What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (11 page)

Time and again, the Republicans took Obama at his word that he wanted real fiscal responsibility, deficit reduction, spending cuts, cost-containing health care reform, job creation, and economic growth. Time and again, they believed him when he said he was interested in their ideas and was willing to listen to them. And each time, the Republicans would ready their alternative market- and individual-based proposals, present them to Obama, and eagerly await his promised “conversation” about them, only to be met with a rolled-up newspaper slapped across their noses. The congressional Republicans received worse attention, harsher treatment, and less face time than Obama’s dog Bo. In fact, at one point Bo decided he was going to relieve himself inside the White House. Upon discovery, the president blamed the mess on Eric Cantor.

The perfect symbol of the disconnect between what the kooks were actually doing and the Republicans’ naive belief that they were to be included in policy making was Representative Paul Ryan’s budget presentation in the spring of 2011. When the GOP took control of the House in January 2011, they began work on a budget. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, had been working on budgetary issues for years and labored tirelessly on a major reform document that proposed serious spending cuts and structural changes to Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs in order to rescue them from the jaws of insolvency. Ryan, all boyish good looks and earnest demeanor, released the Republican budget and prepared for brutal political attacks but also at least serious engagement from the White House on the issues. He accepted Obama’s invitation to attend a major address by the president on spending and the deficit.

Ryan was seated front and center, perhaps expecting to hear the president announce that he was finally ready to meet the GOP and him halfway in order to restore fiscal order. Instead, Ryan and his plan were met by a relentless barrage of partisan insults, policy attacks, and Obama’s own budget proposal that was so ludicrously budget-busting that it was later unanimously defeated in the Senate 97 to 0. Representative Ryan should have known something was amiss when he was seated in the “naughty chair” and forced to wear a
KICK ME
sign while Joe Biden tied Ryan’s shoelaces together. Ryan was by far the more thoughtful and mature of the two men in the room that day and the only one with a serious budget plan, but Obama assumed the Big Daddy persona and cast Ryan as the naive schoolboy who needed to be taught a lesson.

Regardless of the issue, the president would blow a dog whistle and Republicans would eagerly come running to the table with their own ideas and proposals, only to be blown off in the most disrespectful and cavalier ways by Obama and the leftists. Obama never had any intention of reining in government, cutting spending, reducing the deficit, considering market-based ideas for health care reform, carrying out tax reform, or engaging in serious entitlement reform (see his immediate blow-off of his own deficit reduction commission, Simpson-Bowles). While he was busy “perfecting America” on one playing field, the Republicans were operating obliviously on another one. And the Republicans didn’t even realize they were being played.

The GOP was Obama’s booty call. The Republicans were willing to be “friends with benefits” in the hope that a relationship would form. Meanwhile, Barry was just looking for a casual hookup in order to get what he wanted. Indeed, he already had a longtime girlfriend named Karla Marxism … so for him, it was simply “Wham, Bam, No Thank You, John Boehner.”

I believe all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones.

—Barack Obama, October 2011

Barack Obama sold himself as the One who was going to bring us all together. He campaigned as the guy who, because of his biracial makeup and cool-cat demeanor, was the
only
one who could unite the nation and erase divisions based on politics, race, gender, and religion. The one area he deliberately left out was class divisions. He would need those in order to accomplish his redistributive mission. But he promised that under his leadership, other splits that have long riven America would be healed. He was unique. Special. A one-of-a-kind man for the moment.

Instead of making good on his Rodney King–esque “can’t we all get along” promise, however, Mr. “I’m a uniter, not a divider 2.0” managed to divide the nation in ways unimaginable before his presidency. We are more polarized politically, economically, racially, and culturally than ever.

And yet, notice that Obama hasn’t moved to fix these deepening divides. He hasn’t done any of the “healing” he promised because he never had any intention of healing anything. Like a dutiful Alinskyite, he never let a crisis go to waste, and he created them when necessary. If everyone were getting along and the economy were a job-creating dynamo, there would be no crisis atmosphere to justify his massive, unprecedented expansion of government.

He
needs
the economic situation to stay dire. He
needs
spending to continue to spiral upward. He
needs
the debt to reach unprecedented levels. He
needs
unemployment to stay high. He
needs
the classes pitted against each other. He
needs
a growing pauper class to keep the class conflict going. He
needs
a wealthy class constantly under assault. He
needs
government-sector unions strong and growing. He
needs
union thugs on the march. He
needs
conflict between the public and private sectors. He
needs
a southern border out of control. He
needs
a world thrown into disarray by retrenching American leadership. He
needs
to have the latest iPad before everyone else.

Obama and his fellow redistributionists have inflamed all of these crises as pretexts to sink the tentacles of state power into every part of our lives, from our checkbooks to our Chevy Tahoes to our hot dogs to our tonsillectomies. Obama has so consolidated power in his own hands and in the hands of the very few unelected kooks around him that freedom as we’ve always known it is slipping away.

Chaos and control: the very elements of George Orwell’s
1984
are the exact underpinnings of the Obama presidency.

And sitting atop it all is the one person we hire to look out for us: the president. He has always been a Trojan horse who said all of the right things, who whispered empty, sweet nothings like “hope” and “change” and “healing” and “perfecting,” but who—once he had gotten us to say “yes, we can”—sank the knife into our backs, à la Michael Corleone. “We knew it was you, Barry. You broke our heart. You broke our heart!”

The writer Maya Angelou once said, “When somebody shows you who they are,
believe them … the first time
.”

