Rush Limbaugh lambastes the left daily for what he considers disingenuously spinning his “I hope he fails” comment making it seem anti-American. “If you hope the president fails, you’re hoping the country fails.” According to Limbaugh, those on the left know full well that the reason he wants Obama to fail is that he wants his socialist agenda to fail.
Both our president and our vice-president scoff at the notion. “Our policies are socialistic? You’ve got to be kidding!” (Biden) “When you suggested I was a socialist, I thought you were joking.” (Obama) I responded physically to both those comments. Something crawled up my spine. Absolutely Orwellian. Our country has been steadily on the path toward socialism since 1933, and the present administration has said openly that they see the present crisis as an opportunity to move their agenda forward. Spreading the wealth? Spending $800 billion dollars as a down payment on a federal health care system? Incidentally, that’s more than we spent on the war in Iraq. Extending unemployment benefits? Strengthening unions?
That kind of ad homien scoff (Silly you! You’ve got to be kidding) is effective, however. It simply avoids the argument which they both know they would lose hopelessly. It’s a strategy concocted, I suppose, by James Carvill, the operative who has been working the back room for the Dems since before the Clinton era. He was the one who, panicked by Bush’s popularity after 9/11, began immediately feeding politicians talking points to “destroy him at once” or they’d never reclaim the White House. You can be sure that Carville feeds talking points to every Democrat in Washington.
He is probably the one who has made certain that the liberals keeps repeating “the carnage of the last eight years,” hoping we’ll all blame Bush’s silly war for our economic problems. They are educated people. They know right well that our economic problems result from the fact that the chickens spawned by FDR’s new deal and LBJ’s War on overty are coming home to roost. In 1955 entitlement spending totaled 12 per cent of the budget, in 1965, 30 percent, in 2008, 55 per cent. As a percentage of the budget, discressionary spending, including military spending, has remained almost stable since 1965. The per cent spent on entitlement spending has tripled. The deficit rose sharply over the last few years largely because the boomers, that large group of wage earners who have been supporting the FDR and LBJ entitlements, are beginning to retire. You can be sure that every liberal in Washington is fully aware of this problem.
I have certainly benefited from that socialistic gamble. Social security makes my “retirement” years quite comfortable and adequately looks after my disabled daughter. An inexpensive supplemental insurance policy covers those Medicare gaps. Farmers love being paid not to farm, especially those millionaire owners of American farms who live in France and Quebec and Saudi Arabia and Germany. However, I do fear for my grandchildren, indeed, my great-grandchildren. Mandatory government spending has increased by 769 per cent 1965, and the baby-boomers have just begun sucking at the federal teat. We may not be as openly socialistic as Sweden or say Great Britain, but if Obama gets his way, we will be by 2012, and his recent stimulus package included every wet dream a socialist ever had.
Those rising costs would pose no problem if we could make the conservative give up their anti-government ideologies. We can learn that much from European Socialism, countries that have achieved a kind of socialist utopia. Sweden is often seen as a model of a compassionate, healthy, caring country. To support their socialist state they tax car purchases, for example, at 100 per cent of their cost, and that’s good, because the Swedes opt to ride bikes. Good exercise and good for the environment.
It is true that they have a 17 per cent unemployment rate. One has to consider how that rate is calculated. Great Britain, for example, boasts an 8 percent unemployment rate, but according to The Mail, the officials don’t count the 8 million people classified as economically inactive, 21 per cent of the working-age population. I guess it’s great to live in a country willing to subsidize “discouraged workers,” those just not interested in finding a job. I can’t say that I understand. I’m 70 and I still work simply because it seems satisfying. My siblings, all in their 70’s, also work. I guess we’re still plagued by that silly Puritan ethic. We simply convince ourselves that work is rewarding. Or perhaps Phillip Hammond is right: that that “21 per cent of the working age population in Great Britain represents a huge pool of wasted talent.”
So why do liberals, knowing full well what our move toward socialism is costing our country, want to lead us down that path. Power. They learned in 1933 that if they put out a trough, we will feed at it, and the more of us they can get feeding at their troughs, the more power they have. They keep building the troughs and pouring in the slop and we keep lapping it up.
What puzzled me for a long time was why so many of our billionaires were supporting this madness? Warren Buffet and George Soros are the ones most commonly linked to the radical left, but the list includes others: Hollywood producer Stephen Bing; Peter Lewis, chairman of Progressive Insurance Company; Herbert and Marion Sandler of Golden West Financial; Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs; Citigroup’s Robert Rubin; Edwin Janss, founder of the leftwing Janss Foundation; and Aris Anagnos, a Los Angeles real estate magnate and a rabid Marxist-Lenonist. It’s important to note that none of these billionaires are directly involved in an enterprise that actually produces something. Mostly they just play with money. If they are simply committed to service to their fellow man, they certainly have the assets adequate to funding their charitable enterprises on their own.
I have to conclude that charity is not their goal, so there must be another reason for their interest in promoting some form of a fascist-socialist-Lenonist state. To Insure their power base?
The content of this diatribe now veers toward one of those crazy conspiracy theories. First a fact based question: Why is it that 80 per cent of America’s very rich are self-made men and that 80 per cent of wealthy Europeans have inherited wealth? Perhaps because socialism has managed to destroy the talent and initiative of “21 per cent of the working age population.” The power base of the wealthy is not threatened by our talent and initiative if they can keep us feeding at the trough.
Now the really wild theory. Could it be that our recent stock market collapse was created by those rich Marxists who, perhaps under cover of anonymous sources, pulled huge amounts of money out of the market to create a panic? That might explain the slight recovery trend that has baffled us in recent days. Now that they have their troops in command, they’re buying back in. Hmmmmmmm.
