Has America “Gone Soft”?
Or is it only the welfare-industrial complex that runs greater and greater segments of American society?
Yes, our Spender-in-Chief, B. “Tax-the-Rich” Obama said in an interview that “this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft and, you know, we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades. We need to get back on track.”
Two points: When, Barack, did you start thinking — or, more to the point, start saying — that America was “a great, great country”? It wasn’t so long ago that you were jetting around the world apologizing for America. What changed your mind? Could it be that your handlers have let you in on the fact that bad-mouthing the country is not a good re-election strategy?
They’re right about that, you know, but my chief point is the second: Who told you that America had lost its competitive edge “over the last couple of decades”? Whoever it was, you should sack him. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Like Koko in the Mikado, I have a little list, and I offer it to you, Barack, free and for nothing, without tax or levy:
Google. Yahoo. Facebook. Microsoft. Intel. Apple. Cisco. Adobe. Oracle. Wikipedia. YouTube. Twitter. Sun. Amazon. eBay.
What do these world-bestriding colossi have in common? One thing is, they’re American companies. What other country can field a tenth as many innovative tech companies? None.
No, there is nothing flaccid about American business. There’s plenty of keenness on its “competitive edge.” It’s far and away the most productive and innovative economic machine in the world.
OMG! OMG! OMG!
I agree, Obama knows nothing of how America grows businesses and seems to be doing more than what is in his power to make it harder.
Socialism delenda est.
“..gotten a little soft..”
Projection is the domain of the Left.
OMG is already in wide use – it means Oh My God.
Suggest instead ABO – Anybody But Obama.
But don’t you see, that’s the beauty of it. It’s already springing up on T-shirts.
It has a further benefit. No leftist would ever use any saying that referenced God. So both its meanings, Oh My God, or Obama Must Go, are daggers pointed at the heart of leftism.
A leftist would probably think it means, “Obama (is) MY god.”
If liberals did think, that would be the message. LOL
well said. OMG, sooner the better
Mr. Obama sounds just like Jimmy Carter in 1980 complaining about the “malaise.” Obama and Carter share the conviction that if America doesn’t get them, the problem must be with America.
You’re right, 77kart.
I would just add that Obama even makes Carter look good in comparison. And Carter was still a bad president–I lived through it.
The difference is that in 1980, liberals still remembered enough of Hoover Dam and the Apollo moon program and walked away from Carter’s “malaise” nonsense. In 1980, they endorsed Ted Kennedy in his attempt to primary Carter and take the Dem nomination away from him.
But today we have a whole new generation of young liberals who are contemptuous of what America has done and can do, and so they’ve been pushing that same line all by themselves: America is just not worthy of a guy as wonderful as Obama.
Do you notice where these young “liberals” are living?
It’s not Somalia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Russia, China, any African nation, or in most of the nations which are members of the UN. They live in New York City, New Haven, Boston /Cambridge, San Francisc, Los Angelos/Hollywood, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Washington/Montgomery County, Seattle etc.
From where comes the wherewithal for their “liberalism” “compassion”, their disdain for common blue collar Americans and military?
Could it be Wall Street, the American Stock and Commodity Exchanges, their large mansions in their leafy suburbs, et al. From their law practices a la John Edwards and Michelle Obama, etc. They bite the hands that feed them.
All bow down to these “liberals” who hire illegal immigrants to tend their children, water their garden, clean their houses, service them generally. Who don’t see the point of fidelity to any oath private or public. Who vote the representatives of their parasitic “lifestyles” such as WJ Clinton, ALL the Kennedys, Obama, etc. All of whom believe it travesty to suggest they might learn something from people who get their hands dirty. Not just their heads.
All bow down to these “best and brightest”
Obama is the perfect example of nasty, sniveling Ruling Class members who don’t like our country very much, but when the public puts them on the hot seat they say “who me?–I LOVE this country.” But with Obama’s actions and his lying, twisting words its still so obvious that he neither likes what the USA stands for, nor does he understand what makes us successful.
