What Was the Meaning of President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address?
No sooner did President Barack Obama finish his second inaugural address than the liberal pundits proclaimed it to be a speech of unity on behalf of all Americans. Yes, it is a platitude, but all of us do pause to reaffirm the greatness of our republic, and to celebrate the election of a chief executive with whom many of us may disagree but who nevertheless represents our country as a whole and is entrusted by us to make the tough decisions that all our countrymen will have to live with. The speech, however, left much to be desired, and my first take is that it will not be one that many will remember in future years.
The president took generalities with which we all agree and used them to imply that to carry on in the American tradition, “progressive” measures favored by his base need to be implemented.
Take the enthusiastic response by liberal columnist Matthew Yglesias writing at Slate. According to Yglesias, the president’s speech was “not even slightly” anti-capitalist, but instead was a defense of economic liberalism tempered by a “robust welfare state and select government interventions in the economy.” Obama, he thinks, came off not as any kind of socialist or statist, but as a pragmatist in the American tradition who believes that fidelity to the Constitution demands a “pragmatic response to changing circumstances.”
Thus the president said in his speech that a “free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.” Echoing the progressivism of the age of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, he emphasized that a “great nation must care for the vulnerable and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.”
Few would disagree, including most conservatives. But the devil, of course, lies in the details.
The problem is well spelled out by William Voegeli, who in the current issue of National Review warns Americans about the coming Swedenization of America. He notes the difference between European social democracies and the United States and our welfare state:
Our deeply rooted, don’t-tread-on-me Jeffersonianism means that we cannot be persuaded to buy even a relatively modest welfare state unless a significant portion of the purchase is financed with debt. In this we are unlike the Europeans, who want cradle-to-grave welfare states with enough to pay cash for them.
…
[The welfare state] creates strong incentives for individuals to have fewer children of their own and rely instead on aggregated financial support from everyone’s children, thereby putting social-security systems under intolerable strain.
The social-democratic project, already sinking in Europe and Scandinavia, cannot work here. Yet, by implication — arguing that it is only a pragmatic adjustment for today to our Constitutional obligations — the president is subtly suggesting that our nation continue down a forlorn path.
I wrote a blog today too, but not as refined as Ron Radosh’s. I feel that we are peering into the abyss of a one-party dictatorship for which there are precedents in the 20th century. See http://clarespark.com/2013/01/21/citizen-obama-political-pluralism-and-the-elusive-search-for-unity/.
“I feel that we are peering into the abyss of a one-party dictatorship….”
You don’t know the half of it, Clare!
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/chart-obama-conspiracy-theories
Keep up the good work!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfjTZLxekig
Click… click… boom… here come the Nanny Haters.
“You’re Going Down” Sick Puppies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0M5D5OA-d4
“March of Cambreadth” By Heather Alexander
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4EXkeNJmSk
“Warriors of the World” Manowar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ0sW7KOFhU
“Winterborn” Cruxshadows.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVNjx4k8mWk
“The Last Crusade” Epica.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbhW2hTRyGY
A one-party dictatorship like the one in Chicago, perhaps?
Well done! Well said! And as we know he who controls the message (err, mainstream media) – well, let’s just say that Thank God that alternate presses and broadcasters still exist in an America sorely in need of more free speech and less free stuff!
You leave a very confusing message!
Of the 20th century presidents, 11 GOP and 7 Democrat. If you’re speaking the the houses of congress you still leave a very confusing message. You would have to look at each congress and first determine if one party or another had a super majority and what the House and Seante rules for each one were. Was voting done purely along party lines or was voting bipartisan and on down the line of variables — to make a claim of one-party ruling government having some precedent.
It really wasn’t in my opinion, a purely partisan government until the election cycle of 2000 going forward.
And then we have the example of at least one of his acolytes proposing a bit more direct and drastic action: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/01/21/cbs-political-director-urges-obama-to-go-for-throat-gop-to-cement-legacy/
Fewer and fewer people are willing to publicly deny the Leftwing bias of the MSM. So at least we have movement on that front.
Deny it to whom, wingnut sites like PJM? Fox News? What’s the point?
No, to leftest wingnuts (who probably couldn’t tell an actual wing nut from a lock nut)who speak of tolerance and diversity yet can tolerate no diversity. If your position was so strong you wouldn’t have to worry about Fox News.
