Has it hit you personally yet? You know what I mean: the real “State of the Union.”
I haven’t lost a minute’s sleep over Obama’s re-election, even though I dread his leadership. The debt, the cliff, sequestration … nothing’s reached me personally yet. But some good friends are coming unhinged.
I interviewed a California conservative about a year ago (yes, there is one!), when cities began to go bankrupt. I asked him what a bankrupt city looked like and lived like. He was as spot-on as a biblical prophet. In San Bernardino (population 210,000), City Attorney Jim Penman noted that the city had 45 murders this year, a 50 percent increase over last year, after laying off 80 cops. Penman’s advice to a nervous crowd at City Hall: “Lock your doors and load your guns!”
I’ve never lived in a Czechoslovakia next to Nazi Germany, listening to Hitler’s threats. I’ve never lived in a Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia, wedged up next to a Soviet Union ever eager to swallow me up. I suspect that could drive you over a personal cliff. But, as an American, I’m now a stockholder in an enterprise that’s $16 trillion in debt; if you want to include unfunded mandates, make that around 68 trillion. What was that advice again? “Lock your doors and load your guns!”
I met a woman in Israel who’d just landed a great job in Elath, Israel’s southern port on the Gulf of Aqaba. She abruptly quit. Elath’s eastern city limit is the border with Jordan. Its western city limit is the border with Egypt. “I feel the pressure physically,” she explained. “I’ve lived all my life in Israel, so I’ve never known peace, but down here I feel like my head is in a vise. At least up in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, those who want to kill you are over there. In Elath they’re right there!”
Americans have never had enemy tanks that close. We’ve never had a Canadian dictator strike across Lake Erie, forcing women refugees with shawls around their heads to push baby carriages with their belongings through Lima, Ohio. Aggression need not be from overseas. We are in nothing less than a fight for the soul of America, and we’re losing.
The TV show “The Real Housewives of Orange County” featured a mother asking her daughter why she thought her husband didn’t love her any more. (I thought they were twins, but my wife explained one was the mother!) “Well,” replied the daughter, “He keeps saying things like, ‘I hate you!'” It should be exactly that clear that President Obama intends a ritualistic public castration of the GOP. (I think he’s intending worse!)
Did you fathom what Obama said when asked why he wanted to do tax increases now, but wait until next year to consider expense cuts? He sounded like my mother when I was 10 and wanted to go swimming and she didn’t. It was something like, “If we do taxes now, that will give us more time next year to work on spending cuts!” Then the White House sends Geithner to Boehner without one single suggestion on spending cuts! Not only that, but Obama wants $80 billion more in spending plus automatic elevations of the debt ceiling instead of all these annoying arguments. This is calculated to incense.
Elections do have consequences. (WND’s founder and CEO, Joseph Farah, presents impossible-to-ignore evidence that the election was stolen!) So do wars. And defeated enemies like Germany and Japan must accept the terms of the victor. However, Hitler did not stop our forces at the Rhine or the Oder, and Japan did not stop America short of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The GOP, however, did much better.
The GOP lost the White House but they won the House! They’re not as defeated as Obama’s treatment of them suggests and as many Republicans seem to submissively agree.
The Republicans must get off their knees. They must rise. Sure, polls tell us Republicans will get the blame if we go over the cliff. Give me one strong Republican voice telling the truth to America and that changes. Obama has much more to lose if cliff-tumbling and sequestration engulf us.
Republicans: Do this or disappear! You, GOP, are not Nazi Gen. Jodl surrendering at Rheims or those ridiculous-looking Japanese in formalwear on the Battleship Missouri. You’ve never had more sitting governors. You have energized allies eager to get it right.
The next time they send Geithner to you with no spending cuts; the next time Obama asks for $80 billion more in spending, the next time Obama wants no more “debate” on debt-ceiling increases, look at their proposal, then look them in the eye and use the same words as that 6-year-old girl who won America’s heart in the 1920s when her mother told her, “It’s broccoli, Dear.” She looked at her mother and said, “I still say it’s spinach, and I still say to hell with it!”
