Three radio events yesterday, all related to my post Obama and Warren cribbed “build it” narrative from progressive Berkeley Professor.
1. Rush featured the post in a lengthy segment. I don’t have the audio, but the transcript is here. (Audio added via DailyRushbo):
2. I was a guest on the Lars Larson Show which runs nationally. The portion referred to in the title appears at 4:05 of the audio.
Am I allowed to quote myself?
“The citizen is born indebted to the government because the government has provided the road that the trucks used to build the hospital that citizen was born in, and the road that the parents used to drive the citizen home, etcetera etcetera. It’s kind of the whole Julia notion that Obama put forward in his campaign, that the government is there and we owe something to the government rather than the other way around. And I think it is a fundamental transformation, to kind of paraphrase Obama, of the way we look at the role between the individual and the state…. Rather than simply funding services, you’re paying back a debt that you were born with.”
3. I was a guest on the John Batchelor Show on WABC in NYC. The segment starts at 18:25 of this audio.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Obama’s statement is the “gift that keeps giving”. We need to keep it “top-of-mind” for the next 100 days – or until Obama steps into a different pile of crap.
Here is something I found on another blog that deconstructs what the president actually said. It notes that he was grammatically correct until he got to the most important part of the narrative. Here is where Progressocrats and Prez-O-Bama say that when he used the singular ‘that,’ he was really referring to ‘roads and bridges,’ plural. Check it out.
http://i1072.photobucket.com/albums/w362/TrooperJohnSmith/42887_0178-082.jpg
Ah, recall that very ancient Roman practice of having a slave follow a triumphant victorious general whispering in his ear that he was but a mortal man! Yes, thou art but a mortal man and thanks be to God for that! Darn, where’s that golden laurel wreath to hold over your head?
Except in Modern USA, this person probably wouldn’t speak English. It would probably come out as, “You wanatee fries, yes?”
😐
I like the latest one the best. “We tried our plan. It worked.” The Dems are squawking about the Republican ad based on this comment, saying Obama was talking about what Clinton did, not what Obama did. “WE tried OUR plan” is pretty clear. If that doesn’t apply to the Obama administration, how did WE and OUR get into the statement? Obama had no role in the Clinton administration.
In any event, the economy under Clinton really soared after the Republicans took over Congress in 1995 and restrained spending and cut capital gains taxes. Now, THOSE policies would work even today, but Obama wants to do the opposite.
“We tried our plan. It worked.”
1.5% GDP growth in the second quarter 2012. If that is what “worked” means, I’d hate to see “didn’t work” and “failed miserably”.
The commercials just write themselves, don’t they? is this the untelepromptered note reading Obama? remember, we were told this was the smartest man in the room.
It’s an awfully small and uncrowded room.
Or a big crowded room of Democrats.
US: “Hey, Mr. President, you’re a two-faced, lying, court-defying, violently-combative, Democrat!”
Them: “What? How dare you insult our president! You, racist Re-thug-licans!”
US: “No. We meant Andrew Jackson. Did you not know that? Wow, typical overly-sensitive Democrats.”
The Democrats serially-prevaricate, and then when they’re caught, they play the “You didn’t understand my context,” card.
That philosophy explains a lot then: the more the govt spends NOW, the luckier the unborn will be: after all, they’re not getting $100K in debt when they’re born, they’re getting roads and bridges built by their ancestors.
But that ignores economics:
(1) what if what that unborn baby really needed was jobs for its mother and father, rather than roads that they can’t drive on, because they can’t afford a car? In Obama’s world, only govt can create value.
(2) that there’s no such thing as wealth creation – that it IS possible to spend money and have more than you started with – we are obviously richer than in 1800.
It’s a very attractive philosophy if you’re looking for a way to spend government money on friends, relatives and cronies.
At a company I worked at in the 1980’s we got a lot of expatriate Soviet Jews as engineers. They told us that they were allowed to leave with a suitcase of personal stuff and the equivalent of $100. They were told that they could not take more because the State had paid for their education so they owed essentially everything to the state.
