The Obama Budget Speech: The Reviews Are In...

...and let's just say the President didn't exactly impress a nation looking for leadership in a crisis:

Peter Wehner at Contentions:

President Obama’s speech today was both outrageous and insulting, a practically perfect combination of demagoguery and shallowness...If anyone had any doubts what we’re dealing with when it comes to Obama, those have been allayed. He is a deeply irresponsible and arrogant man whose thirst for political power is overriding virtually every good and decent instinct he might have.

Ouch. Scathing....

Mark Steyn wants to know where the change is:

...We spend more than anyone but the Swiss on education, and by any rational measure at least half of it is entirely wasted: That model is why this country is dying, and the President just went on TV and bragged to the world he has no plans to change it.

Andrew Stiles on how Obama tricked Paul Ryan into attending the speech, if only in a vain attempt to humiliate him on national television:

Ryan says he was “excited” to received an invitation to the president’s speech, and thought it was a potential “olive branch” to the GOP signaling the start of meaningful negotiations over the deficit. Not so, as we all know. I imagine being forced to sit through a smug lecture explaining how the serious plan you’ve just proposed to save America from a debt crisis is actually, in fact, fundamentally un-American, is not a very pleasant experience.

Ryan is too gentle when he characterizes the president's speech as "a speech that was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our countries fiscal challenges"

Even liberal Mickey Kaus calls it the "anti-Ryan" speech, and points out it myriad of inadequcies, both substantially and verbally:

Obama tends to defend the welfare state in ineffective paleolib terms. It’s mostly “compassion” and taking “responsibility for … each other,” whether we work or not.

The speech defines a failure to tax the rich–i.e. keeping rates where they are–as “spending.” Way too clever...Social Security fixes are still in a mystery box....

Charles Krauthammer, who has more intellectual depth and honesty in his pinky finger than the top liberal "thinkers" contain in their entire addled craniums:

“I thought it was a disgrace,” he said. “I rarely heard a speech by a president so shallow, so hyper-partisan and so intellectually dishonest, outside the last couple of weeks of a presidential election where you are allowed to call your opponent anything short of a traitor. But, we’re a year-and-a-half away from Election Day and it was supposed to be a speech about policy. He didn’t even get to his own alternative until more than halfway through the speech. And when he did, he threw out numbers suspended in mid-air with nothing under them with all kinds of goals and guidelines and triggers that mean nothing. The speech was really about and entirely an attack on the [Rep. Paul] Ryan plan.”

Jen Rubin:


Obama today gave a speech about nothing much at all — if you don’t count attacking the only viable debt-reduction plan out there....One wonders how the White House thinks this helps the president.

It was rather embarrassing in what it did offer: negotiations with Joe Biden, more defense cuts and taxes on the rich. How utterly trite...

And that might be the best word to describe this pathetic liberal waif: Trite. You know why? Because to a self-serious blowhard like Barack, there is probably no description he would find more insulting....

I'll update this post with more later this AM...