Frugal Café Blog Zone

Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on February 6, 2010

Following Pres. Barack Obama’s State of the Union address and his release of an unprecedented budget in the midst of an economic recession has brought out many who do not share his vision in mandating government-run health care nor his desire to spend our nation, our children, and our grandchildren into oblivion.

Here is my roundup of a few thought-provoking critiques of the president that I read this past week and found to be insightful (and some a bit disturbing)… different thoughts, different perspectives, different evaluations and conclusions drawn on our POTUS to date.

From George F. Will, The State of the Union address reveals a president of two minds:

Barack Obama tiptoed Wednesday night along the seam that bifurcates the Democratic Party’s brain. The seam separates that brain’s John Quincy Adams lobe from its Sigmund Freud lobe.

[...]

Not until the 33rd minute of Wednesday’s 70-minute address did Obama mention health care. The weirdness of what he said made it worth the wait.

Acknowledging that the longer the public has looked at the legislation the less the public has liked it, he blamed himself for not “explaining it more clearly.” But his faux contrition actually blames the public: The problem is not the legislation’s substance but the presentation of it to slow learners. He urged them to take “another look at the plan we’ve proposed.” The plan? The differences between the House and Senate plans are not trivial; they concern how to pay for the enormous new entitlement.

Last Feb. 24, with a grandiosity with which the nation has become wearily familiar, he said, “Already, we have done more to advance the cause of health-care reform in the last 30 days than we have in the last decade.” He was referring to the expansion of eligibility to an existing entitlement — the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. But that expansion was minor compared to the enormous new Medicare entitlement for prescription drugs created under Obama’s predecessor. Before the Massachusetts nuisance, this year’s speech was to be a self-coronation of the “last” president to deal with health care.

Last Feb. 24, he said he had an activist agenda because of the recession, “not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t.” Ninety-seven days later, he bought General Motors.

Wednesday night’s debut of Obama as avenging angel of populism featured one of those opaque phrases — the “weight of our politics” — that third-rate speechwriters slip past drowsy editors. Obama seems to regret the existence in Washington of . . . everyone else. He seems to feel entitled to have his way without tiresome interventions in the political process by the many interests affected by his agenda for radical expansion of the regulatory state. Speaking of slow learners, liberals do not notice the connection between expansion of government and expansion of (often defensive) activities referred to under the rubric of “lobbying.”

Lamenting Washington’s “deficit of trust,” Obama gave an example of the reason for it when he brassily declared: “We are prepared to freeze government spending for three years.” This flagrant falsehood enlarges Washington’s deficit of truth: He proposes freezing some discretionary spending — about one-eighth of government spending.

Obama’s leitmotif is: Washington is disappointing, Washington is annoying, Washington is dysfunctional, Washington is corrupt, verily Washington is toxic — yet Washington should conscript a substantially larger share of GDP, and Washington should exercise vast new controls over health care, energy, K-12 education, etc. Talk about a divided brain.

From Ann Coulter, Townhall.com: Matthews and Olbermann Now Openly Fighting Over Obama:

…Unlike the jock-sniffers, normal people watching the president’s tete-a-tete with the Republicans only wondered why Obama always responds to imaginary arguments no one made, rather than the questions actually being asked.

That is Obama’s signature move: Invent “people” who are “saying” ridiculous things and then encourage the audience to laugh at these made-up buffoons.

Since Obama’s reformulations of Republican arguments are always absurd, no further response from him is necessary — and none is ever forthcoming.

Thus, for example, Obama’s description of Republican criticism of his plan to nationalize health care was that “this thing was some Bolshevik plot.”

No. No one said it was a “plot,” Bolshevik or otherwise.

Republicans’ objection to national health care could be more accurately portrayed as follows: Obama’s plan to nationalize health care was a terrible idea because it would turn over one-sixth of the American economy to Washington bureaucrats, who would run the system as competently as the federal government runs everything else, from airport security to the post office to FEMA.

How about responding to that argument? (And as long as Obama brought it up, can he explain which part of national health care the Bolsheviks would have objected to most strongly?)

This isn’t how adults conduct serious political debates; it’s how children argue with their parents. Don’t have a cow! Liberals hide conservative arguments from the public like teenagers hide contraband from mother under the bed.

Repeatedly positing imaginary attacks by Republicans accusing him of a “plot,” Obama said that “the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives.”

Again, not a “plot” and certainly not “wild-eyed.” The only person accusing anyone of “plotting” here is Obama accusing the GOP of plotting against him. I guess they don’t teach irony at Harvard Law School.

From Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post: The great peasant revolt of 2010:

…It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozick’s masterwork, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” “proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification.” The right, you see, is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.

This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obama’s social democratic agenda — which couldn’t get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts — is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.

By contrast, Democratic opposition to George W. Bush — from Iraq to Social Security reform — constituted dissent. And dissent, we were told at the time, including by candidate Obama, is “one of the truest expressions of patriotism.”

No more. Today, dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice. “They made a decision,” explained David Axelrod, “they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed, that the country failed” — a perfect expression of liberals’ conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the country’s, that their idea of the public good is the public’s, that their failure is therefore the nation’s.