OMG
I LOVE the phrase welfare-industrial complex! It is too true unfortunately. When our companies have realized that hiring consultants to plead for money from the government is qucker and less painful than dealing with banks (which demand to be paid back!) we’ve finally reached…? The problem, as I see it, is that government ‘income,redistributed’ is not tracked. Wage slaves get their W-2′s and then there’s the numerous 1099-MISC, 1099-G,1099-C and more for those making real income. Where is the 1099-GOV for all the ‘income,redistributed’ that the government hands out?
By the way, none of this is new. My family accountant, who worked for us from 1953 to 2000, used to audit certain governmental programs. One, in the Bronx, was just an office, full of black attorneys, who administered tens of millions in loans every year, circa 1970, to poor, black, startup businesses. They had been doing this for 5 years when the old auditor retired, and he took over the account.
In their entire history, they had lent over 100 million dollars, mostly to obviously shadow companies owned by the several members of the group’s board. Not one cent had ever been repaid. Noone who worked there seemed to actually do anything except play grabass with the secretaries, and go to expensive lunches. Oh, and write themselves checks.
As all this became obvious to my friend, he mentioned it to them, and said he must include all this in his report, and did they have anything they’d like to attach by way of explanation. They just laughed, and went to lunch. Nothing ever came of his report, and next year, they hired someone else. For all I know, they’re still doing the same thing. Remember. The very definition of eternal life is a temporary government program, and theft like this is not really a bug, but a feature.
This reminds me of Barone’s “Hard America, Soft America”. Government is soft. Business is hard.
Gone soft? I don’t suppose you would like to be on the receiving end of the Seal Team Six rebuttal argument?
How about being Al-Whacky blending in today with Yemeni sand dunes at the moment?
If you ask another country to fight insane jihadists on three fronts, hold one hand behind their backs and tell the world you are leading from behind, who is really the “soft” one?
America hasn’t gone soft, in spite of its own government suing the states for trying to remain strong. Despite its own government and media slandering it around the globe. Despite the confiscatory money grabs and crushing regulatory red tape of leftist bureaucrats.
America took these kicks and punches from its own government…and gave back a “shellacking”. Soft? Don’t count on it.
That would be a very unwise bet.
He’ll see how “soft” we are on 11/6/12!
I work for a civil engineering firm – on a high tech scale of 1=rocks and sticks and 10=NASA we fall about 7. Over the last 3 years we’ve gone from 25 employees to 8. We fired both our secretaries and split their duties between us (we all do our own filing, typing and shipping). Half of our outside field crews have been replaced by robotic surveying equipment which never calls in sick, and doesn’t require withholding for social security, 401K, medicare, workers comp et al.
We have cut our rent by a third by eliminating paper – incoming documents get scanned to the file server and then thrown away (no paper-no filing cabinets-no need to pay rent for space for document storage).
And finally we are all on call 24-7 (I have dragged myself into the office at 3am on occasion to make sure our clients will not have to wait for their plans. In short we have become lean and agile.
There is nothing soft about our operation.
I didn’t vote for the man, but I didn’t hate him until now.
The actual words are so much more satisfying than an acronym:
Obama Must Go.
Obama is falling into the same morass as Jimmy Carter did when his policies failed – it’s not his fault, but something wrong with America. To Carter it was a national malaise. To Obama, we’re ‘soft.’
Same blame game. Different labels.
Apparently, Progressives and other Lefties are used to “going soft.”
The character of a person is a relative constant, it simply becomes easier to discern under certain conditions, which act as a test.
During the 1980s, the Japanese economic juggernaut “invaded” the US. There were cries of doom: the US could not compete, there was no way to stop the Asian invasion, after 200 years of progress we were washed up. What happened instead? US companies learned to adapt, or else, Darwinian like, they perished. US business learned well from the Japanese, applied those lessons, and fought back. As it turned out, the Japanese weren’t supermen after all. The lessons US business learned back made our best companies leaner, stronger, and more productive. They learned how to compete. The lessons learned then still apply today, making it possible for US companies to leverage the innovations that America excels at creating and exploiting. America is anything but soft; more than ever, it is a lean and mean competitor in global business markets.
