Living in Obama's Mad House
By Alan
Caruba
Like
everyone else I get up each day and do my best to make sense of my life. I turn
on “Fox and Friends” while I pour a cup of my morning coffee. I give a quick
read to The Wall Street Journal’s editorials and scan the news until later in
the day when I devote more time to its content. I spend about an hour at the
beginning of each day, reading and responding to those emails I have not deleted
as fraudulent schemes or matters of no interest.
I
“surf” the news and opinion sites to which I contribute and move on to The
Drudge Report, a news aggregator that has an influence on the day’s issues
comparable to Rush Limbaugh. The news is invariably bad whether it is about the
nation’s imperiled economy, the gridlock in Congress, or events around the
world. As an old journalist I understand well that bad news sells and good news
is relegated to the “lifestyle” or “entertainment” sections of the newspaper or
news sites.
Rush
caught a lot of heat recently when he said he was “ashamed” of America, but I
think a lot of us are ashamed of a nation being run by people of low-to-no
character that we elected to office. We are ashamed of ourselves for being duped
by some Republicans who are more closely aligned with Democrats, of a Republican
Party that seems hapless and unable to unite around its values with a strong
message of fiscal prudence, strong defense, and a host of other issues upon
which we generally agree.
The
United States used to feel like a rational place where, even when we had
differences, they would be negotiated, compromises would be made, and our
general welfare would be the guiding principle. We used to have cause to believe
that the Constitution would determine our governance, but after four years
without a budget and government still funded by “continuing resolutions”, there
is cause to believe otherwise.
We used
to have confidence that the Supreme Court would interpret that Constitution in
ways that even the average citizen would if they took the time to read it.
Obamacare blew that up. Declaring it a “tax” and ignoring its totally
unconstitutional mandate to purchase insurance or be fined if you do not, the
Court left the door open for worse mischief.
We now
lurch from crisis to crisis with no resolution in sight. The cliché of “kick the
can down the road” has become an everyday expression to describe a government
that governs via presidential executive orders, ever more regulations, and the
aforementioned continuing resolutions.
Americans cannot buy guns fast enough
in the face of a government trying to negate the Second Amendment. It says “the
right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” That’s
definitive. The people is us!
We
wonder why the Justice Department can unilaterally decide that it does not
intend to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act and seeks to get it overturned by
the Supreme Court.
We
wonder why the Department of Defense can no longer afford to send a second
carrier group to the Persian Gulf in the face of Iran’s impending acquisition of
nuclear weapon status. How weakened has our defense capability become?
We know
our economy is burdened by more than $16 trillion in debt that it is mounting by
the hour. Yet President Obama cannot find any waste in government to cut
despite ample evidence of multi-billion dollar waste. Stop White House tours?
Who is he kidding?
A year
ago the government gave $3 million to researchers at the University of
California to study video games. The U.S. Department of Agriculture once gave
researchers at the University of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas
emissions from dairy costs. Despite borrowing billions from China, the
government gave it $17.5 million for social and environmental programs and once
spent $2.6 million to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly. The list
of insane expenditures defies the imagination.
Obama’s
answer is that taxing anyone who has earned any level of wealth from $250,000 a
year and up—deemed “rich”—will close the gap, but he cannot spend the
nation into growth. He tried that with the failed stimulus, with the idiotic
“cash for clunkers” program, and with the increase in tax revenue he wrung out
of the Republicans while demanding more and more. He could take all the money
from the “rich” and it would not run the government for more than a
month.
Despite
this consumer confidence is up. Banks made large profits last year. Housing
prices are increasing. Wall Street responded to the sequester cuts with a surge.
And the President’s popularity continues to hover around fifty percent even
though he lies about everything including promises to control the
climate!
When
veteran Washington, D.C. journalist, Bob Woodward, described Obama’s claim that
he could not defend the nation as the result of the sequestration cuts he called
it “madness.”
We are
living in a mad house called America, courtesy of Barack Obama.
© Alan
Caruba, 2013
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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" and shared on dozens
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