Back to Basics

Barack Obama is a liar. In this instructive video, the CATO Institute deconstructs the President and his misstatements, exaggerations and out right lies.

Last night on Twitter I asked if the guy who loads Obama’s words into the teleprompter accidentally put one of his previous SOTU speeches. I think that was the case. Here are just a few examples:

Obama 2010: “It’s time for colleges and universities to get serious about cutting their own costs.

Obama 2012: “Colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs down.”
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Obama 2010: “And we should continue the work by fixing our broken immigration system.”

Obama 2011: “I strongly believe that we should take on, once and for all, the issue of illegal immigration.”

Obama 2012: “I believe as strongly as ever that we should take on illegal immigration.”
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Obama 2010: “We face a deficit of trust.”

Obama 2012: “I’ve talked tonight about the deficit of trust . . .”
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Obama 2010: “We can’t wage a perpetual campaign.”

Obama 2012: “We need to end the notion that the two parties must be locked in a perpetual campaign.”

We’ve seen that same show so many times the speech should have been broadcast on Nick at Night.

Video from the Weekly Standard:

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The GOP presidential candidate, whoever that ends up being, should use that in an ad. I can hear it already: “He’s out of ideas, and America is out of time and money.”

We know that the state of the union is good no matter how many Americans are out of work, how many families are counting every penny, how many industries are falling off a cliff and how high the national debt gets. We know it’s good so long as another politician takes a victory lap up to the podium and tells us that it’s all good because he’s here.

Iraq? Nothing to worry about. We just brought all the troops home. Sure it’s breaking up into a civil war, but you won’t hear about it on the news. Osama bin Laden is no longer a threat, but his allies have taken over Egypt and Tunisia, and are moving on Libya. The Taliban’s momentum has been broken and they are on the verge of taking over the government which means they will finally have been defeated. These achievements are a testament to a military which is facing the biggest budget cuts in decades.

The American soldier is a role model to us. I take away his weapons, fire him, put him on trial and force him to marry his bunkmate to show his tolerance, and he never complains because he’s not allowed to. The rest of you need to take a lesson from him. Stop complaining or I’ll send you to a military tribunal.

Now it’s time for an applause break. We need to spend more money funding college degrees and political indoctrination for everyone. More applause. Only by creating more unemployed people with six figure student debts working at McD’s will we be able to restore the post WW2 economy that was built on manufacturing jobs which my administration is working hard to completely eliminate.

More applause? No you shouldn’t have. And I didn’t get you anything but a monopoly for my buddy Warren Buffett’s rail line. Sure it cost a 100,000 American jobs, but who needs them anyway. We need to keep the promise alive and fight the rich whose irresponsible investing tanked this economy. And the only way we can do that is by going deep into debt with irresponsible investments. That’s why we’ve put new rules in place to hold Wall Street accountable in case they ever borrow more money than they can pay back and we’ve also put new rules into place so the government can borrow as much money as it wants.

The economy is great right now. There are millions of jobs everywhere, even if you can’t see them because they’re invisible jobs. They only come out at night and during State of the Union addresses. In the last 5 minutes over 3 billion jobs have been created. The auto industry used to be on the verge of collapse. It’s still on the verge of collapse but now it’s being subsidized by taxpayers. Now the auto industry is too big to fail, no matter how many Volts it makes and how few people buy them. And just wait till you see the GM Lada that uses Soviet manufacturing processes to create a car that only works one day a month and runs entirely on hot air. Just like me.

The Tuesday morning post of the Heritage Foundation’s “Morning Bell” is worth sharing in part. You can read the whole post here.

“Tonight, Americans who tune in to the State of the Union will watch the work of a rhetorical master with a flair for illusion,” says Mike Brownfield. “President Barack Obama will take the to the floor of the Capitol in hopes of laying the groundwork for a political debate on his terms—one where he stands on emotional appeals, populism, and class warfare, not the shaky ground of his crumbling record.”

