What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (47 page)

Obama once likened his brief time in the private sector to being “a spy behind enemy lines.” In mid-December 2011, Obama gave a major economic speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, that revealed just how much he still believed economic freedom is the “enemy.” Why would the president of the United States choose that particular location to once again lecture America on the injustices of capitalism? Teddy Roosevelt launched modern progressivism in a speech there in 1910, making it something of a sacred mecca for leftists. In fact, the radical anti-American group the Weather Underground—yes, the Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn Weather Underground—named their publication
Osawatomie
. The summer 1975 edition of
Osawatomie
was a delightful paean to the Vietnamese communist Ho Chi Minh, with a cover illustration of the mass murderer saying, “The American invaders will be defeated.” I’m sure that in the summer of 1975, pubescent Barry was feeling the changes in his body. He was fourteen years old, and like all boys going through puberty, he liked to spend time alone in his bedroom. The difference between him and the other boys, however, was that Barry wouldn’t vanish into his room with a pilfered copy of
Playboy
. Instead, he’d lock the door behind him with a copy of
Osawatomie
.

In his Osawatomie speech, given nearly three years into his tenure, Obama proved yet again that he is committed to his domestic demolition project, regardless of the economic pain or even his own reelection. Class warfare, wealth redistribution, unprecedented spending, record-breaking deficits and debt, socialized medicine, higher taxes, oppressive state regulations … they are all working for the greater end. The wrecking ball he let swing is smashing through every part of the economy, exactly as planned.

“Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune,” he intoned. “‘The market will take care of everything,’ they tell us. Now, it’s a simple theory,” he continued. “And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked.”

Obama was really saying that economic freedom doesn’t work. Economic decisions cannot be left to individuals, who are too selfish, greedy, and reckless to make them. They must be consolidated in the hands of the state, which can more evenly “spread the wealth around” to ensure equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity.

Obama is America’s chief misery merchant, and his job is to guarantee that all joy is sucked completely from the American people. He knows that a joyless people is a desperate people, and thus he must maintain an atmosphere of stagnation where upward mobility is impossible. He is constantly positioning himself as the great defender of the middle class, but much of what he has done has been geared toward destroying it: engaging in record government spending, exploding deficits, inflating the currency and devaluing the dollar, raising taxes, and burdening businesses with ever-increasing costs and regulations. While he hits the highest earners, his real target is the middle class, which is less able to manage the leftist economic assault. His ultimate goal is to so
weaken
the middle class that it becomes utterly dependent on government as well. This is at the core of Obama’s Declaration of Dependence.

“I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules,” he said in Osawatomie. He hasn’t changed his thinking or his policies one iota. He keeps telling us who he is. Do we believe him now?

First, consider
Obama the Liar
:

On the “stimulus,” Obama told us that it would keep unemployment at or under 8 percent. Nearly $1 trillion later, unemployment sailed over 10 percent and then settled into the 9 percent range, and when the rate dropped, it was largely because people stopped looking for work, not because they found jobs. Obama calls that improvement.

On spending, Obama told us he’d institute “pay-as-you-go budgeting” because he wanted to reduce spending levels. Instead, he produced multiple budgets over $3.5 trillion each—all rejected by Congress—and proposed endless spending proposals. He also refused to actually cut spending in any meaningful way, except in national defense.

Also on spending, Obama told us that he’d “go through our federal budget—page by page, line by line—eliminating those programs we don’t need, and insisting that those we do, operate in a sensible, cost-effective way.” He hasn’t done either.

On the deficit, Obama told us that he’d cut it in half by the end of his first term. Instead, he more than tripled it, producing years’ worth of record $1 trillion–plus deficits.

On the debt, Obama told us he’d slow its growth. Instead, he’s piled on a record $5 trillion in three years, more than any other president ever. As a senator in 2006, he called raising the debt ceiling “a failure of leadership.” As president, he requested and got four mega-increases in the debt ceiling in less than three years. He’s on pace to borrow more than $6.2 trillion in just one term, which is more debt than was accumulated by all U.S. presidents from Washington through Clinton combined.

On ObamaCare, Obama told us it would help to improve the economy, lower costs, deliver greater accessibility, and if we “liked our current plan,” we could “keep it.” Instead, ObamaCare brought job creation to a screeching halt, prices are already skyrocketing before the bulk of it has even been enacted, rationing has kicked in, many Americans have discovered that they won’t be able to keep their plans, and the Supreme Court has been forced to decide its very constitutionality.

On “green energy,” Obama told us to expect a green jobs revolution (backed by taxpayer money). Instead, we ended up paying tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to “clean energy” companies only to have them supply a measly 2.4 percent of the nation’s power, that is, when they didn’t go belly-up.

On traditional sources of energy, Obama told us that he wanted to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of oil and gas. Instead, he called for hiking taxes on domestic oil and gas production, halted offshore drilling and exploration and then made them more difficult, and blocked the private-sector construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

On ethics, Obama told us that he’d lead the “most transparent administration in history” and a new era of “accountability.” Instead, Team Obama has stonewalled every investigation from Solyndra to the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case to his own murky background to Fast and Furious. He has also blamed the bad economy on everything but his own policies. And he has depended heavily on his vast network of “czars,” through whom he
really
exercises power.

On presidential signing statements, Obama told us he wouldn’t engage in the practice “as a way of doing an end-run around Congress.” As of early 2012, he had put his name to nineteen signing statements, on issues from dispersing “stimulus” money to negotiating with foreign governments to detaining Americans, a new power he claimed he didn’t think he’d ever use. But you never know.

