I did not watch President Obama's State of the Union speech last night. Honestly I just didn't care what he had to say, and didn't feel the need to get aggravated. Plenty of time for that in the next four years. I did hear a couple of sound bites and a few brief reviews. The reviews all said, "he gave a great speech, as usual. Next?"
What amazes me is the amazing speed with which the new president is getting so much of his insane liberal agenda passed through Congress. It's all they can do to give him whatever he wants, as quickly as possible. The whole thing is sickening. For the first time, in the last day or two, I've actually started seriously wondering whether this is the beginning of the end of the country I grew up in and love so much. I don't mean to sound overly dramatic, but I just don't see any serious conservative opposition to any of the insanity the liberals in power are pushing through right now. And this stuff is not here-today-gone-tomorrow. This will last for generations.
Here you have a guy who has never run a single thing in his entire life, and he gets elected President of the United States and says he has a mandate to "remake America." His Congress is majority liberal, happy to pass whatever he wants. The Supreme Court clings to balance by the thinnest of grips, half-full of liberal activist justices who not only won't stand in the way of any new liberal legislation, but will happily, it seems, permit obviously unconstitutional behavior, enshrining it in "opinions" that give it the legitimacy of law just as strongly (probably more so) as if Congress had passed it themselves. So I ask: Where does this end?
Obama has been in office for only 5 weeks. Yet the amount of legislation and other orders that have been passed through already is amazing, and it's only the beginning. He is being very aggressive, re-dedicating himself to even the most leftist causes he claimed to support on the campaign trail (before he pretended to move to the center).
- He already killed the "Mexico City Policy," which now means American taxpayers' money will go to other countries as aid, to be spent on abortions, which at least 50% of the population finds abhorrent. And he clearly signalled during his campaign that he means to increase the number of abortions performed in this country by a lot. FOCA is coming.
- He is preparing to spend the remaining $350 billion of TARP money that President Bush got authorized (no fiscal conservative, our former president)
- Congress just authorized over $800 billion in new spending, calling it "stimulus" but almost no one truly considers it that. Much of this money won't even be spent for a few years, which proves all by itself that even the bill's authors don't consider it stimulating. And by the way, we don't have this money. It's all borrowed, jacking up the national debt that is already in the trillions.
- There is $75 billion in there that is supposed to help people who are "underwater" with their mortgage loans actually stay in their homes. This to me is beyond asinine: Your house's value has dropped below the amount you owe on the loan you took out to buy it. Therefore you're entitled to re-negotiate your loan? Why? Do you re-negotiate when the value of your home rises? Why should the bank be penalized for the drop in value of your home? You signed a contract to borrow money from them, buy a house with it, and pay it all back. Period.
- Obama has gone out of his way on several occasions to bad-mouth American businessmen. He feels he has the right to do this because the government he's the head of is going to be shelling out all kinds of investment capital to keep these businesses afloat. He has mandated that bank executives, for example, make no more than $500K/year. He has also pressured companies to reneg on various business deals they had made that Obama thought looked sketchy, like a sponsorship deal for a stadium (can't have that); reservations for company outings; and trips on private jets. Put aside the fact that Obama gets all of these for himself as POTUS (and Camp David, Marine One and Air Force One are a heckuva lot bigger and more costly than any of the executives' equivalents, I guarantee it). Why is government investing money directly in the private sector? This is a BAD idea.
- Obama claims he is not for the "Fairness Doctrine," which will destroy conservative talk radio, but I don't believe him, and many members of Congress are starting to speak out on its behalf, not to mention Obama's pick for FCC chair, who is all for it.
- The president keeps saying "universal health care" as though it's a given that everyone wants this. Yet no one is standing up and saying, "I don't want this!!" Well I don't! I'm quite happy with the level of my medical care, and even if I wasn't, I would not want government trying to get into that business. They're already screwing everything else up. Already he is trying to put into place a system wherein doctors are "strongly encouraged" to start contributing patients' medical records into a government-controlled national database. Again, why is this government's problem?? This is the job of the private sector.
- Obama is talking about reforming Social Security as though no one has ever tried to do this before. As I've said before, he's no student of history, that's for sure. President Bush tried to do this during 2005 and got nowhere with it. As a result, I'm paying money into a system I don't believe will be there for me when I retire. So how is Obama going to do this?
- He's still going forward with plans to let the Bush tax cuts expire, and to levy new taxes on people like me while giving cash to people who don't pay taxes. The class warfare with him isn't bad enough; he's got to play Robin Hood and steal my money, too.
- The stimulus bill is also reversing the one big success that President Clinton had in his presidency (thanks to Newt Gingrich's conservative Congress): Welfare reform. The new bill put in all kinds of incentives for poor people to have children and stay on the public dole; incentives that had been removed in the 1990's, resulting in huge numbers of people dropping off welfare.
The list could go on. And he's only been in office for about a month.
The reality is that he can do this because he has a virtually filibuster-proof majority in Congress and they're almost as liberal and partisan as he is. Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Leader Reid have all said, in no uncertain terms, that they have zero interest in negotiating with the Republicans. Reid said, "Republicans cannot hold the POTUS hostage. If they want to work constructively [read: agree with us liberals], we will work with them...If they think they're going to rewrite this bill, Barack Obama is going to walk away." Obama himself said, "we are not going to get relief by turning back to the same policies that...threw our economy into a tailspin." He knows the liberals are guilty on this issue and yet he lies and says the GOP's policies caused the recession. Amazingly dishonest. And no one calls him on it.
The only question mark is, will we survive this? If he can cause this much havoc in one month, what can he do in 4 or - God Forbid - 8 years?
Posts
|