“And looking right back at him will be the U.S. Senate, which has for the past 1,000 days failed to pass a budget—a total shirking of their fundamental duty to be diligent stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars.”

That about sums up the situation in which voters on both side of the political spectrum, from liberal to conservative, find themselves and for both it is a portrait of failure of spectacular dimensions. Government, as we envision it, is not functioning.

Instead, Americans will have to listen to a great deal of nonsense about “fairness” and Obama’s view that government, as Brownfield warns, “should be the guarantor of equal outcomes and that ‘fairness’ of achievement should be decided by legions of bureaucrats in Washington.”

The Founding Fathers knew that life is not fair and that government can only provide the circumstances under which Americans are provided not happiness, but “the pursuit of happiness” based on a host of factors that include the good luck of being born to good parents, receiving a decent education, and being willing to work hard for a portion of success in life. Even without these factors, many Americans succeed while most just settle.

Joe Wilson, a Republican Representative of South Carolina’s Second District, gained fame at a previous State of the Union speech when in 2009 he shouted out “You lie!” at the president. He has said that “Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.”

That kind of straight talk is rare in politics. Commentators and political pundits are more free to express themselves than politicians and Charles Krauthammer has said that “Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism.”

I doubt that Americans want to be equally poor, but that is the end result of Obama’s socialist policies.

Most certainly, a large element of the mainstream press has bought into Obama’s policies and the result is a growing distrust and disdain for it. Fox News’ Brit Hume has said that “Fairness is not an attitude. It’s a professional skill that must be developed and exercised.” It is reflected in Fox’s famed “fair and balanced” motto, though any journalist will tell you it is a very high standard to achieve.

We would do well to keep in mind Lincoln’s advice:

“You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away men’s initiative and independence.

In spite of the fact that even Warren Buffett is unsure what the “Buffett Rule” is, President Obama, fully aware that the US tax code is in dire need of more ambiguity, will push for it in his State of the Union speech tonight. Just to hammer home the point, Buffett’s Executive Assistant (the word “secretary” sounds incredibly non-progressive) will sit with First Lady tonight:

Billionaire Warren Buffett’s longtime secretary will be joining first lady Michelle Obama in her box at tonight’s State of the Union, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer announced on Twitter.

Debbie Bosanek, who has worked for Buffett for nearly two decades, has become a symbol in the White House’s fight over the tax code and economic fairness. Obama is expected to renew his push for the so-called “Buffett rule” that would bring investment taxation levels into line with income taxation levels — and ensure that upper income earners pay rates as high as middle-class Americans.

In his Republican Response, maybe Mitch Daniels can use this as an opportunity to point out the need to lower the tax burden on folks like Ms. Bosanek — as well as talk about how one of her boss’s companies stands to benefit from Obama’s Keystone Pipeline rejection.

Rumor is that after the SOTU Buffett may generously offer to lower his secretary’s salary so as to drop her down into a tax bracket that more closely resembles the percentage he pays on his capital gains and dividends income, but if that happens she’ll probably decline.

As we prepare to watch President Obama lambaste Republicans for obstructionism in his State of the Union address tonight, remember:

Today marks 1000 days since the Senate last passed a full budget.

Pass it on:

From the Heritage Foundation, things that were accomplished in less than 1,000 days…and things that were not:

From my friends at Misfit Politics, it’s the 1,000 Days (without a budget) anthem:

Misfit Politics- 1000 Days (Without Passing a Budget) by Just as Good as Ezra

Update (DP): Some congressional Republicans will be wearing “1000 days” buttons at the SOTU speech tonight:

On Tuesday, January 25, 2011 our usurper president, Barack Hussein (Soetoro) Obama, son of a foreign national father and an under age American mother, gave a State of the Union (SOTU) address to the country.

It was more notable for the fact that he began to try to appear as though he was once again looking to provide some “CHANGE that you can believe in” as he did on the campaign trail in 2008.  The catch this time is that the CHANGE was now projected to appear that he would be moving away from the CHANGE he that he wanted to bring in 2008.