Ive likened the Obama/Warren assertion to “original sin” because for them its that powerful a notion.
What seems fatal to thier argument is their failure to differentiate between America and our Government.
Every one of us can be comfortable with a notion that suggests we are grateful for and to “America” but that doesnt mean our elected government.
When we think of America..we think baseball…Statue of Liberty..Fourth of July…Football games…little kids at the beach…a raft of intangables. Thats where our gratitude lies…not with self serving government that injects itself into nearly every aspect of our lives.
“There’s no happiness in the Obama campaign. There’s no happiness in the Obama White House. There’s no happiness. There’s no pursuit of happiness anywhere on the left. You just have a bunch of angry, victimized people who sit around in resentment, various forms of it, various stages of anger…”
From Rush. I’ve been witnessing this for many years. It is the key to understanding the Left, as well as unlocking the opportunity for conservatives. Our fight with the Left is really about the politics of joy vs. the politics of contempt. If we can find, revive and evangelize (politically speaking) the joy in America and freedom, the Left will shrink and retreat back under the rock from which they emerged. But it takes confidence and robustness — something our pasty and timorous Republican candidates have lacked since Reagan. Reagan was political joy personified. He believed in America and translated that belief joyfully. His confidence in America enabled him to laugh at liberals, and, when necessary, slap them down. But we’ve mostly lost this quality.
As an Illinois conservative, union laborer that has worked on 100+ federal, state, and local bridges and 2000+ miles of federal, state, and local highways, the government doesn’t build squat. The government limp-wristedly documents private contractor’s work progress and spinelessly make decisions in gray areas that their so-called expert engineers and designers did not want to foresee. The government pays private contractors with your money. The government will even find an extra million here or there to award a crony consultant to assist them with the caveat that the crony consultant will have a “no-liability” clause in their contracts so that when something is built according to plan and fails, the contractor gets all the blame. Obama knows the game.
Got IRS audit? You ain’t big time until you are on Obama’s enemy list.
We’ve finally found the fabled roads and bridges fountain of economic youth!
Let’s double the number of roads and bridges in this country and watch GDP double!!!
LukeHandCool (who thinks liberals think “bridges to nowhere” exist only in Sarah Palin’s Alaska).
Government also requires the tags, which you are not allowed to remove under penalty of law, on the mattress where you were likely conceived.
The Rush transcript is great. But it can be summed up equally well by the old Italian Fascist statement:
“Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato” (“Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”)
That’s where the Progressives are headed. Individuals are nothing. The State is everything. That’s why none of us built anything on our own; if we did we as individuals would be something, and the Left says that can’t be true.
Thanks. I’ll remember that quote.
“Self-empowerment” is the great lie of Leftism. But they’ve sold it beautifully. The poor college kids clustered adoringly around Elizabeth Warren in the photo the other day are sad proof, and so too the vapid chants to the collective at Occupy.
These children are co-conspirators in their own negation.
We the People built it (the government), and We the People can say that it’s turned into a money pit and part of it needs to be torn down.
(Also that there are a whole lot of tenants now in there who are not paying their rent and need to be booted.)
The Trail of Lies this man is forging are unprecedented.
You get a welfare check every month?
Good for you!
You didn’t “earn” that on your own. The mailman delivered that welfare check to your mailbox using roads the rest of us paid for.
You earned a bacherlor’s degree in engineering with a 4.0 GPA??
Good for you!
But you didn’t do that. You used roads to get to school and loans and grants the rest of us paid for.
LukeHandCool (who thinks ants are the smartest and most advanced species … they long ago realized there is no such thing as individual success … and that’s why all the great works and advances of culture and science come from ants).
Right on!
So, can we blame “street crime” on the fact that governments built the streets, so the crime is all their fault?
I was afraid of the day the Professor went national. Once Hollywood gets a look at his mug, we’ll never see him again – except on the big screen.
Yep.
I’ve said it before.
It’s like that bittersweet moment in the Beatles documentary circa 1963 when a group of teenage Liverpudlian birds who have been spending their lunch hours almost every day for years at the Cavern Club tearfully protest that they don’t want to share the lads with the world.
