Obama’s changed. Gone is that young knight drawing the sword from the stone, selling Hopium to the adoring media, preaching an end to the broken politics of the past. These days, he wears a new presidential persona: the multimillionaire with the Chicago clout, playing the class warrior, fighting for that second term.
John Kass
The Chicago Tribune
7/18/2012
When President Barack Obama hauled off and slapped American small-business owners in the mouth the other day, I wanted to dream of my father.
But I didn’t have to close my eyes to see my dad. I could do it with my eyes open.
All I had to do was think of the driveway of our home, and my dad’s car gone before dawn, that old white Chrysler with a push-button transmission. It always started, but there was a hole in the floor and his feet got wet in the rain. So he patched it with concrete mix and kept on driving it to the little supermarket he ran with my Uncle George…
…There was no federal bailout money for us. No Republican corporate welfare. No Democratic handouts. No bipartisan lobbyists working the angles. No Tony Rezkos. No offshore accounts. No Obama bucks.
Just two immigrant brothers and their families risking everything, balancing on the economic high wire, building a business in America. They sacrificed, paid their bills, counted pennies to pay rent and purchase health care and food and not much else. And for their troubles they were muscled by the politicos, by the city inspectors and the chiselers and the weasels, all those smiling extortionists who held the government hammer over all of our heads…
…If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that? Somebody else made that happen?
Somebody else, Mr. President? Who, exactly? Government?
One of my earliest memories as a boy at the store was that of the government men coming from City Hall. One was tall and beefy. The other was wiry. They wanted steaks.
We didn’t eat red steaks at home or yellow bananas. We took home the brown bananas and the brown steaks because we couldn’t sell them. But the government men liked the big, red steaks, the fat rib-eyes two to a shrink-wrapped package. You could put 20 or so in a shopping bag.
“Thanks, Greek,” they’d say.
That was government…
Read the complete article at The Chicago Tribune.
Update:
Yup. via Austin Petersen
Update 2: Obama to America: Society is to blame
…This is where the Obama’s & the Warren’s [sic] of the world reveal themselves for what they actually are. You don’t deserve credit for what you’ve done and you don’t deserve blame for what you haven’t. All the credit, all the blame and all the results belong to the collective and it up to the enlightened leaders at the top to make sure you all get what’s rightfully yours.
Update 3: “Nobel Peace Prize? You didn’t earn that” — and more great responses to “You Didn’t Build That” Heh!
Update 4: Why Romney’s “you didn’t build that” attack is the most substantive argument of 2012
…Sunstein explains why FDR failed to get his Second Bill of Rights enshrined in the Constitution:
For many decades, what is centrist in Europe falls on the far left in the United States. … Socialism in any form has had little appeal in America, and a large part of the reason lies in the fact that the nation of “class conflict” has usually fallen on deaf ears. It is fully acceptable for American officials to argue for “opportunities for all,” defend “compassionate conservatism,” and even urge a “war on poverty.” But it is not acceptable for American politicians to claim that economic classes are engaged in battle with one another and that voters should take one side or another. … Perhaps America is exceptional in its hostility to thinking of political like in terms of class. If this is so, the absence of a second bill of rights from American constitutional understandings might be an outgrowth of the absence of class-based thinking in the United States.
This last paragraph is dead on. Redistributive-class-warfare thinking is foreign to Americans. Which is probably why we saw Romney say this yesterday:
You understand, of course, what’s going on. What he is saying is his justification for raising taxes higher and higher, because government needs more. … You heard that story by the way, he is trying to take work out of welfare requirement. It is changing the nature of America, changing the nature of what the Democrats have fought for, and Republicans have fought for. In the past, people of both parties understood that encouraging achievement, encouraging success, encouraging people to lift themselves as high as they can, encouraging entrepreneurs, celebrating success instead of attacking it and denigrating, makes America strong. That’s the right course for this country. His course is extraordinarily foreign…
Read the whole thing.
Also, Stuart Varney Says President Obama Has Defined Himself as Anti-Business.
