Obama, The Economy & An Absence Of Leadership

Obama is finally figuring out that the November 2010 elections meant something. Americans can see the direction of our country - and its running fast and furious towards an economic cliff. Obama tried ignoring it with his 2011 Budget and insane SOTU speech. In stark contrast, Rep. Paul Ryan recently released a budget proposal to deal honestly with our problems. Obama tried to respond today - with a speech of course, not a serious budget proposal. Here is the summary of that speech:

The debt and deficit is Bush's fault. Republican's budget plan is "E"-vil. It will destroy our nation's infrastructure, toss grandmothers into the street, take away their health care, and take candy from babies. WE (the royal "we") will bring fiscal sanity to America by gutting our military and raising taxes on the rich and corporations. WE will also increase spending and leave untouched all benefits for social security and medicare. All of this will magically reduce the deficit by trillions.

Add a ton of intellectually dishonest demagoguery and announce a new panel with Joe the Clown in charge and that is it a nutshell. Obama is more dangerously incompetent than Homer Simpson working at a nuke plant.

Update: Krauthammer offers his take on the scurrilous performance by Obama:



Jake Tapper at Political Punch notes this contrast in intellectual honesty from one of Obama's prior speeches to today's:

President Obama at the GOP House retreat, January 2010:

“We're not going to be able to do anything about any of these entitlements if what we do is characterize whatever proposals are put out there as, ‘Well, you know, that's -- the other party's being irresponsible. The other party is trying to hurt our senior citizens. That the other party is doing X, Y, Z.”

President Obama today:

“One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates…This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. And who are those 50 million Americans? Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.”

One word that will never be appended to Obama when history is written is "leadership." My only question is whether we will still be able to fix our country post 2012, or whether Obama and the left have set us on a permanent progressive course to ruin.

Update from Rep. Paul Ryan, via the Weekly Standard:

“When the President reached out to ask us to attend his speech, we were expecting an olive branch. Instead, his speech was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our fiscal crisis. What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our commander-in-chief; we heard a political broadside from our campaigner-in-chief.

“Last year, in the absence of a serious budget, the President created a Fiscal Commission. He then ignored its recommendations and omitted any of its major proposals from his budget, and now he wants to delegate leadership to yet another commission to solve a problem he refuses to confront.

“We need leadership, not a doubling down on the politics of the past. By failing to seriously confront the most predictable economic crisis in our history, this President’s policies are committing our children to a diminished future. We are looking for bipartisan solutions, not partisan rhetoric. When the President is ready to get serious about confronting this challenge, we'll be here.”

Update: Ryan's office highlights "key facts" from Obama's speech:

· Counts unspecified savings over 12 years, not the 10-year window by which serious budget proposals are evaluated.

· Postpones all savings until 2013 – after his reelection campaign.

· Runs away from the Fiscal Commission’s recommendations on Social Security – puts forward no specific ideas or even a process to force action.

Update: The full comments from Paul Ryan on video -



(H/T Hot Air)