What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (18 page)

After all of the debt deal machinations, the unthinkable happened anyway.

“Mr. President! Your country just got downgraded! What are you going to do next?”

“I’m going to two reelection fund-raisers!”

Obama’s version of Disney World.

On August 5, 2011, Standard & Poor’s did what they had threatened for months and downgraded U.S. debt from its sterling AAA credit rating to AA+. For the first time in American history, our creditworthiness took a humiliating blow. The United States—the greatest superpower the world had ever known—was instantly cut down with a Backwaterville credit rating.

What the @$%&! just happened?

The kooks had seized control of the nation’s wallet.

In the spring of 2011, Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner was asked point-blank what level of risk existed for a possible debt downgrade. He answered, “No risk.” He went even further, saying, “Things are better than they’ve been if you want to think about the prospects for improving our long-term fiscal position.” That prediction was right up there with those giddy administration predictions for Recovery Summers! I and II.

This is how fundamentally unserious Obama was about pursuing real debt reduction: six months before the downgrade, he offered a budget that
increased
spending and the debt so preposterously that after ten years, annual deficits would have still been running over $1 trillion. Four months before the downgrade, he delivered a budget speech full of absurd gimmicks and degrading insults to House Budget chairman Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which had courageously offered a meaningful proposal to reduce spending and bring down the debt. In April 2011, White House press secretary Jay Carney announced that Obama wanted a clean debt-ceiling increase with no spending restraints at all. Seven days later, Standard & Poor’s issued a negative outlook to our AAA rating, something Obama Treasury officials tried to prevent by privately urging S&P to reconsider because the “debt was manageable.” Obama also refused to put ObamaCare on the table, despite a $1 trillion price tag over the first few years with its projected costs growing faster in its out-years. In large part, it was Obama’s repeated unwillingness to deal with the debt crisis in a serious way that provoked the downgrade.

As Standard & Poor’s put it: “We view President Obama’s and Congressman Ryan’s proposals as the starting point of a process aimed at broader engagement, which could result in substantial and lasting U.S. government fiscal consolidation.
That said, we see the path to agreement as challenging because the gap between the parties remains wide
.” (Emphasis added.)

The president’s open hostility to a mature debt-reduction plan while offering no mature plan of his own was the final straw for Standard & Poor’s. Of course, Team Obama immediately set about to shoot the messenger, claiming the ratings agency’s numbers were off and that they could not be trusted because they had missed the big blowups at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Enron, and WorldCom. Furthermore, just days after the downgrade, the Holder Justice Department leaked to the
New York Times
that it was conducting an investigation into whether Standard & Poor’s improperly rated scores of mortgage-backed securities in the years before the financial crisis. The
Times
story took pains to say that the investigation had been begun before the credit downgrade, but the leak came almost immediately afterward. The Department of Justice tossed Moody’s into the investigation as well, for good measure.

The problem with the downgrade, however, wasn’t the messenger but the message: it’s the spending, stupid! Unsustainable entitlement programs have grown over many decades and across many presidents and Congresses. But the biggest chance to begin correcting the problem was during the 2011 debt-ceiling debate, and both sides ran for the hills. This downgrade should make everyone feel a bit impotent. It’s like going to bed with Ralph Fiennes and waking up the next morning with former Labor secretary Robert Reich … that is, if you can actually locate him under the covers. One minute, you’re getting frisky with the hot star of
The English Patient
, and the next, you find yourself drowning in Munchkinland. Now, THAT’S a downgrade.

Right on cue, some of our largest foreign creditors scolded our fiscal irresponsibility. Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin called the United States a “parasite,” saying, “They are living beyond their means and shifting a part of the weight of their problems to the world economy.” The Chinese government chimed in as well, using the official Xinhua news service to say that Beijing had “every right” to demand that Washington safeguard Chinese dollar assets and to call for the United States to “come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone.... To cure its addiction to debt, the United States has to re-establish the common sense principle that one should live within its means.” Savor the irony: the Chinese communists and the Russian pseudo-communists are lecturing us about our spending and debt levels, and the commies are right.

