Brad Schaeffer
Big Government
9/20/2011
Those listening to President Obama’s speech in the Rose Garden yesterday may have been hoping for remarks outlining a comprehensive debt reducing package from the nation’s chief executive, but what they got was yet another class warfare screed. Replete with admonitions that the wealthy need to pay their “fair share” (as defined by Him of course) and sprinkled with his patented scare tactics rooted in the fallacy of the false alternative (either hedge fund managers pay more or seniors will go hungry) the president to me revealed more of himself even than he has in the past about what really makes him tick, both philosophically as psychologically.
He is, at heart, an ardent believer that the wealth of a nation’s citizenry is in the end the property of their government into which the haves pay and bureaucrats then distribute out as social justice in the form or largess to the have-nots. His increasing vibe of anger, that seems to conversely rise as his poll numbers fall, reveals to me a rather petulant man, unable to grasp the notion that he may not actually be the smartest guy in the room (despite the assurances of his orbiting satellites of sycophants in and out of the MSM media) and that there are those who disagree with him not because they haven’t heard his message, but rather because they have and have found it wanting.
I found myself listening to his speech and thinking that I’d heard most of it before. Most but not all. One new tact that the historian in me found fascinating, and quite cynical, was his reaching down into the soil of Mount Vernon to summon the ghost of our most esteemed first president, George Washington, to help make his case. Mr. Obama offered up this snippet from Washington’s September 19, 1796 Farwell Address to the nation to bolster his tax raising stance…
Interestingly, Mr. Obama never mentions that in Washington’s day there was no income tax as we know it…
…Washington’s full quote is hardly an endorsement of either the president’s stimulus policies or even his vision of the role of government in our lives…
The complete article is at Big Government.
Related: Obama Speech was “Obama Unplugged”
…The second notable thing about Obama’s speech is its insight into the president’s state of mind. Obama has a deep, almost desperate, need to portray himself as the opposite of what he is. This appears to involve more than simple political considerations. Obama has an unusual capacity to conceive of himself in a way that is at odds with reality. And so the most profligate spender in history warns the rest of us about profligacy and not placing a debt burden “on our children’s shoulders.”…