The boys are on the cusp of greatness, and the girls just want them to stay in Liverpool and play lunches at the Cavern … the way it’s always been.
Before you know it, the Professor will have a beard and be holding week-long protest movements in his bed, while declaring he’s more popular than Jesus).
“If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.” Exodus 21:2
How many years do the 35 million (that pay 90% of the income taxes) have to labor, before they are free of state ownership?
100 million adults don’t even file .. how are they going to buy their freedom? Or does “The Won” consider them “his people”? Obama keeps preaching his “American family”, but he scolds the successful “servants” that fund everyone else. Apparently he wants all to join his union families. Those that escape to freedom are lost to his socialist vision of total state control. They need to be captured, and have their wealth spread around.
Considering his 20 years in the black power church, and his anti-colonialist dreams, it seems Obama kinda gets off on having his foot on the neck of the successful white man. All business owners abuse their shackled workers, in his dreams from his socialist Father.
About those twenty years Barry-O spent in Rev. Wright’s church…
Not for one second to defend the SCOAMF, but I suspect he was not a regular attendee. Clearly, he is not a religious man, nor is his wife a religious woman. They may have been official members but I’d bet the farm (or what’s left of it after this drought) that they were seldom worshipers at best.
In a way, it’s funny. Barry had a tiger by the tail. He couldn’t get elected without proving his religious bona fides but those were all wrapped up in Wright’s Black Liberation Theology. You have to give him credit for being able to lie his way through it.
Some of the information released by Sherif Arpaio’c Cold Case Posse that supports the evidence that Obama’s COLB released to the public is a forgery…
Codes in the margin may reveal that Obama was a home birth at which neither a physician nor a midwife was present.
heh -no roads used
Additionally, Obama wouldn’t have been able to knock a few stokes off his golf game without the aid of Marine One.
Congrats on all of the mentions!
David Limbaugh made a good point: Those roads and bridges and that infrastructure that “made small businesses a success” also went to businesses that had failed.
I expect Barry-O’s attitude is “You don’t get credit for building it but you can have the blame when it fails.”
That was a nice surprise when I heard you announced on Larson’s show yesterday live. I usually only listen to his local Northwest show each day. Congrats on the recognition of the good work you’re doing here.
P’fessor, I am very, very proud of you! One man with a dream, a blog and the TRUTH can make a difference.
Now, this thing is OUT THERE! The curtain is back, the mask is off, and the genie is out of the bottle. I’m sure I could find some more metaphors…. but.
God bless you sir! You have my eternal, undying gratitude for your great work!
My older sister and brothers were born at home does this mean I owe and they don’t?
I was born at home – no road nor hospital usage involved. Do I get a percentage off my debt?
Does that headline mean that my parents didn’t produce me all by themselves? My mother never mentioned someone else was there at the time of my conception. Surely obama and warren could figure out some trick to make this seem real. Then again, maybe he is saying the doctor had a whole battalion of workers at his shoulder at my birth. This just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. They really should stop digging and let it die.
They need a reason that justifies higher taxes on every future generation. This is it.
For a guy that has taken up “Forward” campaign slogan to inspire hope for transformational change…
He spends a lot of time looking back to try and self-justify the high taxation that O’change must extract.
Looking back to Clinton, where inherited Reagan prosperity and low capitol gains tax allowed continued economic growth, to plow through despite Clinton high-tax, despite radical environmentalism of Algore/Bruce Babbitt and benefit in stability of Republican balanced budgets.
Obama Fed QE, printing of faux currency, failed Keynesian farce and low interest rates has left them neutered to control inflation (Obama engages in ridicule and class warfare a/k/a rampant corporate profits NO J-O-B-S BUT we are fortunate none of that faux currency trickled down to cause damage)
Obama is left with FDR era (high-tax) planned economy strategy to suck all that faux currency out of circulation to curb impending risk of hyperinflation and Democrats Ticking Tax Bomb
The truth often are O’lies just below the surface.