You need to silence all opposition because your arguments aren’t capable of withstanding any scrutiny.
By coming onto PJ Media and doing the usual left wing thing of name calling and attempted ridicule you just illustrate how accurately the conservatives have assessed you. You definitely haven’t persuaded anyone to come over to your point of view. So,keep it up, we occasionally like to see just how right we are about you.
And right you are, Chuck. This troll wanders over on the same day his Messiah gives his partisan speech to his America, not All Americans, wherein he mocks the Right and says not to name call, our mission is too important for we need real debate,…. and what’s the first thing this troller does? Why, he jumps out with “wingnut” to make his snarky presence known.
The worst is, he/she doesn’t even know what he/she just did. But you do, thanks. There is no honest debate with the left, Socialists are devious by their very nature,… no morals, no truth, only lies and deceptions, over and over, especially Obama, and his CBS News produce pal now.
Well said!!
Based upon the 2008 and 2012 election cycles, the majority of people had no interest in fox news or the GOP. Most of the dems ‘wingnuts’ are in the media. Most of the GOPs ‘wingnuts’ are a small faction within the GOP and on fox news. Oooops! Forgot about the internet wingnut sites and their followings. Oh well, anyway you slice and dice it there ain’t but about 3M GOP wingnuts out of 54M republican voters and 123M voters of both parties and 300M citizens 18 years of age and older if, one is feeling up to giving benefit of dout to their numbers.
If you heard Jon Stewart’s (Comedy Central) interview of delegates to the democratic national convention about Republicans/Conservatives, then you know how ridiculous your comment is. The fops he interviewed sounded more like people that came from family trees that resembled a power pole…. you know… no branches what so ever.
I thought those people were a perfect example of today’s intellectual liberal.
“Let us wish that President Obama, with the help of a Republican House of Representatives and a Democratic Senate, manages to move in such a way that we do not in the next four years slip farther away from our moorings.”
Really..? Are you (literally and figuratively) prepared to pull the trigger against your family, your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers or anyone else you are ordered to fire upon?
That is the level of determination that exists in Obama and the Democrats in what is left of the United States of America right now. That is how they are moving our nation. Item by item, issue by issue, man by man, each one at a time against the other and on to the next. It is as brutal, cold, deep, manipulative, uncivil, viscous and wicked as anything Communism or radical Islam has ever come up with.
And we would to wish them well…?
Not even when hell freezes over will that happen.
That is what Obama and the Democrats have earned – no more!
my dad was right. the more i listen to this fraud the more he sounds like hitler.
woe is us.
he sure isn’t shy about grabbing onto the coat tails of great men long since past either. i remember dr. m.l.k. was looking for a future for his daughters that was colorblind, where a person’s character was the measure of that person. this bunch uses color as an excuse for everything. buys votes w/ obamaphones. won’t come clean on his past. the list of his misdeeds is long. and as for character, what else needs to be said about a man who sells thousands of guns to mexican drug cartels to ‘pump up the numbers’ of dead killed by American guns, in an attempt to ram through his latest gun grab?
i wonder once all this hysteria is over (and if we still exist as a nation) will future generations look back and say wtf, just as we do w/ nazi germany?
“my dad was right. the more i listen to this fraud the more he sounds like hitler.”
You’ve found your audience, Ron.
We got to Godwin’s Law much sooner than I expected…
Obama’s just a lazy, effeminate daydreamer looking for attention without doing any real work.
His equally lazy white grandfather sat him down and explained how his “ethnicity” would make everything easier.
The presidency was an accident, an effort to sell books that got way out of hand, Obama has no idea what he’s doing or why.
We move together as one people and nation–
This is the part of your fine piece I disagreed with. Perhaps because I have read too many aspirational blueprints. Maybe because I think long and hard about comparable statements and desires from the 19th that ended so poorly.
There is no question that there is a renewed desire to cultivate a feeling of Gemeinschafft among the people. At least when playing off the differences of culture isn’t politically advantageous. The collective action remark was consistent with this Amitai Etzioni cultivation of communitarianism by this Administration via education. I think this active cultivation of the herd instinct and responding habitually from emotion has proved dangerous in the past.