Obama’s beliefs and policies were so extreme and destructive that many Americans tried to explain or justify them away, by claiming to themselves and others that he was “really not that bad” or that “his critics find any reason to attack him.” The defensive crouch sometimes expressed itself in a benign way (“he’s in over his head”) and sometimes in a much darker way (“his critics are racist”). As time went on, other excuses were offered: he was “trying to do too much,” “naive,” “incompetent.” When he continued to present the same big-government, big-spending policies and refused to moderate his positions, some people invoked Albert Einstein’s famous definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. The
New York Times
even prepared a piece that suggested Obama suffered from clinical depression. Color me naive, but I have a hard time believing that a man who spends so many of his waking hours planning the latest celebrity visit to the White House is secretly the next Sylvia Plath.

He is not naive, incompetent, insane, or depressed. And the longer we’ve danced around, trying to explain his commitment to redistributionism with every pop psychological diagnosis in the book, the longer we’ve given him to methodically effect his agenda.

Every once in a while, a kook will forget the left-wing code of omertà and blurt out exactly what the organized crime syndicate known as the Far Left is up to. Ladies and gentlemen: give it up for the Reverend Al Sharpton, who on March 21, 2010, gave some smelling salts to a hypnotized nation. “First of all, then we have to say the American public overwhelmingly voted for socialism when they elected President Obama,” Sharpton said. “Let’s not act as though the president didn’t tell the American people—the president offered the American people health reform when he ran. He was overwhelmingly elected running on that and he has delivered what he promised.” Duh.

The self-proclaimed “blank screen” was not a messiah but he was messianic. Just days after Barack Obama was elected president, NBC News patriarch and prominent liberal Tom Brokaw gave an interview to PBS’s Charlie Rose. Here is part of their incredible exchange:

ROSE:
I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.

BROKAW:
No, I don’t either.

ROSE:
I don’t know how he really sees where China is.

BROKAW:
We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.

ROSE:
I don’t really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?

BROKAW:
You know that’s an interesting question.

ROSE:
He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational [
sic
] speeches, two of them.

BROKAW:
I don’t know what books he’s read.

ROSE:
What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?

BROKAW:
There’s a lot about him we don’t know.

The left-wing press—of which Brokaw and Rose are major parts—knew Sarah Palin’s dress size and how Michelle Obama got her smokin’ biceps, but when it came to the candidate they had promoted so vigorously, some of the nation’s biggest “journalists” were thunderstruck but how little they knew about him—by their own choice.

We blindly and willingly gave the keys to the kingdom to a stranger who then blindfolded us and took us on a socialist joyride. What a long, strange trip it’s been—and not in the good Grateful Dead way. As all of the Obama weirdness and destruction unfolded, most Americans began to feel like the coed at the frat party who drinks too much wine out of a box, goes home with the guy she thinks is Ryan Reynolds, only to wake up instead with the Situation.

What the @$%&! just happened? A bad case of beer goggles.

But unlike our fictional coed, in our drunken political stupor we actually married the guy. And the divorce is going to be really, really expensive.

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

—Ronald Reagan, July 28, 1988

Government can help.

—Barack Obama, August 16, 2011

In 1934, the
Chicago Tribune
printed a scathing political cartoon that struck at the heart of Franklin Roosevelt’s massive expansion of government known as the New Deal. At the top of the cartoon are the words “Planned Economy or Planned Destruction?” Underneath is a drawing of a horse-drawn wagon, filled with Roosevelt’s economic advisers, such as Vice President Henry Wallace, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, Director of the National Recovery Administration Donald Richberg, and chief intellectual architect of the New Deal, Rexford Tugwell, who is pictured driving the out-of-control, speeding wagon. As they pass around a bottle labeled
POWER
, they laugh with glee as bags of money fly off the wagon. They are identified as the “Young Pinkies from Columbia and Harvard” and the “Brains Trust.” A sign hangs off the back of the wagon that says they are
DEPLETING THE RESOURCES OF THE SOUNDEST GOVERNMENT IN THE WORLD
. At the bottom of the cartoon are two communist titans. In the lower right corner stands Joseph Stalin, who is seen saying, “How red the sunrise is getting.” In the lower left corner sits Vladimir Lenin writing a sign of his own:
PLAN OF ACTION FOR U.S. SPEND! SPEND! SPEND! UNDER THE GUISE OF RECOVERY—BUST THE GOVERNMENT—BLAME THE CAPITALISTS FOR THE FAILURE—JUNK THE CONSTITUTION AND DECLARE A DICTATORSHIP
. His final thought: “It worked in Russia!”

Published just one year into Roosevelt’s first term, the cartoon proved prophetic. Roosevelt and his merry band of leftist intellectuals took the nation on a socialist joyride in the name of dealing with the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression. Eighty years later, a White House chief of staff went on national television and resurrected the sacred leftist mantra. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel intoned. “And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” That 1934 cartoon proved to be a red warning flag not just for Roosevelt’s unprecedented spending and growth of government but for many of the Democratic presidents and some of the Republican ones who followed him. In fact, on November 24, 2008,
Time
magazine actually published a cover image of Obama as FDR, titled “The New New Deal.”

The multiple economic catastrophes we face today did not develop overnight. They were the result of decades of gross fiscal mismanagement, either done in service of an ideological agenda (the Left) or out of a misguided desire to appear “compassionate” (the Republicans). Either way, we have seen explosive deficit spending to fuel an ever-ravenous government.