Returning from a congressional town hall meeting in Pryor Creek, Oklahoma last Tuesday, one of three town hall meetings held that day by our “blue dog” Democrat congressman, Dan Boren, I couldn’t help but notice a long deep gouge cut into the pavement of Sam’s Corner Road, near our home. And as I rounded the next bend in the road I could see what had cause the damage to the road. Parked off to the right side of the road was a large red septic tank truck, a “honey wagon,” with all of its left rear wheels missing.
After what we had just witnessed in the filled-to-capacity Expo Center at Pryor Creek’s Mid-America Industrial Park, I couldn’t help but see the broken-down truck as a metaphor for the Obama presidency. Just as a heavy load of raw sewage had caused the wheels to come off the septic tank pumper, causing its driver to have a very bad day, the wheels are slowly but surely coming off the political “honey wagon” that is the Obama Administration, causing its driver to have a very bad year.
As matters now stand, the Obama presidency may well be over before it really begins, saddling the American people with the first three-year lame duck presidency in history.
In his march to the White House, Obama campaigned on three primary themes. He would:
· Create “economic justice” for the poor and less-fortunate, bring “fairness” to our tax system, stem the outflow of jobs to overseas markets, restructure the mortgage lending industry, and bring stability to financial markets.
· Develop clean, renewable sources of energy, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and create millions of new “green” jobs.
· Reform our overly expensive healthcare system while making healthcare and healthcare insurance available to all… legal and illegal residents alike.
Obama’s first initiative upon taking office was an economic “stimulus” package, supposedly a quick fix to create millions of new jobs and reverse a deepening economic recession. Democrats in Congress approved a $787 billion stimulus package to fund what were billed as “shovel-ready” projects. However, after more than six months, only about ten percent of the appropriated funds have been spent… most on pork barrel projects to benefit Democratic special interests… and attendees at town hall meetings are beginning to press the Congress to stop the spending spree and leave the remaining ninety percent in the hands of the Chinese lenders.
On the subject of taxes, Obama said, over and over again, “I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”
That pledge was found to be just so much hot air when the Congress took up Obama’s “cap-and-trade” proposal. Obama soon found that the American people are not nearly as dumb as he and congressional Democrats think they are. Taxpayers very quickly came to the conclusion that the extra $3,000 that American families would have to spend on motor fuels and electricity each year may not have been, by definition, a tax, but if it was money out of their pockets it came under the heading of a “rose by any other name.”
As the American people came to understand that Obama was serious when he said he would “bankrupt coal-burning power plants and drive electricity costs through the ceiling,” cap-and-trade quickly became a very hot potato and was shoved to the back burner so that Obama could take up the even larger problem of healthcare reform.
Instead of writing a bill and sending it off to Congress for action, as the Clintons did in 1993, Obama simply dropped back ten yards and punted the ball to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and Henry Waxman. After all, if there was a chance that Obamacare would suffer the same fate as Hillarycare, he didn’t want his fingerprints on it. Unfortunately, the task of writing the bill was turned over to some of the most radical leftists in Congress and they happily produced something called the Healthcare Choices Act of 2009, a 1,019-page monstrosity that Obama did not write, but which he is now forced to defend.
Priced at well over a trillion dollars, Obama has promised that the bill would be “revenue neutral” and would not increase the federal deficit. To accomplish this great feat of magic, the bill’s supporters expect to fund it by rooting out waste and corruption in Medicare and Medicaid, by cutbacks in Medicare reimbursements, and by imposing oppressive new taxes on the rich. In terms of quality and availability, Obama continues to insist that he can provide healthcare to 47 million additional people… without increasing the number of doctors and hospitals needed to provide the service.
There was a time, just a few short months ago, when these campaign themes all existed separate and apart from each other… but no more. When Obama assembled the $787 billion stimulus package and taxpayers came to recognize it as a blatant payoff to Democratic constituencies, he dropped a few cc’s of poison into the political well. Then, when he tried to push cap-and-trade legislation, based on nothing more than junk science, he dumped a cup of poison into the well. And finally, when he tried to push what the people see as a radical government takeover of our healthcare system, he dumped a bucketful of poison into the well.
The end result is that he is unlikely to get any sort of meaningful healthcare reform because a majority of Americans simply do not trust him any longer. And since he has so thoroughly poisoned the well of political discourse… his own White House deputy Chief of Staff called on union goons to “push back twice as hard” against angry senior citizens, the Democratic Speaker of the House referred to Americans exercising their right of free speech as “Nazis,” and the Democratic leader of the U.S. Senate called town hall meeting attendees “evil-mongers”… he can’t go back to cap-and-trade or to tax reform and pick up where he left off.
In a May 20, 2009 article for American Thinker, titled “Revolution – Which Side Is Going To Win The War?” the former Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council, Herbert E. Meyer, brings us face to face with a stark reality that every American should ponder in the Age of Obama. He tells us that “what defines a ‘revolution’ is that, when it’s over, a country has changed not only its leaders and its laws, but its operating system.”
Meyer reminds us that “we Americans have been so politically divided that some of us have called this left-right, liberal-conservative split a ‘culture war,’ or even a ‘second Civil War.’ ” But these descriptions are no longer accurate. Instead, he argues, “The precise, technical word for what is happening in the United States today is ‘revolution.’ ”
Meyer explains that, just as computers may operate either on an Apple or a Microsoft operating system, countries have a choice of operating systems, as well – one political and the other economic. Politically, countries can be either a democracy or a dictatorship, while economically they can have either a free market or a command economy.
He explains, “When politics in a democracy is normal the political parties will agree to preserve the operating system while they compete to improve it… Honorable people often will disagree about what to do – sometime quite strongly… But in normal politics the outer limits of all these disagreements are marked by a shared commitment to preserving and improving the operating system.”
But here’s the scary part. Meyer goes on to say that, “In abnormal politics, the objective of one party isn’t to improve the operating system, but to overthrow it.”
That is precisely what describes American politics today, and for at least the past seventy-five years. While conservatives and Republicans have worked steadfastly to preserve and improve our democracy and our free market system, liberals and Democrats have worked tirelessly to replace our political system with an authoritarian socialist system and our free market economy with a managed economy, controlled by politicians and government bureaucrats.
As Meyer suggests, liberals and Democrats could never admit to their true goals and objectives. Instead, they have worked covertly, pretending to support democracy and the free market while working diligently to undermine both.
The people who filled the Expo Center in Pryor Creek, Oklahoma last Tuesday… most of them lifelong Democrats who’ve suddenly awakened to the dangers of Obama and what the Democrat Party is all about… are in full revolt against Obama, Pelosi, and Reid and their entire program. They are living proof that, while Obama is leading a revolution against the American system of government, there is also a massive revolution extant within the Democratic Party. With each passing day, Obama and the Democrats lose more and more of the senior vote… people highly concerned about their healthcare… and more and more of the white middle class… people concerned about the kind of world that Obama and the Democrats are creating for their children and grandchildren.
As I see the wheels coming off the Obama Express I keep thinking back to that big red “honey wagon” parked along Sam’s Corner Road in Mayes County, Oklahoma with all of its left rear wheels missing. In order to make it a fitting symbol of the Obama Administration, I’ve been tempted to pay a visit to the truck in the middle of the night to paint the word “Obama” just above the words “Septic Tank Pumping” in large white letters… but my wife won’t let me. Darn!
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