Excellent!, Our productive citizenry is reaching its limit of “progressive socialism” Federal /State Govt. sanctioned thievery tax/regulation – slavery. Are the entitled “Elite” and those who get checks they don’t work for, or even make an effort to volunteer if “unemployed” our masters? We’re beginning to wake up as a nation and “Just Say No!” (thanks Ronny and Nancy Reagan)
Our true Citizenry is awakened by “the (SOFT) One”, Governor Warren, Pelosi, Reid, the Greek debacle, good old Deutschland saying goodbye to the Euro Zone parasites. The train of individual freedom in America is coming though the dark tunnel of guilty, ignorant, leftist stupidity into the daylight, to arrive at the “Shining City on the Hill”.
We’re saying, Enough Already, grow your own wheat, mill it, get your own yeast and oven, bake your own bread, or pay us productive types to do it for you. Otherwise, go hungry, period.
God Bless America! Now back to work. People are lining up to pay for our fabulous Apples!!
I hope you’re right. It’s right and very satisfying to rail against how ignorant Obama is about what America really is and how destructive his college dorm Marxist world view is. But the real battle is with the number of people with skulls full of mush who allowed themselves, disgracefully, to be lured by a media mirage into voting for him with less thought than they use voting for the favorite on American Idol. Until the voters wake up and realize how shallow their grasp of reality has been and how dangerous the “progressive” agenda is, behind all the deceptive rhetoric, we will not get back on track to restore the latent greatness of this country.
“Obama delenda est” would also work. ODE.
I, and all of my friends for that matter, was doing so much better under the Failed Policies Of The Past.
I think its time we go back to the Failed Policies of the Past because the Failed Policies of the Present are much much worse!
I’m partial to “ABO blood type” Anyone But Obama.
Once in a while I day dream about what we Americans could accomplish if instead of our current situation, we truly governed ourselves in accordance with our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence and our shared political beliefs and values came from a greater understanding of the wisdom of our founders by the average American.
It brings tears to my eyes to think about what could be. The truly great and wonderful things Americans would accomplish, and the prosperity, peace and overall high quality of life that we would achieve for so many were we as individual Americans truly free to pursue happiness as intended, and our government functioned as intended.
I’m not pretending we’d be perfect, but compared to where we are today, we would be a people who were vastly more free and far more capable of great things through the aggregated power of each individual’s pursuit of happiness and living a life based on liberty, truly shared key values, and the responsibilities attendant to such a life.
Unlike today, we would not be oppressed by a government – designed by politicians and bureaucrats to serve the needs and wants of themselves, their benefactors, and other cronies – that had successfully politicized all aspects of our lives (both as individuals and in groups as businesses) and then formed massive, expensive, and ever-growing bureaucracies to manage all those aspects assuring us it is all ‘for our own good’.
We would be free from a government that had effectively detached itself from it’s Constitutional role of protecting each individual’s freedom and liberty from the power of government and so was able to increase it’s pursuit of it’s own interests: money and power for the governing elite and their cronies.
The results in my day dreams are not perfection, just the best possible form of government for a people who believe first and foremost that society and government should be based on the freedom, liberty and the attendant responsibilities of the individual as so beautifully and powerfully described by our founders in our founding documents.
This statement of the Zero’s is the most hypocritical thing I have heard from his mouth-prompter and that is going some. The Socialist Government he is so damned proud of has spent the last forty years incrementally destroying by regulation our competitive edge. The most interesting thing about your list of successes is they are all on the very outskirts of Fed Regulations- notice there is only one manufacturing biz in the lot? Those businesses started and grew outside the Regulatory handcuffs of the EPA, OSHA, etc, ad infinitum.
Ask the CEO of Gibson guitars about competitive edge.
Just wait until the dems manage to pass net neutrality, and manage to get their regulatory claws into the internet. Then your list will also be regulated to death. Unfortunately, some companies on the list, like Google and most of silicon valley, have become willing accomplices to Obama and the dems, and are assisting in their own destruction. The old saying of Marx is true, the capitalists will give us the rope we need to hang them.
How come whenever a repub administration is failing, it is all the fault of the president, but if a dem, like Carter or Obama, then there must be something wrong with the country. We must be in malaise, or soft, or in gridlock, or mean spirited, or become ungovernable.
Could it be that your handlers have let you in on the fact that bad-mouthing the country is not a good re-election strategy?
Yes, it could.
Every time this president uses the word “we” these days, I shudder at the baldfaced (and apparently desperate) hypocrisy.