Then comes Massachusetts, an election Obama himself helped nationalize, to shatter this most self-congratulatory of illusions.

For liberals, the observation that “the peasants are revolting” is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.

The ankle-dwelling populace pushes back. It recenters. It renormalizes. Even in Massachusetts.

From Tony Blankley, Townhall.com: Obama’s Quagmire of Ambiguity:

…Of course, we are all a bundle of contradictions, and we all grapple with the tension between pleasing others and being true to ourselves. And Mr. Obama is to be commended for writing with such searing honesty just a year before he started his run for the presidency.

But all of the foregoing would be merely obscure marginalia to the main text of his presidency if, in his first year in office, he had executed his responsibilities with a firm steadiness of purpose. He would not be in the fix he is in now if he had so comported himself that his strong supporter Mr. Herbert (and many other of his cheerleaders) had not felt compelled to rudely question his credibility and wondered out loud who Mr. Obama is.

If the president is to save his presidency from a fatal weakening, he needs promptly to work through his inner dialogue and resolve the contesting urge to be loved with the urge to be true to himself — in favor of the latter. His State of the Union speech reflected too much of the former.

He could do with a little less public love and a lot more public respect. Take some stands and stick with them. If he thinks we need more deficit spending to stimulate the economy, he shouldn’t trot out rhetoric and faux policies in support of deficit reduction. He thereby neither gained the support of fiscal conservatives nor kept the favor of those for more deficits. (See Paul Krugman’s brutal New York Times column in which he called the president not a true deficit hawk, but a “deficit peacock,” a term he borrowed from an article published by the Center for American Progress) because, as the CAP article said, he “pretend(s) that our budget problems can be solved with gimmicks like a temporary freeze.”

If he truly believes he cannot get the health care legislation he wants, he should tell his allies (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in particular) to drop it, now. Give his allies on the Hill firm priorities and guidance. He should not continue to hint at cap-and-trade if he knows it can’t happen in 2010. He may disappoint the Greens but gain their respect for his firm leadership.

Whether he wants to “stay the course” or “pivot to the center,” the president has the next six months to steadily and unambiguously execute that vision. If he fails to right his image by then — it will be post-Katrina time for yet another president.

More Obama, government, and Democrat stuff:
Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion: No Offense to the Clueless
Hot Air: Guess what rose “unexpectedly”?
The Conservative Pup: Divide And Conquer: The 2010 Democrat Strategy
Radio Vice Online: Obama demands health care insurers justify premium increases
No Sheeples Here: I’d Rather Have A Bottle In Front Of Me
Nice Deb: Democrats vs The Revolting, Bitter Clingers and Video: Las Vegas Mayor: “This President Is A Real Slow Learner”
Joseph Lawler, American Spectator: Norm Coleman’s Right-Wing CAP
GayPatriot: The Contradiction at the Heart of Obama-ism
The Powers That Be: Obama vs. Obama
Gateway Pundit: Unreal. Joe Biden Travels to Michigan to Defend Stimulus (Where Unemployment is 14%) -Video and Greenspan Confirms: Team Obama Cooking the Books on Unemployment and Obama Can’t Resist – Will Appear on TV Super Bowl Sunday and Breaking: Unemployment at 9.7% – New Counting Method Saved or Created 541,000 Jobs and Nevada Governor Slams Obama: “Doesn’t He Know That Thousands of Vegas Families Are Suffering Because of His Failed Policies?” and Leading Democrat: “We’ve Got to Spend Our Way Out of This Recession” (Video) and McCain Seen Mouthing “Blame It On Bush” During Obama’s Hyper-Partisan Attack Speech
Stop The ACLU: Democrats: What’s The Plan? Obama: A Rousing Speech!
Frugal Café Blog Zone: Score One for Free Speech: Supreme Court Ruled Government Can’t Ban Political Spending or Political Speech by Corporations in Elections

No Runny Eggs: How much of the deficit is Obama’s fault?
Flopping Aces: GOP Will Meet With Obama Over ObamaCare If He Agrees To Start Over and Obama Blames Bush Again….Surprised?
Mcnorman’s Weblog: Obama cries “uncle” finally! and Schizophrenia Or Bald Faced Lying?
Patterico’s Pontifications: Behind the Scenes at the White House and Obama Concedes on Health Care Reform? (Updated)
On My Watch – the writings of SamHenry: Radical Lifestyle Changes Under Obama
The Lonely Conservative: Video: Why one should never compare Obamanomics to Reaganomics in the company of Charles Krauthammer
Sharp Right Turn: Obama Budget Fashion Chic: Budget Freeze-OUT; Unsustainable Record Deficits-IN
Big Government: America’s Decline, And Where Recovery Begins
The Anchoress: Evil Tax Cuts & Humpty Words
CNN Money: Urban Unemployment Grows

Categories: Business & Economy, Conservatism, Government, Health, Social and Political Climate
Tags: Ann Coulter, Barack Obama, Charles Krauthammer, Democrat, liberal, Obama's health care plan, political, politics, POTUS, Pres. Obama, president, SOTU, State of the Union address, Team Obama, Tony Blankley, White House