cleaned up the debris at Ground Zero, and are well on their way to building splendid new skyscrapers, plus a memorial to the dead. The Twin Towers are being replaced with, appropriately enough, a Freedom Tower.

History also informs us that the “greatest generation” had spent ten years suffering through the Great Depression prior to responding to a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, declaring war on both the Empire of Japan and Nazi Germany. Starting from scratch we and our allies defeated both by 1945. Was that generation “soft” because, thanks to a bumbling, Keynesian government, many previously had to stand in soup lines for a warm meal?

Obama is a perpetual embarrassment to most Americans—save for the twenty to twenty-five percent who want to hold civil trials for the likes of the Islamist fanatics who are still plotting to kill us.

While the media has been quick to credit Obama with the killing of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al Alwaki, they have ignored the fact that those actions were made possible by George W. Bush who restructured our intelligence, defense, and law enforcement communities to coordinate in ways they had never done before.

Obama signed the capture or kill orders, but the machinery was created by his predecessor. It was Obama who wanted to close Guantanamo and prosecute the CIA interrogators who secured the information used to degrade and destroy al Qaeda.

As for Americans being soft, I doubt that Obama has ever attended or watched a football game; a quintessentially American sport involving brute force, combined with speed and athleticism that requires extraordinary skills. Obama is far more likely to be found playing golf; a fine sport, but not one that fills stadiums.

No one suggests that Obama did not “inherit” a nation facing an economic crisis, but it wasn’t, as Obama kept saying for his first two years in office, Bush’s fault. It was the result of bad government programs dating back to the days of the Great Depression. They were that same kind of "stimulus" programs that Obama has used to run up the national debt.

Now he has the gall to blame Americans for being “soft” while 14 million are unemployed, others have lost their homes to foreclosure, and the rest struggle to raise their families, pay their bills, and tend to the needs of their community.

It is a terrible thing to have elected a big baby, a petulant, self-indulgent child to the highest office of the land, along with a Vice President who is a babbling fool.

To hear him call the rest of us “soft” is a rebuke that will be answered in November 2012.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

McConnell Takes Obama to the Woodshed

By Alan Caruba

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) gave a response, in advance, to President Obama’s Thursday speech regarding the state of the economy.

“We’ve tried the President’s approach. It’s failed.”

I doubt that Sen. McConnell’s speech received much notice by the mainstream media, but it was as succinct an analysis of why everything the President has done regarding the economy has failed. Reportedly, Obama wants to throw more billions at “recovery.”

Much like the man caught in bed by his wife with someone else, Obama’s approach is “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?”

Obama has a very big problem now. Even those who voted for him have removed their rose-colored glasses and concluded that they have mortgaged the present and their future to someone who has no idea how to fix that future. He will do what he has always done. He will blame someone or something else. The Bush administration. A Japanese earthquake. Hurricanes. Bad luck. And this time around, Congress.

Sen. McConnell is no silver-tongued orator. He’s not flashy or charismatic. He is, however, the quintessential conservative politician. In his address on the Senate floor he said, “I don’t think any one of us is under any illusion that the American people were particularly eager to see us come back.” That is refreshing candor.

“After two and a half years of being told that Washington had the answer to everything from the high costs of health care to high unemployment, people have every reason to be skeptical.” If Americans are skeptical of a sharply divided, highly partisan Congress, they are even more skeptical of the President.

“For more than two and a half years, under this administration, Americans have been hearing about the wonders that government spending would do for our economy, and about the dangerous consequences of failing to apply ‘bold’ solutions to big problems.”

Sen. McConnell paused and asked, “And what’s it gotten them?”

One thing Americans know about the Obama “Stimulus” is that there are 1.7 million fewer jobs in America since he signed it. “That’s not the kind of change people voted for three years ago,” said Sen. McConnell.

What, indeed, did people think they were voting for three years ago? Change? Hope? Those aren’t policies, they’re slogans.

What Americans don’t know about the Stimulus, Sen. McConnell noted, was that it is “the one of the single most expensive pieces of legislation Congress has ever approved. The interest payments alone are projected to cost an average of $100 million a day.”

“And here’s what the President told us...the Stimulus would save or create 3.5 million jobs.” As we now know, Obama’s answer to everything is more government. When his programs are criticized his answer is that it’s just politics. No, it is the failure of those programs that is obvious to anyone and everyone.

Sen. McConnell noted the ways, rather than admit failure, Obama has taken, such as agreeing to keep taxes from going up last December, but then he identified the source of our present problems. “The President is forever eager to embrace big proposals whenever government’s at the helm, but when it comes to doing the kind of things job creators really want, he’s suddenly timid. He’ll agree to a tax cut as long as it’s temporary.”

It was a long speech, but Sen. McConnell rounded it out by identifying what can and should be done. He called on the President to send Congress the three trade treaties that have been sitting on his desk for nearly three years. He called for a reform of the budget process and for a balanced budget amendment. He warned against a series of huge and costly regulatory proposals by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“We’ve tried the President’s approach. It’s failed.”

“Millions of Americans are looking for Washington not so much to do more, but for the first time in a long time, to do less—so that they can finally do what it takes to get this economy moving again.”

In the wake of the President’s speech, who are you going to believe? Him? We’ve tried that and it hasn’t worked.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Friday, October 8, 2010

How Crazy Is It?


By Alan Caruba

How crazy is it to keep telling people the economy is recovering when everyone knows the “stimulus” was a complete flop and unemployment is up?

How crazy is it to keep wanting to spend more billions on “stimulus”?

How crazy is it to let the Bush tax cuts expire when every economist in America is telling you to extend or make them permanent?

How crazy is it for the federal government to sue Arizona for passing a law that directly mirrors a federal one intended to enforce the prohibition against illegal aliens?

How crazy is it to help fund a deepwater oil drilling operation off the coast of Brazil while refusing to allow it anywhere off the East and West coasts of America?

How crazy is it to refuse to open a tiny portion of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to drilling for oil at a time when we are importing sixty percent of oil from foreign producers?

How crazy is it to “reform” Medicare by adding thousands more to its rolls while telling everyone you were cutting its costs?

How crazy is it to pass Obamacare without telling people that many would lose their insurance while others would see their premiums increase?

How crazy is it to require utilities to purchase electricity from wind and solar farms when neither could exist without taxpayer subsidies, nor produces a steady supply?

How crazy is it to try to stop the building of coal-fired plants to generate electricity when the United States is the “Saudi Arabia of coal”, having hundreds of years’ supply?

How crazy is it to continue the moratorium on U.S. oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico, throwing more people out of work, denying the oil to the marketplace, and yet give money to Mexico so it can drill in the same Gulf?

How crazy is it to try to close Guantanamo when no U.S. state prison system and no foreign nation want to take the detainees? When one third or more of those previously released returned to the battlefield?

How crazy is it to continue blaming G.W. Bush for everything when you’ve spent more time on the golf course in a year and a half than he did during eight years in office?

How crazy is it to give a speech on the war in Afghanistan at West Point and announce when the U.S. will be leaving?

How crazy is it for the federal government to ban the incandescent light bulb?

I could ask this generic question many times regarding the Obama administration and some previous congressional actions, but they add up to something less than “crazy” and more like a plan to harm the nation and all Americans when it comes to energy, healthcare, and national security.

Some may say this notion is just plain crazy, but it may be closer to the truth than anyone wants to admit.

© Alan Caruba, 2010