We are one nation but this collectivist passion coupled with the repeated denigration of individualism means that today of all days we should be careful with one nation.
Central governments have historically been the allies of individuals against the local tyranny of families, churches, and bosses. In American history, the great enemies of the Federal government were promoters of States rights, which is literally the rights of states, not of individuals. The 19th Century right wanted to curb Washington, not Little Rock or Jackson. To resist the abolitionists, for example, the governments of the Southern states routinely opened the mail looking for dangerous writings; and in the 20th Century, it took Federal intervention, with boots on the ground, to keep Dixie governors from continuing to oppress large parts of the population. Some individualists.
The same hostility to individuality is manifest in the non-governmental social groups lionized by the right. Is there anything more relentless conformist than a fundamentalist Congregation? (Speaking of social insects: it’s not for nothing that the symbol of the LDS is the bee.) The home schooling movement, at least the political and religions versions, is very much about the assertion of control and the prevention of deviations, i.e. of individuality. Hence the endlessly repeated bleat about the menace of colleges and universities, which are attacked not because they brainwash kids but because they don’t. And I could have sworn that squelching sexual individuality was also a standard feature of rightist ideology. Some individualists.
The conservative defense of individualism might be more credible if it didn’t come from a political culture that hysterically denounces anybody who strays from the party line as (pick one or pick all) a Marxist/Fascist/Nazi/Muslim/Lesbian whatever. Don’t kid a kidder. I grew up around you lot.
Huh?
And your tirade was about?
Mercy. I hope someone is paying you for the pinball buzz terms.
Not an analysis.
I think it was: Far left ‘control’ radicals = far right ‘control’ radicals.
Not a micro gram of difference between them — only what they want to control!
I still can’t stop laughing at Harrisn’s silly statement:
Central governments have historically been the allies of individuals against the local tyranny of families, churches, and bosses.
Heres where you go wrong in your assessment. The constitution leaves to the people to be ‘disciplined and responsible’ to the freedoms of the nation. The government ONLY deals with the consequences of the people failures to be responsible and disciplined to those freedoms. Blame yourself and your generations for all that you perceive to be wrong! Then take a breath and enter into reality and discover how it is that the “christian movement” is running to the government with all your demands — in fact, trying very hard to elect and or perpetuate a one-party government to exert your will upon the people and government of the land. Thats really respectful of the constitution, eh? Other than that, you’re all a bunch of fiscal and governance frauds!
Elsewhere, I stated I would remove myself from your presence. I shall do so forthwith.
I am unworthy of the forgiveness of the people here.
Yes, the federal government sometimes seems to want to take over the roles of family, churches and bosses. But it is astonishing that you can’t recognize the pressures from the Left to conform with leftist ideology — especially in prominent sectors of academia. And the Left seems a lot more hysterical than the Right at this point in history. Ask the true individualists — libertarians. http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/161935/
And why do you consider the (mostly religious) abolitionists to have been from the Left rather than from the Right? Weren’t they trying to convince other people to “conform” to their views?
Like Ron Radosh, I grew up in a card carrying Communist home, so I have witnessed the intolerance of the left, first hand. It was not until adulthood that I was able to shake it.
The left (Communism, progressism, whatever it wants to call itself) is just like a religion. It has its gods, its devils, its dogma, its rituals, its taboos, its hymns, its martyrs, and it punishes those who stray with shaming and ostracism.
How is this different from the fundamentalist religious types that the left is always criticizing?
Please don’t waste your time and energy on the likes of Jim Harrishmuck. He has venomous opinions on every topic, even ones he knows nothing about. He is simply too ignorant to understand how ignorant he is. However, he thinks he knows everything about everything and thinks he has the solution to all of the world’s problems. The guy is what Thomas Sowell might call a self-anointed messiah. He believes that civilized and successful people and countries are intrinsically evil and he has a vicious hatred of Jews and Israel. His posts are often incoherent ramblings. He evades questions, he tells outright lies and he throws tantrums. Please don’t waste your time and energy on this immature, malignant, narcissistic, attention-starved, anti-Semitic demagogue.
I do not reaffirm the greatness of our republic. Where is it?
