Obama Wasn't Just Tired or Off His Game. He Was Incoherent Because His Ideas Stink.

After taking a debate shelling that showed up on NORAD’s radar last night, President Obama is trying to get his campaign back on track. Today his staff have been aggressively tweeting quotes from the debate to reframe the day, and this one tweeted out a little bit ago.

Obama did say that during the debate last night. But in the same debate, he said this:

OBAMA: When I walked into the Oval Office, I had more than a trillion-dollar deficit greeting me. And we know where it came from: two wars that were paid for on a credit card; two tax cuts that were not paid for; and a whole bunch of programs that were not paid for; and then a massive economic crisis.

And he also said this:

I think we’ve got to invest in education and training. I think it’s important for us to develop new sources of energy here in America, that we change our tax code to make sure that we’re helping small businesses and companies that are investing here in the United States, that we take some of the money that we’re saving as we wind down two wars to rebuild America and that we reduce our deficit in a balanced way that allows us to make these critical investments.

If the two wars are paid for on a “credit card” as the president says, how then are we going to reduce the deficit by taking that money and just spending it on something else? Wouldn’t it make more sense just to not spend that money at all? Since, you know, we don’t have it in the first place?

So that’s one problem. Here’s another. In the tweet, Obama says he’ll use the war money to “put more people back to work.” A dollar spent by the government is a dollar taxed out of the free market, either now or at some point in the future, so that’s a dollar taken out of the economy and put back in, only less efficiently than if it was spent within the free market. But there’s yet another problem in that statement. The government is spending the money now. That spending is paying someone’s salary now. If you stop spending in one direction and merely spend it in another, aren’t you just endangering one set of jobs while you’re setting up a preference for another? How does this produce a net gain? Obama doesn’t say, because he has no idea.

The war money is currently being spent on war stuff — the troops, their supplies, their hardware, development of future war stuff. Where does Obama intend to spend that credit card money that would be better than spending it to defend us from terrorists? More Obama Phones?

Distill it all down, and it’s clear that Barack Obama simply doesn’t understand how the real world works. That’s why he’s a lousy debater.