Our country is facing a fiscal crisis. Everybody recognizes that. International institutions are warning that the United States "lacks credibility" in dealing with our deficits. Top economists are sounding the alarm. Major bond holders are dumping our debt. At a time when we desperately need presidential leadership, Barack Obama, the man who was supposed to transcend partisanship and bring us all together, is behaving like the divider-in-chief, pitting Americans versus Americans.
For example, the White House hyped this speech for days and presented it as a serious policy address. The administration "reached out" to top Republican officials, including Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee. But during the speech, the president repeatedly insulted Ryan and attacked his budget proposal in the most hyperbolic terms. And big media let him get away with it.
For example, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) said yesterday on Fox News that without more spending our children would be "running around with no shoes, no clothes, eating off the ground and drinking water that's not safe." Surely President Obama wouldn't say anything that outrageous. If he did, it would make headlines on the nightly news, right? Wrong. Consider this excerpt from the president's address yesterday at George Washington University describing the Ryan plan:
"It's a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them. …It's a vision that says America can't afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors. …This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. And who are those 50 million Americans? Many are someone's grandparents who wouldn't be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we'd be telling to fend for themselves."So, according to President Obama, Republicans want bridges to collapse, they're going to kick Granny out onto the street and children with disabilities will be left to "fend for themselves." Talk about chutzpah! Obama and his liberal allies do their best to make sure that children with Down syndrome and others with no disabilities at all don't even make it out of the womb alive.
Rep. Ryan responded to the president's speech saying, "When the president reached out to ask us to attend his speech, we were expecting an olive branch. Instead, his speech was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our fiscal crisis. What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our commander-in-chief; we heard a political broadside from our campaigner-in-chief."
The man who sold us on hope and change is now peddling fear and hate. He wants you to hate the guy down the street who is doing a little better. He wants you to resent the success of your employer or the small business owner. And he wants you to fear the conservative message of smaller government and lower taxes. Barack Obama's latest budget spends twice as much as Bill Clinton's last budget. But according to Obama and Eddie Bernice Johnson, if we don't spend more money bridges will collapse and children will starve. This is political pornography. The purpose of such incendiary rhetoric is to inflame envy and appeal to the worst of human instincts.
President Obama did say one thing I agreed with when he said that this debate was about "our vision for America." Once again he has disclosed the kind of country he wants -- one where there is a ceiling on achievement, where you can earn only so much before you are "rich" and he gets to take even more of your money to "spread the wealth around." He wants a nation where more and more people fall into dependency with the government paying for everything. Obama's dream is one where there are enough people depending on government so that politicians like him will be empowered, and the people will recoil from a conservative message of personal responsibility. We are very close to that tipping point now.
And look at Europe today. Europe embraced socialism decades ago. But, as Margaret Thatcher warned, "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." The video we linked to yesterday demonstrated that if there is any wealth problem in America today it is that there are too few rich people in America to do what the left wants! As Thatcher predicted, European governments have run out of money, and there are riots in the streets and banks are set on fire when the governments can't meet their obligations. Is that our future too? Remember the scenes from Wisconsin?
My friends, the 2012 campaign is underway. Obama tested his major reelection themes yesterday, and he is in Chicago today for three fundraisers. If Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Haley Barbour, Sarah Palin, [Herman Cain] or any other conservative contender wants to catapult to the top, get out in front now and take on Obama's socialist nonsense. Prove to the American people that there is a better way, because Obama is taking our nation down a dead-end road.
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Gary Bauer is is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families.
Tags: Gary Bauer, Campaign for Working Families, Barack Obama, speech, debt, Federal spending, fear, hate To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. Thanks!
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