We are being demographically subverted by every failed nation in the Third World. Gov’t bureaucracy at all levels from local to fed is at an all-time high, and it is frighteningly expensive to have class A facilities and to cross every T and dot every I.
Our own President is a racist who came to power by accusing others of racism and half the country’s on board with this.
Crime and racism has gone from once being shunned to now being not only culturally celebrated but institutionalized in an Orwellian form of idiocy. How stupid does a human being have to be to belong, for example, to an organization called 100 Black Men of America and call others racist?
Conformist Americans rail against a type of conformism that never actually existed and even if it did, is now a half-century gone. People are arrested for sketching bridges and photographing police and our gov’t main form of activity seems to be trying to figure out how to suck in even more revenues from people while giving much of it away to failure and self-pitying incompetence.
Our DOJ has become endemically corrupt and they can do anything they want to anybody by burying them under legal fees. Half the nation, including the vast majority of the latest generation, has been taught to despise our history and traditions, regurgitating the most shallow stereotypes about race, class and gender straight from a mold someone failed to break.
The worst morons in American history occupy the highest echelons of media and gov’t. I’d think that normally you’d have to crack open a Ma and Pa Kettle movie to find people as vapid as Maxine Waters or Chris Matthews.
People vote by race in a way never before seen. Why black Americans even need an ID is a mystery since how they will vote is not. Dissent there is statistically irrelevent. And we’re inviting more in from the Third World and granting a de facto amnesty to anyone who can sneak in, while teaching them that if they whine and vote correctly, they can hold this nation hostage.
This nation is institutionally broken and the larger culture is not far behind. What will this nation be like when the average PC 20 yr. old is 55 if laws are ignored in favor of moral posturing now? If a hit song in 1960 was about puppy love in 1960 and titled “F-ck You” today, what will a hit song be 40 years from now?
We’re heading in the wrong direction, and in spades, not the right one. Hard to reaffirm a Republic when it’s sliding off a cliff into a abyss of vulgarity and ethnic squabbling.
Note that HillelA dare not reply to your comment.
It would be too cruel.
I realized that I was wrong, that I was always wrong, and will always be wrong.
But I was too arrogant to be able to say that.
I am deeply ashamed of ever having been so overweening and presumptuous.
Your response, or the riposte that would crush you like an ant?
As JFK said ‘ Ask not what your Country can do for you – ask what you can do for your Country .
We used to be a Nation of moral people of good will , who cared about their Country , loved it and strove
to work for the benefit of all Americans , rather it be economically , spiritually, or politically . The basic
institutions enshrined in the Constitution are as sound as ever . It’s the six decade long purposely divisive
Gramscian Marxists leftism – the incrementalism that has weakened and hurt our Country . Do you know
that one of their main goals is to destroy Judeo – Christian faith and traditions ? Read up on it .
There is nothing wrong with the Constitution and the vast number of Americans who love this Country
and who live good, decent lives . The ones who love God and their fellow man . And who humbly try
make a positive impact every day . The fault lies almost entirely with hard core leftists who we have allowed
to weaken and destroy this Country .
The hard core marxists are masters of human nature and the prediction thereof. The radcial Religious Right/Moral Majority folks rountinely fall victim to their strategies like clockwork. As a marxists strategy, what better way to divide a nations people than by the hands of your foe?
The intellectual literaries on here and elswwhere only know what they’ve been spoon fed by other generations of intellectual literaries following the same path. They’ve never spent a day in intelligence, in the trenches of the subversives strategic planning rooms. Heck, the congress’ subversive activities sub-committees are non existant today as well as with the FBI. They’re now consumed with global organized crime, drug interdiction, border and immigration matters and radical Islam wars and even the FBI is on the battlefilds of those wars.
When you don’t have a clue of whats going on with your foes and their strategies, albeit nearly 50 years now, you end up the fool! Thats the Religious Right/Moral Majority folks, playing right into the foes strategic hands! Denouncing the very parts of the constitution for which they hypocritically claim they stand upon! I suggest the Religious Right/Moral Majority folks who are doing a fair job of dividing the GOP rendering it ineffective and with a bad public image, just as, the marxists progressives of the democrat party seek. Then on top of eveything else, they are a vile bunch of attack hounds and isolationists who havent’ a clue they’re reducing their needed support numbers down to even more irrelevance by decimating the GOP. Whose proven to be the smarter once again, I ask you?
