Late last week, radio and television commentator Glenn Beck touched on something at which I hinted in my last column – that rather than putting on the brakes in light of Scott Brown's recent senatorial win and the summative occurrences leading up to same, the Obama administration would probably stomp on the gas. Beck's assessment was based on instructions contained in "Rules for Radicals," the Saul Alinsky tome that has been a holy text for President Obama's variety of progressives; this protocol calls for fierce augmentation of goal-oriented actions when threatened or thwarted, rather than falling back and regrouping.
And it would appear that Beck – or perhaps Beck and I – were correct. As reported, early this week, Obama released his new $3.8 trillion budget plan, nearly half of which is deficit spending and which includes approximately $1.4 trillion in tax increases on businesses and "the wealthy."
Our economy has lost 7 million jobs over the last two years. And our government is deeply in debt.
– President Obama, Feb. 1, 2010
This reality somehow renders all of the spending a perfectly rational and prudent course of action, I suppose.
Obviously I'm being facetious, but one would think that given the Brown win, Republican gubernatorial wins in Virginia and New Jersey, and the ongoing battle within his own party over health-care reform legislation, Obama might have considered revising his budget or delaying its release. But he didn't. He unveiled it with a flourish, and on schedule, warts and all.
Like in the stimulus bill of 2009, no doubt there will be billions in sheer, shameless waste, billions going to phantom ZIP codes, earmarks and pork, and untraceable billions that will find their way into the hands of Obama cronies (such as ACORN and SEIU), unions and uber-progressive states.
What's going to kill us is that there is, by design, a wealth of potential for millions to cash in on some of those trillions. There's something for everybody, like bonus payments to Social Security recipients and other retirees, extended jobless benefits and health insurance subsidies for the unemployed and extended middle-class tax credits. These will overcome the sensibilities of lawmakers and taxpayers alike. Most people aren't business owners, nor do they count themselves among "the wealthy," so the taxes Obama plans to impose will pass without protestation.
I won't even get into the futility of sparking the economy via spending; what's frightening is that the president can even offer this course of action with a straight face. Attempting to spur job creation by investing in an existing corrupt and wasteful bureaucracy that administers federal construction and other jobs projects will, as we have seen in practice over decades, only stultify job creation overall.
We will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole-vault in. If that doesn't work, we will parachute in. But we are going to get health-care reform passed.
– House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Jan. 28, 2010
Apropos stomping on the gas: Pelosi has essentially said that Congress is going to force-feed Americans their brand of health-care "reform" whether we like it or not, and whether or not she and the president can get the congressional (Democratic) majority to go along with it. There's also more than an intimation there that we're too stupid to know what's good for us.
The way some of you have gone after this bill, you'd think this was some … Bolshevik plot.
– President Obama, Jan. 29, 2010, to GOP members of the House
Now, why on earth might people suspect someone who's been immersed in Marxist ideology since he came out of the chute of masterminding a Bolshevik-style plot? Actually, I'm glad Obama brought it up; he saved me the trouble. Regular readers of this column are aware that I've made this claim regarding nearly everything Obama has done, from his involvement in mortgage-securities politics (even before he became president) to health-care legislation.
The "Bolshevik plot" statement itself, according to a professional I consulted in the area of psychological pathology (yes, I do that, because I don't pretend to be a psychologist), might be a variant of psychological projection (sometimes called Freudian Projection). You know, like the guy who says to his wife, "Jeez, honey – it's not like I'm cheating on you," when in fact, he is. He's trying to allay her suspicions whilst gauging them at the same time. Judging from the materials I've read by psychologists and lay people on Obama's alleged mental twists, I can only come to the conclusion that the signs thereof are pretty apparent.
But all of this borders on the irrelevant. The current economic crisis was orchestrated. Health-care reform, Obama's past spending and his new budget all have the same objective: manipulation of the economy toward consolidation of unprecedented power. Obama could possess any number of dangerous psychological maladies; for now, he's still the president, and his ideology presents far more peril than the mind that harbors it.
Whatever the case, if he mentions the film "Soylent Green" once, I'm heading for the hills.