Obama: Government Spending 'Made This Country Great'

Last night, President Obama spoke at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. There, he attacked his political opponents’ philosophy:

They’ve got one message and that is, we’re going to make sure that we cut people’s taxes even more – so that by every objective measure our deficit is worse and we will slash government investments that have made this country great, not because it’s going to balance the budget, but because it’s driven by our ideological vision about how government should be.  That’s their agenda, pure and simple.

Obviously the takeaway line here is that “government investments … have made this country great.” That is insipid. The American people and their hard work, perseverance, and creativity make this country great–not bureaucrats in Washington spending huge sums of money in order to generate mediocre results.  In another speech on Friday, Obama suggested that Republicans suffered from “madness” for opposing him.

The notion that cutting taxes creates deficits – not his wildly out-of-control spending, the largest single spending spree in the history of mankind – is pure Obama, suggesting that all money and rights source back to the government, not the people. The idea that Obama is suddenly a budget-balancer is hilarious, especially when you recognize that by not cutting spending, the only way to balance the budget is to ratchet up taxes dramatically.

But this speech is going to be President Obama’s blueprint for the election cycle. And there’s more to it than his simple Big Government view of politics.

He ticked off his list of accomplishments in tending to “a set of challenges that had been building up for decades.” What are those accomplishments? Ending “don’t ask, don’t tell” – hardly a landmark proposition, considering that President Clinton instituted it in the first place. Signing the Lilly Ledbetter Act, a terrible piece of legislation that extends the statute of limitations indefinitely for discrimination lawsuits – basically, a sop to the trial lawyers. Investment “in clean energy” – that’s companies like Solyndra. And, of course, Obamacare, which is blatantly unconstitutional and puts our entire economy on the verge of bankruptcy. So there’s that.

The speech goes on with his litany of “accomplishments” that aren’t actually accomplishments – ending American involvement in Iraq and handing power over to the Iranians; chaos in Afghanistan; reading terrorists Miranda rights that they shouldn’t have. Lies, half-truths, and nonsense masquerading as a winning record. And he spells out further goals: moving beyond fossil fuels (how?), investing in infrastructure (remember those non-existent shovel-ready projects?), and reforming immigration (what do you suggest?). So if we’re interested, four more years of incompetent world-changing are just around the corner.

The speech also featured Obama’s capitalization on the personal popularity of his wife, Michelle, who has become one of his most successful fundraising tools. It featured an insane amount of whining, too. There’s his self-proclaimed martyrdom:

So there’s a lot at stake.  But the good news is, as I travel around the country, part of what sustained me each and every day – people sometimes ask, boy, you’re working pretty long hours and people are calling you pretty nasty names, and how do you put up with all that? 

How many people truly ask President Obama how he works so hard and gets called names? And how many presidents have whined about it in public?

And the whining didn’t stop there. We got President Obama’s “Blame Bush Without Mentioning Him” routine:

We’ve gone through a tough three years, this country – as tough as any in our lifetime.  The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.  The economic aftermath that left millions without work.  A collapsed housing market.  It’s hard to remember sometimes how perilous things were when I was sworn in.  The month I was sworn into office, we lost 800,000 jobs in that month alone.  We had lost almost 4 million in the months before I took office.  And then we would just keep on shedding jobs for the first few months that I was sworn in.  The banks were locked up, so even blue-chip companies couldn’t get credit.  People, I think, genuinely thought that you might see a world financial meltdown.  And nobody exactly knew where the bottom was.  The stock market, by the way, was about half of what it is today.

Notice how he blames Bush for job losses on his own watch. Subtle.

His last line is a killer, though:

If you are just as determined, and you’re willing to work just as hard as we did four years ago, then we’re going to win.  And more importantly, we’re going to make sure that this country is everything that it deserves to be.

What does that even mean? What do we deserve to be?

For Obama, the answer is obvious: we deserve to be bankrupt. Which means great. Or something.