On lobbying, Obama told us there would be no lobbyists in his administration and no lobbyist money going to his campaign. Instead, he has happily welcomed both with open arms.

Obama promised a thriving economy and a united country. We have gotten neither.

About that promised thriving economy … consider
The Obama Reign of Economic Terror
:

Chronic unemployment worse than what it was during the Great Depression.

The longest stretch of sky-high unemployment since the Depression.

The worst jobs record of any president in the modern age.

The lowest labor participation rate since the early 1980s.

An unprecedented number of underemployed people.

Plummeting real median income; since June 2009, the income of Americans has fallen by over 6.5 percent.

Black unemployment at its highest level in nearly thirty years, with black youth unemployment reaching a staggering 50 percent.

The lowest number of youth, ages sixteen to nineteen, employed since 1948.

The steepest drop in the American standard of living in over fifty years.

A rate of economic growth only slightly higher than the decade of the Great Depression.

As percentages of GDP, federal spending, the budget deficit, and the national debt at their highest levels since World War II.

U.S. credit downgraded for the first time in history.

The misery index at its highest level and consumer confidence at its lowest level in more than three decades.

A housing crisis worse than the one that occurred during the Great Depression, with median home values declining every month Obama has been in office.

Over seven thousand new regulations, rules, and guidelines issued.

Creeping inflation, particularly in the goods Americans use every day: food and fuel.

A record increase of Americans living in poverty, including record numbers of children.

A record number of people—48 million—on food stamps.

The largest number of people—just under 50 million—since the early 1990s without health insurance.

The highest level of government dependency on one or more federal benefit programs in American history.

To Obama, this isn’t a record of failure. It’s a record of extraordinary success. It was all designed and executed to near perfection by Obama and the kooks, who had to uproot the existing economic system in order to replace it with their redistributive one. They knew it would be painful, messy, and jarring; they just didn’t care.

Because Obama and his fellow kooks believe that the
American
system is unjust, unfair, and evil, they set out to replace it with their own enlightened, twenty-first-century leftist revolution. As old-school commies like Castro and the Chinese moved toward more capitalist systems, the kooks believe we should meet them halfway. So they set out to install their brand of leftism through shrewd political force in order to so weaken America domestically and internationally that the changes would be irreversible.

Meanwhile, Obama attempted to obfuscate his agenda’s failures by blaming
us
for not getting with the leftist program. At a 2011 San Francisco fund-raiser, he sighed that “we have lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam.” A few weeks later, he lamented that we had gotten “a little soft.” And then shortly after that, while attending the Asia-Pacific summit, he complained to world leaders that Americans had gotten “lazy” in attracting foreign investment.

To the contemptuous Obama, we’re just a bunch of rubes who don’t get the brilliance that is his vision. When Michelle said during the 2008 campaign, “Barack Obama will require you to work,” what she—what they—meant was that they’d require us to work under
their
rules and toward
their
goals. George W. Bush once said, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” But if Obama has ever thought anything similar, it would most likely sound like, “Either you are with us, or you are with the capitalists.”

Like any self-respecting authoritarian, Obama also hated having to deal with the coequal branches of government and dissenting points of view. His exasperation burst out in his repeated slams of the Supreme Court, and in his July 2011 comments to La Raza: “Believe me, right now, dealing with Congress … the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting.” But he had already been circumventing the legislative process and violating the spirit of the law for years. When a growth-killing Internet regulation proposal failed to pass Congress, Obama’s Federal Communications Commission announced that it was going to regulate the Web anyway, defying a federal court ruling. The Obama/Holder Justice Department also unilaterally decided that it would no longer enforce federal laws against marijuana use and the Defense of Marriage Act. All hail an unaccountable and undemocratic bureaucratic welfare state, and never mind that pesky Constitution.

In one of his most flagrant floutings of the rule of law, Obama made four recess appointments in early 2012 when the Senate was not in recess. It was a blatant violation of the constitutional separation of powers, a trampling of Congress’s constitutional authority, and a dangerous concentration of executive power. But to be fair to Obama, he was under the impression that a recess appointment took place after lunch but before language arts class.

The system is not “broken,” as Obama likes to complain; it’s exactly as the Founders intended, made up of checks and balances to restrain his most radical impulses. Or at least it was until he got his kook hands on it. He doesn’t care that when a branch of government gets out of control, we’ve got lawful options, such as elections and impeachment. Why should Obama respect the existing processes when he can overhaul the whole shebang to his specifications?

Amid all of the wreckage, however, there is a silver lining that marks the beginning of our own “fundamental transformation” of America: the Obama economy is finally shattering the myth of the Left. The monumental success of American capitalism had prevented leftism from being exposed as a fraudulent ideology designed to kill off prosperity at every turn. Until now. The wealth redistribution ideology is collapsing, swamped by its own internal contradictions and disastrous consequences. If Keynesianism truly worked, the unprecedented spending blowouts of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid era would have had the U.S. economy now at Herculean strength. Instead, we have years of economic basket-case-ism. The romanticism of the Left is over. But the kooks cannot possibly look in the mirror and find the fault within themselves, because doing so would mean the end of leftism, the end of their cottage industry of victimhood and dependency, the end of their calamitous agenda. They cannot abide this kind of ignominious end, so they continue their lies and playing Blame Roulette. But the curtain has been pulled back on them. And their emperor has been shown to have no clothes. I might also add that the skinny socialist emperor could really use a sandwich. I can see his rib cage. Then again, maybe he plans to don some angel wings and try out for the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.