I can assure you one thing Ron, this speech will be remembered in years to come in the universities filled with Leftwing and Minroity culture warriors.
Perhaps they will be remembered in the way I remember uncle Adolph’s rantings of a madman. I have to borrow from the movie “On Golden Pond” when Norman was giving the dentist the business and he replied, “But I know crap when I hear it.”
People who come to this blog and others also know crap. There were many citizens in 1930′s Germany who also knew crap when they heard it but, like us, are unable to stop it until it reaches critical mass. Unfortunately, there will be no entity to free us from the bondage that awaits.
I do see more citizens confronting the new laws that are about to hit us with complete non-compliance. In other words, defiance. Like 1930′s Germany though, there is a large percentage of people who think the government should take care of them. Most are city-dwellers. When I lived there in the 80′s, the people in their 60′s and 70′s spoke of the Nazi years as very, very bad and how they were not allowed to speak freely, act freely or do anything without arousing the suspicion of the Gestapo.
We are headed in that direction. And, like many nations in the past, with the willful cooperation of a combination of utopia-addled nincompoops and angry individuals bent on hurting those who they think deserve it, for whatever reason.
Again, I suggest watching the movie, “Hitler’s SS: Portrait In Evil” from 1985. It demonstrates how a peaceful people go from rallies to raids in a few short years. Problem is that here, it’s again the youth who think that they know a better way than the tried and true methods of conservatism and their angst explodes in the form of remaking the government, as we are seeing in this country now.
They hate the Constitution, actually believe that all white people are racist, even the white ones who believe that, and that businesses are the source for all the evil in the world and fed by capitalism. This attitude is a youthful, ignorant and arrogant attitude and has been propagated repeatedly in every nation that went either fascist or socialist in the 20th century.
It—–fails. Badly. Repeatedly. Noble causes give way to evil methods every time. And this is because there are people like me and you who recognize evil when we see it and refuse to acquiesce to it or appease it. Evil has found a home in the democrat party. Not surprising, really, given their bent on ruining everyone’s lives by decree.
The only good thing is that they are really showing their collective ass. The first four years were just a warmup. They are now going to start going down the road with a bottle of gin in one hand and a brick on the throttle. They will create such a mess that they will leave this nation in shambles. We may or may not recover from that in 2016 or sometime after.
From the beginning, Obama has been one pissed off little dude. He likes his tantrums and likes sticking it to people. He is a bully, a child, a brat.
Spoilt.
And like any of that kind he’s going to demonstrate just what an ass he really is. He will proudly display his disdain when he used to attempt to hide it but he is emboldened now, thinking that he has been given a mandate to sever this nation from its founders. Of course he is very wrong but it will only serve to let him bloviate, accuse and otherwise yell at those who disagree with him.
For now the hippie socialists have won. They will do their damage. And they will have no one to blame but themselves when the wheels come off.
The highlights I heard from the speech were all empty blather. Obama and his writers do not go for meaning. They go for effect — largely emotional. And as for “truth”: it has no place in any speech Obama has ever given — at least, not by intention.
Exactly right about Americans thinking they can buy socialism with debt. The best way to end this is clearly to impose pay as you go.
Left/liberals think tyranny would be better because it’d be equally bad for everybody.
No, they think it will be good because they will be in charge, and get to decide who gets what.
With them reserving the goodies for themselves. And the punishment for anyone they think it would be enjoyable for them to hurt.
By a staggering coincidence, this is exactly how they see our present system, which they despise. Mainly because they aren’t getting to make all the decisions.
Like the old Russian joke says, “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by his fellow man. Socialism is the exact opposite.”
clear ether
eon
Ron,
I have had an Epiphany, and realized that every time I come here, it was to prove to myself that I was have somehow proved worthy of any faith that anyone had that I would ever cease to be a mewling child, eating my own regurgitated vomit.
I now know that this is not, and will never be the case.
Please forgive me.
After typing this apology, I will have my fingers chopped off, my tongue cut out, and wear a ball gag, and a sign saying: “I am an Asshole. Punch me in the nose, then kick me in the balls. It is all I deserve, and still less. To kill me would be to deprive someone else of the privilege of punishing me.”
