Ah, the Hollow Man...As I've told you before, I listen to these things so you don't have to, and I've got a pretty strong stomach - but tonight's festivities were truly something else.
A transcript is available here for those of you into self-mortification, but I'll go over the basics.
First off, the speech was obviously very well rehearsed down to the last vocal inflection and raised eyebrow..in fact. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if there were theatrical directions emanating from TOTUS tonight. Simply amazing..yet as he spoke, the contradictions between what was coming out of his mouth and what we've seen coming out of this White House are so radically different they underlined one of the qualities I dislike most about this president -the way he arrogantly thinks everyone's stupid except him, and thinks that the usual rule that nothing ever goes away on the internet doesn't apply where he's concerned.
The president started off and ended by invoking what he referred to as 'this generation of heroes' returning from victory in Iraq, and indeed he used the military frequently as an example of how he wants the Republicans in Congress to behave . It was disgusting to hear, considering how Senator Obama and many of his fellow Democrats cheering him on tonight did everything they could to sabotage our troops in the field and their mission during wartime. Yet he had the unmitigated gall to use military teamwork as an example of what he wants to see in Washington!
Our military is legally bound to follow President Obama's orders no matter how nonsensical. Congress is not, especially when their common sense revolts and it was both deeply insulting as well as very revealing of the president to use the comparison, making the expected rhetoric that came later about working together a mockery. As if President Obama made any pretense of that when he and the Democrats controlled Congress!
The president of course mentioned bin-Laden, and regular members of Joshua's Army may recall what I had to say President Obama's chief boast perhaps being a huge error. And his statement about how the Taliban's momentum has been broken was simply a blatant falsehood - which is exactly why we're desperately negotiating with them and just released one of their leaders with American blood on his hands from Club Gitmo as a 'confidence gesture'.
The president's chief theme, under the slogan 'an economy built to last' is actually pretty simple - eat the rich and punish the corporations to pay for more government spending.
He called for a punishment levy on 'big banks' and 'big oil companies' and is apparently going to sic Eric Holder on the financial sector to ' find out who was responsible for the mortgage collapse'. I guarantee you that well connected Democrats like Franklin Raines and Jaimie Gorelick who ran Fannie Mae into the ground and walked away with multi-million dollar bonuses are not going to have to worry on that account.
You see, it wasn't the banks that made the rules that governed the secondary mortgage market..it was Washington, and government entities Fannie and Freddie set the pace by reducing underwriting standards and down payment requirements while demanding that lenders make more loans to the unqualified based on racial bean counting. And the Democrat majority in Congress defended them from any oversight or reigning in while they did it.
The president went on to mention his great achievement of 'saving' the auto industry. Will anyone remind him that he did it by gifting GM to his union political allies, crapping on private equity holders and giving the company special tax breaks at the taxpayer's expense to make them look artificially profitable? Or that he allowed GM to do stock dumping that was against SEC rules?
Or about the outright lies he told the American people about GM and Chrysler being profitable and returning the money used to bail them out, when in reality they were a huge loss?
We also had to listen to the president's blathering about trade. Rather than lower our corporate income tax sufficiently to encourage more companies to do business here, his solution is to put another punishment levy on companies that outsource, which will have the effect of even more companies relocating all but bare bones operations elsewhere. When Canada's corporate rate is less than half of ours, why not ?
It was also unintentionally comical to hear the president make a vague call for tearing down regulations that stifle entrepreneurship in one part of his speech while mentioning at least three or four brand new regulatory bureaucracies he wants to create and calling for cap n' trade and climate change legislation in another.
The president went on to discuss education, and of course his solution is to spend more taxpayer dollars to hire more teachers to pay more union dues to fund the Democrats. For such a pro-education guy, you'd never think he'd be the one to stop poor kids from getting into a decent school right there in DC.
Not to mention the trillion dollar time bomb for America's economy this president enacted by executive order concerning a new student loans entitlement that will eventually create a bubble similar to housing and is guaranteed to raise the cost of college education.
Yes, he really does intend to bankrupt the country. Or he's simply clueless, take your pick.
The president also got in a nice plug for the DREAM Act for illegal aliens that he enacted by executive order after Congress rejected it twice. What was that about working together again?
President Obama made quite a thing about his favoring the creation of domestic energy while believing that those of us listening would forget about his job killing de facto prohibition on offshore drilling, his opposition to drilling in ANWR , his recent fiasco with the Keystone Pipeline and his war on the coal industry. Or about Solyndra and the other green energy scams he doled out to his campaign donors and bundlers. All you have to do is look at what the price at the pump was when he came into office and what it is now, the largest increase in history...and that doesn't even calculate the corresponding rise in the price of food and other goods.
And speaking of Keystone, I had to chuckle at President Obama's solemnly intoning the so-called Buffet Rule as an example of how 'the rich' should behave. Buffet, a nicely placed Obama donor stands to make a tidy sum because the pipeline got cancelled because the oil we buy from Canada will now have to be shipped via Buffet's railroads. At a surcharge, of course. It's good to be the King's friend!
There's plenty more, but a few final bits that stood out.
President Obama talked a bit about his foreign policy. He reverently evoked the Arab Spring he helped along as 'a wave of change', which it is. He failed to mention that the change involves the rebirth of al-Qaeda and some of it's affiliates in these countries and replacing dictators like Khaddaffi who was no threat to us and Mubarak, Ali Abdullah Saleh and Ben Ali who were at least nominal allies and replacing them with hard line Islamists and salafists who are not going to be friends to the West, not to mention the 'men and women; Christians, Muslims, and Jews' whose dignity and freedom he claims to be so concerned about. President Obama committed an an historic error here that will come back to haunt us long after he departs the scene.
The president also mentioned what he described as his 'iron clad commitment to Israel's security' which is news to those of us who have followed the interaction between this president and Israel closely.But hey, it's election time, and there a sucker born every minute.
I also found it particularly nauseating to hear this president talk about how smart he is in hollowing out our military budget and in the next moment talking about jobs and VA benefits for those he described as 'those men and women in uniform who defend our freedom.'
This is the same president who is laying off an estimated 500,000 military personnel, many of them who haven't been in long enough to become vested for a military pension or full medical benefits. They'll simply be tossed into an already toxic job market for their 'reward' so President Obama can have more money for his domestic agenda. And I got a horrible taste in my mouth hearing the same President who tried to take away their VA benefits early in his administration talk about health care for veterans.
You have to wonder at what goes through someone's mind when putting on this kind of a performance. Is it simply a case of 'the show must go on'? Or has he simply been mouthing these lies and untruths for so long that he actually believes them by now?
Barack Obama is the modern version of Rehoboam, telling the people of America that he's going to double down his failed policies and add to their yoke.
Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who gave the Republican rebuttal did a decent job of responding to the president's little show tonight. But he didn't mention much about a lot of the things I've talked about here, and most of the media certainly won't.
That's the real tragedy. It's one thing to snicker to yourself as you see through a cynical con man going through his act for you, but it' s quite another to keep quiet about it and let the rubes get screwed in the name of 'civility' by the Hollow Men of this world.
They deserve better at your hands. We all do.
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