I sat slack-jawed in disbelief this evening as I listened to the President of the United States assert that our current economic crisis, which grows worse by the hour, is due to "a run of bad luck." Having exhausted the Arab Spring, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the situation in Europe and every other imaginable excuse for the failure of his policies, Obama now falls back on "bad luck"?! Can you imagine any other president attempting this, let alone expecting to get away with it?
When I was born, Harry Truman was president. In my lifetime, I have never seen such a comi-tragic abdication of presidential authority. Bad luck?! Is Obama the Diviner in Chief? Did we elect him to prognosticate, to calculate the odds, to read the Tarot, or did we elect him to lead? Bad luck?! Does it never occur to this man that it is what he is doing and not what is happening that is causing the problem? The fault, dear Barack, is not in our stars, but in us, that we are ideologues.
Can you imagine Abraham Lincoln after the defeats at Manassas, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville declaring that the Union had merely suffered a run of bad luck? He took responsibility - personal and political - and made the changes necessary. He did not go on a campaign tour; he did not go on vacation. And yet the nation now faces a crisis analogous to, if not of the magnitude of, 1863: We face the threat of the collapse of the American economy.
The situation in Europe, as in the United States, is proof positive that creeping socialism leads only to bankruptcy -- the bankruptcy of the human spirit as well as of the economy. Americans are tired, they are frustrated, they are exhausted. We cannot continue paying bills run up by politicians in search of votes for re-election, and debts accumulated that our grandchildren will not be able to pay. But the president and his cronies are oblivious to this.
The much anticipated jobs plan which the president has graciously withheld until after his vacation on Martha's Vineyard from a nation whose effective unemployment rate is 18 percent will, by all accounts, represent nothing but another government stimulus package. But where will the money come from? Shall we borrow more from Communist China, which already upbraids us (the U.S.!) for fiscal irresponsibility, or shall we merely print more money as Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke suggests? Either way, we saddle our descendants with the onus of a debt they cannot hope to repay.
I ask again: Who will vote for Obama next year? Who wants four more years of these inane policies, this vacuum of leadership? Who but those so steeped in the cult of "social justice" that they will drink the Cool-Aid of pseudo-socialist ideology until we all choke to death, will mark their paltry ballots for this man?