Please forgive me, unworthy as I am of your or any one else’s forgiveness.
I am still very, very sorry for the very fact that I draw breath.
In my earlier comment, I proposed a punishment suitable to the offense. Perhaps those in charge here deemed it inadequate.
I will submit to the will of those I have offended.
“Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia, to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm.”
With president Obama in charge of the great republic, he will not rest until this statement is done.
HillelA, you have made comments that idnicate that you are quite the child and worthy of the care and the act of receiving the love and adoration that every child needs.
Your tongue and fingers shall be quite safe to do their deeds, as long as the Great Unifier holds the reigns of power.
The same as the meaning of his commencement address at the University of Michigan three years ago: absolutely nothing. It’s a great speech, but none of it’s true.
What was great about it?
With all the anger that Obama carries inside, it could have gone on for hours.
It means that Obama and the Progressives mean to rule well,
but they mean to rule. They will find out the hard way that
subjects are not productive and producers are not subjects.
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. – James Madison
Obama’s inaugural speech?
It was an open declaration of war aginst The Constitution and against anyone who disagrees with him.
Period.
End of discussion.
Next?
Obama leads the new class. The one which was described by Milovan Djilas in his “The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System” back in 1957.
Donkey and Elephant are twin brothers in this regard.
Nothing is new under the moon…
Actually, as Joel Kotkin says here;
http://www.newgeography.com/content/003409-the-new-power-class-who-will-profit-from-obama-s-second-term
We are dealing with an entirely different sort of “ruling class” here. They have made their money, and gained their power, from the manipulation of images and data. As such, they believe that images and data are all that matter.
And that since they can manipulate both to support their worldview, reality is whatever they say it is. If reality doesn’t obey, they can change it with a wave of the hand.
This is what they actually believe. Which explains why, when their policies and beliefs fail in the real world, they become more strident, more demanding, and more hostile to anyone who dares to point out that no matter how many simulations you can create with CGI, water in the real world will not run uphill without a pump to push it.
The last time the West had this problem was in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when power rested mainly in the hands of churchmen, who were so busy trying to create the Kingdom of God on Earth that they failed to notice that things like bubonic plague (the Black Death) and Muslim invaders weren’t terribly impressed by papal encyclicals. It took the late Renaissance enlightenment to make the West come to its senses, and realize that all answers to everything were not to be found in the Old and New Testaments.
Today, our “ruling class” as Codevila calls them, believe that all answers can be found… in themselves. And their vision of a perfect world.
Obama is not an aberration. He is simply postmodern philosophy and governance taken to its logical, or perhaps illogical, conclusion.
He knows he is always right, and his worldview is perfect. If reality disagrees, he will simply force it to conform.
The data and images are the only reality, to him. And he can make those be whatever he wants.
At some point, he’s going to find out that pointing your car at a mountainside and putting a brick on the accelerator does not mean you can go through the mountain. No matter how many times you’ve seen Peter Weller do it in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.
When you hit the mountain, you’ll know. But by that time it will be too late.
Probably for everybody.
clear ether
eon
Obama and his administration remind me about the British government before 1776.
Only with even more arrogance.
“….a speech of unity on behalf of all Americans.”
Nothing like that will happen so long as political extremists and their minions use every tool available to them 24/7 to divide the nations people and render them enemies of each other.
The democrats and Obama are your enemies! The very constitution that allows them to be elected by a majority of citizens as government officials — IS YOUR ENEMY!
I meant: The democrats and Obama **AREN”T** your enemies!
You were right the first time.
“Nothing like that will happen so long as political extremists and their minions use every tool available to them 24/7 to divide the nations people and render them enemies of each other.”
Good. I’d rather see America divided and fighting itself than unified under the banner of socialism or “social democracy” or any other centralized power movement. Truth is I’m not too worried about what Obama will do over the next 4 years. Republicans in congress will stay the worst of his domestic ambitions, there will be no repeats of 2009 and 2010 and the heady days of ramming through Obamacare against 57% opposition. There may be some mischief with executive orders, but nothing on the scale that legislation would do. He’s essentially already a lame duck, and the next four years are going to look a lot more like the last 2 than the first 2. Lots of bickering over spending, but no real movement on his social agenda. I’d much rather see Americans too divided for anything to get done, because the first two years showed us that what would be done is infinitely worse than doing nothing. His foreign policy boondoggles will probably get a lot of people in other countries killed, but that’s not my problem.
