Friday, December 4, 2009

Slaying The Hydra

Barack Obama has played more golf in 10 months than Bush did in his first two years. So what? Say his apologists; he has a stressful job, he needs to relax. This is nothing more than a 'manufactured controversy.' My personal litmus test for evaluating the actions of Obama has become this: if Bush did it, would I still be as upset? If yes, then I feel it's a legitimate beef. The big difference is that the media – our supposed watch dog – doesn't excoriate him for anything like they did with Bush. Rather, they defend him or even worse, ignore his foibles completely.

I could really care less about the golf. I know from experience you can get a lot done on a golf course. I've even played better while listening to a conference call on my Bluetooth because I not focusing on the minutiae of my swing. What's really sticking in my craw (at least right now) is that he's paying more attention to everything that doesn't matter than he is to things that do matter. He's attended 22 fund raisers so far (Bush did 6 in his first full year); he's given over 120 speeches as of mid October (one every 2.5 days); he dropped everything and flew to Copenhagen to pitch the Olympics for Chicago (and failed) but he couldn't attend the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall because of his busy schedule; he's bowed inappropriately to royalty, first in Saudi Arabia, then in Japan (faux pas at best – a deliberate message of submission and regret at worst) while snubbing the Royalty of our greatest ally; he's won the Nobel Peace Prize for accomplishing…nothing. He believes we can spend our way to prosperity despite hundreds of years of evidence to the contrary. He spent $300,000 of our money on 'date night' with his wife – TWICE! He believes making 95% of the population change their health coverage to accommodate 5% who need help is a good thing, and that adding millions to the insurance rolls and increasing the things that are covered, including pre-existing conditions that guarantee a loss, will somehow reduce costs. When Americans have stood up to both him and the congressional bobbleheads, we the people have been labeled all sorts of nasty things. He's personally appeared before joint sessions of congress to ram through the stimulus bill and the health care reform, yet he's dithered for months over sending troops to Afghanistan. While people have been dying half a world away, he finds time to blame Bush for not sending more troops while he was still president.

In other words, Obama is not leading, he's campaigning and seeing the world on our dime. It comes as no surprise to me that someone who had all of 185 days of experience as a US Senator before abdicating his responsibilities to Illinois and beginning his campaign for President that he would not know how to lead. The question is – who IS leading the country? One need not look beyond Axelrod, Emmanuel and the dozens of 'czars' with their dubious backgrounds to see that the leadership of our country is a hydra. When the unpleasantness of reality crashes down (Van Jones is a communist, Anita Dunn hearts Mao) Obama, Inc is loathe to admit imperfections in anything they've done, so they defend the indefensible until it becomes damaging to the collective to do so. At that point, the offending head of the hydra is lopped off, only to have two more take its place somewhere else. Of course, the media is too complicit in this charade to do any actual investigation. They leave that to professional, seasoned reporters like Hannah Giles.

In the end, I wonder how much any of this really matters. We're at a tipping point in the history of our nation. We have upwards of twenty million illegal immigrants in our country. The administration has every intention of giving them amnesty, getting them on the government dole, and giving them the vote. When that happens, we'll never see a conservative elected to major office again. Ben Franklin said "When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." 45% of the population already doesn't pay any taxes; when we add another 8% to that total, we're sunk. Demography, as they say, is destiny. We have this one change to seize ours. We take back congress in 2010 severing many heads of the hydra; then we take back the White House in 2012, severing the central head and burying it forever. It's either kill the hydra or go the way of the Soviet Union. What will you do today to help kill the hydra?