Immediately following the commie pile-on, the Euro-schoolmarms at the World Economic Forum gave the United States a second downgrade. They dropped America further down their global ranking of the world’s most competitive economies. We are now number five, behind Switzerland, Singapore, Sweden, and Finland. While praising us for our productivity, highly sophisticated and innovative companies, and flexible labor market, the forum called us out for “a number of escalating weaknesses” such as astronomical government debt.

The commies get it. The Euro-socialists get it. But Obama and the kooks? Oh, they get it, all right. I thought there was only a finite number of ways to describe Obama as a leftist, but what do you call a guy who’s sitting to the left of the Communist Chinese and the socialist governments of Europe?

CHRISTMAS EVE, 2009
WASHINGTON, DC

On December 24, 2009, Senate Democrats gave the American people the political equivalent of a fruitcake. As the Democratic Grinches prepared to vote on their version of the widely despised, destructive, and chaotic health care bill, they tried to spice up their fruitcake with distortions, distractions, and flat-out lies. With over 60 percent of the American people opposing their incoherent mess of a plan, the Democrats tried desperately to convince us that we would love this particular fruitcake. Unlike other fruitcakes, however, the health care fruitcake could not be regifted to someone else.

The Democrats reveled in their Heat Miser health care politics, oblivious to the reality that they were melting themselves out of majority control of the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Had you been naughty or nice? It didn’t matter, because the Democrats were going to stick you with a new multitrillion-dollar assault on your freedoms anyway. Nothing says “Merry Christmas” like the government mugging you and leaving you broke, beaten, and bloodied on the street. But no worries! ObamaCare covers government beat-downs.

According to Obama’s Declaration of Dependence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness … and oh yeah, government-run health care.” That last part must have slipped Thomas Jefferson’s mind. Nurse Barry couldn’t wait to slap on some rubber gloves and get his feel for all of our body parts. He couldn’t wait to dig, prod, and poke at our humanity while he humiliated us. Prostate check! Here comes Nurse Barry! Hysterectomy! Here comes Nurse Barry! So you think you have a hernia? Turn your head and cough for Nurse Barry!

The crown jewel of the kooks’ redistributive state has always been socialized medicine, for one simple reason: if the government controls your health care, the government controls you. And if the best health care system in the world were disassembled and then made to resemble so many other atrocious health care systems, yet another part of America’s greatness would be diluted down to unexceptionalism. This is why Obama and the kooks spent their first year and a half hysterically dashing through the health care weeds when most Americans were crying out for jobs and economic growth. In fact, the kooks quickly passed the $862 billion “stimulus,” declared their work on the economy done, and turned immediately to the most important item on their socialist checklist. They moved fast and with near-complete disregard for public opinion. And they made sure that their redistributive superstructure was built on a direct infringement of your personal liberty: an unprecedented legal mandate to buy a good or service as a basic condition of living in the United States. The “individual mandate” to purchase health insurance or face an IRS-enforced fine is so constitutionally dubious that it made its way to the Supreme Court. The kooks, however, knew exactly what they were doing: launching the Mother of All Redistributionist Programs that would fundamentally change the very character of America while reducing America itself.

Health care “reform,” as they called it, was about neither reform nor health care.

For decades, leftists had tried to get it done, from Theodore Roosevelt through Hillary Clinton, but they failed each time for a variety of reasons. They were able to get more limited redistributive programs through that dealt with certain aspects of health care, such as Medicare and Medicaid. But they had been unable to get a massive overhaul of health care in place for
every
American—until Obama and the kooks took control. They realized they had a short window of opportunity to achieve this most ambitious “spread the wealth around” plan at last, and they didn’t waste a second. Nurse Barry was in a rush and didn’t have time to either debate the merits of the bill or change the nation’s bedpan. His plan was to impose socialist medicine as fast as possible, while he dumped that bedpan on our heads.