If there were legitimate cause(s) then I might agree with you. But there are NO legitimate causes other than the delusions of a radical extremist group of the GOP. The constitution is well and alive. The congress is well but in control of radical extremists of the left and the right for the moment. The constitutional electoral process is alive and well.
You’re all like little chldren throwing a tantrum because you can’t always have your way and get what you want and bedamned what the majority at any given time dictates in accordance too the constitutional electoral process.
Like the radical Muslim jihadists attempting to exert their will upon the people and governments around the globe, if you don’t submit to them they’ll just go around killing people and making life miserable for all — thats exactly your suggestion in attempt to have ‘your’ ways!
I hope you realize that by fighting I meant political fighting, not civil war. The sort of political infighting that’s going on now has been going on since there were politics, it’s the duty of the opposition to block the stuff they don’t agree with, not cave to the majority. The Democrats are certainly experts at divide and conquer (that was the entire theme of their campaign in case you didn’t notice), they won by playing demographics against one another, so it is hardly shocking when the people they worked so hard to divide on the campaign trail don’t want to start drinking the kool aid now. The Republicans duly elected to our government have a duty to oppose Obama, that’s what the people elected them for, not to go along merrily with him.
Ooooppps! One soldier, ten AR15s, 30 HCMs, a case of hand grenades and three cases of beer down! Your platoon will miss you as they charge on to their neighbors houses and and then on too the big devils house in D.C to conquer him.
Actually, I’m glad its just a war of words on the internet for you and thus, you contribute to our economy by wearing out keyboards long before their time.
Freudian slip? Your first comment is 100% correct, Joe Biden.
Ill just quote Obama speaking to Latino Americans “Punish your enemies,” vote for revenge!”
he’s a marxist, bred in a swamp of marxists.
And like all of them, he’s a thug, a degenerate liar, and a con man. I only say it in such a mild way to be polite and not get kicked off the site.
Defeat him through any means, or your children will be serfs, if they are lucky enough to live into old age.
For some people Clinton was the first near sociopath to occupy the Oval Office; perhaps, to some degree this is true. For my money it is Obama. So much of what he says in his unscripted moments comes straight out of any case study on sociopathic behavior one would care to name. People dismiss his evident anger at this country, at white people, as if he is somehow entitled to talk this way. He is not. Whatever other motivations lurk inside Obama he definitely has one deep seated need to get even with people that he believes have done him, his chosen race, the world, and perhaps even his mother wrong. Obama believes this is doable because, as is the case with any sociopath, he want to have his cake and eat it too. But even as he wants to get back at this country, at the same time he wants to be rewarded, applauded, and praised by it. Had he lost the election he would have unleashed his pent-up narcissistic fury at this country as if it was his right to do so with absolutely no consequences to himself. Not so deep inside of Obama is a very strange creature. And we will see more of it in his second term. He may understand that he has gotten away with a lot and only a titanic effort got him reelected. But I would bet good money he is oblivious of this and a lot more besides.
Oblivious? Or just doesn’t care?
Even Michele Bachmann drank the kool aid today by praising Obama and the “peaceful transition” of power. We’re screwed.
The meaning can be found in what drives Obama, his inborn nature, which is similar to that of a Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, lit. “Vampire Squid from Hell“, ramming his blood funnel into every part of America to suck dry all remaining individual freedoms. His blood lust and pyromania will not be satiated unless the United States Constitution, especially including it’s Bill of Rights, and most especially the First, Second and Fourth Amendments, is a incinerated corpse. As this throwback fascist monstrosity was reelected this past November the mask will now come completely off and he will go into a rabid freedom killing totalitarian frenzy such as this nation has never before even imagined.
In the speech Obama said something regarding the fact there “must be an end to the divisive rhetoric”; straight from the “accuse others of what you do” playbook of Marx and more proof that Obama means to double down on every freedom killing idea that can be dredged up by his czars and his international advisers.
