Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Obama's Budget: Between The Lines, It Reads "Socialism"

...just not in the direction that Americans were hoping. Oh, he's got a plan all right...and if you've read Stanley's Kurtz's magnificent Radical In Chief, you'll know exactly where he intends to take this nation.

Mr. Kurtz explains what Obama is up to, and suggests a way to stop him:

It seems disrespectful to attribute an ideology to the president that he himself won’t own up to. Words like “radical,” much less “socialist,” sound impolite. Yet, without defining the president in a way that happens to be not only politically advantageous, but true, I doubt Obama can be stopped. Telling the truth about this president is how we shellacked him to begin with.

Obama gains immensely by fudging or simply keeping silent about his ideological commitments and long-term plans. (The imaginary ten-year out projections in the current budget, of course, are a cover for next year’s expansion of government and do not represent the president’s actual long-term plans.)...The real disrespect, of course, is Obama’s failure to own up to his own ideology. Yet Republicans have retreated of late from attempts to (accurately) define the president. That is a recipe for failure.

It will not do to chastise Obama’s budget proposal as a simple “refusal to lead,” a “punt,” or a “cynical political maneuver.” Obama isn’t failing to lead. He is very cleverly leading us toward an irreversible expansion of the welfare state. If Obama is reelected and in control when the entitlement crisis finally does hit, he will manage the country toward Euro-style taxes and Euro-style socialism....

The notion that Obama plans to use Republican proposals for cuts to kick off a movement of “angry and mobilized” beneficiaries is exactly right. Obama’s 2010 attacks on the Chamber of Commerce and his infamous “punish your enemies” exhortation were efforts to do the same thing.... And in the absence of an honest avowal of his plans and motives in the present, only the past reveals the truth about this president’s vision of the future....

Kurtz is suggesting a philosophical attack that both Ayn Rand and Aristotle would have recognized: "
A is A".

In Aristotle’s words, "A is A". It means that a thing is itself and no other thing. It means that a thing has a specific nature and no other nature. It means simply that there are no contradictions in reality.

And thus, you cannot claim to be a budget cutter when you lay out a ten-year projection that increases spending and deficits. You cannot claim to be a capitalist when you seek a command-and control economy fronted by the EPA. You cannot claim to love freedom, and then
block out the press like a third-rate governor of a banana republic.

Kurtz says tell it as it is, and point out the contradictions between what Obama says he is doing, and what he is actually doing. And then ask if A=A.

In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, the denial of this equation by politicians and labor leaders causes almost the complete breakdown in society. Something that seems less fanciful now than it might have when many of us first read her epic tome.

Kurtz, like Aristotle and Rand, is right. The American people can do the math. It's the media and the President that are trying so hard to obscure this most simple equation.

Let's not play the economic version of "the religion of peace" game. Call a thing what it is, and prove that A=A. Once the logic becomes inescapable, and the math easily provable, all the distracting racket that Obama, the Democrats, and the media create won't drown out where this budgets is planning to take us.

To Europe. If we're lucky. If we're not, well....ever wonder why Obama seems to light up every time Hugo Chavez walks into a room?

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