The CHANGE this time would be that the earlier promised CHANGE didn’t CHANGE much of anything for the better; in fact, that CHANGE only CHANGED things in this country for a worse CHANGE.  So this time he promises CHANGE to things that, like he said about the CHANGE in 2008, will make things better.  Funny thing is though, there really is no CHANGE except for the way that he says it.

Check out this CHANGE that he promises to make:  Obama says he will freeze discretionary spending for five years.  That is CHANGE that remains the same; is that CHANGE?  Does he think we are as stupid as he is?  And yes, that includes you Obama robots that suck up his banalities in sickly supplication, unless you are one of the few who pay taxes in which case you get stung even deeper but are too numb to notice.

While it may sound encouraging to hear him say that spending will not increase, it is still disastrous if the alternative is to continue to spend just as much as has gotten this country into one hell of a mess financially.

To freeze spending merely means that you will keep it at the same level.  In other words, after two years of wildly insane spending that increased our debt by TRILLIONS of dollars, Obama says he won’t increase that spending, but freeze it at that same level; and for FIVE YEARS.  Can you imagine how many more TRILLIONS will be added to the national debt if he spends at the same level for five more years?

All of America has seen and-or heard that the Congressional Budget Office reported the day after the SOTU a new estimate prediction for this year of a new record of $1.5 TRILLION.  No wonder the liberal Democrats want to increase the national debt ceiling; it must be terribly embarrassing to them and their president to say they will not increase spending, but there is also no mention of any reductions in spending either.

NewsMax.com writers Jim Myers and Ashley Martella on Jan. 26, 2011 stated that “Press reports show that, during his speech, Obama mentioned far more areas where he would spend than where he would cut. Commenting on that, Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the Republican Study Committee says: “. I don’t think he understands how serious the situation is.

When the applause had died down and the softly glowing screen of the teleprompter faded to black, the echoes of the Leninist cadences of Obama’s State of the Union address, “We must out-educate, out-compete, and out-innovate the rest of the world”, “We have broken the back of the recession” and “We can’t win the future with a government of the past” suggest that we are now living in a land without history.

How else could Obama get up and deliver an address whose rhetoric represents a 180 degree turn, while the substance continues down the same track. The meat of the address was stolen from Clinton’s 1992 campaign stump speeches on the economy. There is the same invocation of personal stories of unemployment combined with promises of replacing the old bad manufacturing jobs with free educations for everyone. But Clinton was better at pretending to be one of the boys, a working class man who only got out thanks to a good education. Obama’s people must have known that dog wouldn’t hunt.

As usual, the slogan du jour comes from the dictionary of the left. “Winning the future” was a common slogan on the left. While it was belatedly used by Newt Gingrich, it was most commonly employed in the 20th century by Communists and the far left. Two time Lenin prize winner, Danilo Dolci used it as the theme of one of his addresses. Jesse Jackson made use of it during his presidential campaign. Max Lerner gave a number of talks on “Winning the Future”. Mandella threw it in there. Most notably it was used by Lenin, “Our hopes must be placed on the young. We must win the youth if we are to win the future.”

The thrust of Obama’s agenda follows Lenin’s. The old jobs are gone. We must prepare for the future by educating our youth. The sturm und drang of the “We Musts” quickly becomes an argument for pandering to the teacher’s unions. Only by empowering the teacher’s union will we be able to compete with China. But China isn’t strong because of its teachers, but because it has no independent unions, no minimum wage, no pollution laws and nothing to get in the way of the terrible machine of its industry. The People’s Republic of China is not beating us in science or math, but in manufacturing cheap products with an undervalued national currency.

Handing out free educations to beat China is like going to college to fight a bear. Not only will it not improve your bear fighting skills, it actually gives the bear the upper hand. American math and science degrees are used to do research whose practical applications take the form of products manufactured in China. Even if all 300 million Americans all go to work as researchers, we are not going to “out-compete” and “out-innovate” by “out-educating” Americans. Russia has the highest percentage of college degrees by population in the world. China has the lowest. These figures have little to do with their economic success.