One thing that is blatantly obvious: Obama is in love with himself and now sees no obstacle in assuring himself an indefinite imperial monarchy; the dream of every control freak. We had a mutual tolerance and cooperation between Islam and the left, until now; THEY HAVE JOINED FORCES TO BRING DOWN THE U.S.A. That’s what Obama meant when he wispered to Medeved; “I’ll have more flexibility in my second term”.
Don’t take lightly the references to Obama being like Hitler, because Hitler allied himself with Islam too. Be prepared for a battle this next few months.
I have found a way to redeem myself.
I saw this on YouTube, and was fascinated to hear someone whose understanding of economics and world affairs is so clearly greater than the False God I have until recently worshiped.
I live in hope that this will begin to make up for my past assholery.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlYbubyGerE
Did you not say earlier that you were going away?
Typical progressive. Yet you are truly now in a league of your own. You are distorting your own personal comments.
Move on, nothing new to see. Same old BS coming from the same old arrogant egomaniac.
a pedantic speech given by someone at the 8th grade level. Not exactly stirring, and rather boring.
Now thats a powerfull bunch of wishing .
THE ERA OF BILL CLINTON IS OVER
For those progressive Democrats who feared that the role Bill Clinton played in the Democratic National Convention and 2012 campaign as Obama’s star surrogate was a sign that he’d pivot to the center if reelected, and that his second term might be Clinton’s third, must have breathed a sigh of relief yesterday. For Obama’s message was that the Era of Bill Clinton is over; that they’ll be no going back to the past of limited government, spending cuts, balanced budgets, surpluses and entitlement reform. Indeed, yesterday Bill Clinton’s centrist call in his second inaugural for “a government that is smaller, lives within its means, and does more with less” was killed and replaced by a radical commitment to “a vastly larger government that continues to spend insanely and must do more with less checks on its power.” With the nation and world imperiled by global warming and worsening poverty and inequality restraint is the enemy of the good. We need to SPEND BABY SPEND like never before with a government in overdrive going deeper into debt to save us from doom and injustice. All caps and ceilings on borrowing and debt must be removed. With so much at stake we must shoot for the moon. If we spend more now we’ll prosper later. Those who want a return to Clinton Era policies are reckless reactionaries in progressive guise, regressive fools who must be despised and pushed aside. Seize the revolutionary moment. We have four years left to put America on an irreversible path to a More Perfect Union of shared prosperity, justice and peace. Four years to save the Earth from catastrophe. Four years to realize the real American Dream. Only vigorous and persistent collective action sparing no expense can get us there.
This is what I heard in yesterday’s speech: Obama’s Battle Hymn of Big Government.
In other words…everything that the informed conservative voter predicted four years ago.
No concrete solutions to any problems – the same old tired speech again and again and again…four more years of it.
Only about half the voters voted for him so he has no enormous majority. The half that didn’t vote for him will be fighting every step of the way and, when they see their money declining, those who did support him may think again. the media has started to think a little more about his beliefs. The years won’t be easy but they will be interesting.
I hope his tenure will bring the end to the 24/7 news cycle and increase reading and lstening to calm, quiet music.
A point about Scandinavians and paying for their welfare state.
My future to be and then father in law worked for the Danish Foreign Service. I can remember several conversations with him, where he talked about his efforts as a government spokesperson to distinguish the national finances of Denmark from the national finances of Sweden.
This was a concern, because the Danes — we are talking about the 80′s and the 90′s — were trying to lower their cost of borrowing internationally, when markets had less access to information, and the Danes were being treated like Swedes, which had undergone a great Keynesian blowout that had left their economy in a parlous state.
I haven’t looked it up, but this may have been the proximate cause of the banking takeover that Paul Krugman liked so much.
Anyway, my point is that that the reasons that the Danes (and later Swedes) had to worry about paying for their welfare state, at least in this stage of the drama, is that they actually had to pay for it.
The Danes love the Krone. They voted against the Euro in part, because they like their national symbols on their currency. The unintended benefit, perhaps, is that they actually have to protect that currency.
So maybe a big part of what is driving U.S. profligacy is that we have the world’s reserve currency, an exorbitant privilege as de Gaulle famously argued. And it’s that privilege that we are putting at risk.
So maybe contra Voegeli, it’s more about monetary economics than political philosophy.
Just a thought.