More than a few notable Democrats will be skipping the DNC in Charlotte, bailing for the life rafts and trying to distance themselves from the sinking ship that Obama is captaining. None, though, are going any further than the Hildabeast, who has, scheduled herself, this week and next to visit "the Cook Islands, Indonesia, China, Timor-Leste, Brunei, and Russia."
According to the talking heads, Romney's job last night was to cross a threshold where the American people could see him as President. He is no great communicator, but I think he easily succeeded.
By far the two most memorable lines:
- President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. MY promise...is to help you and your family.
- Hope and Change had a powerful appeal. But tonight I'd ask a simple question: If you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn’t you feel that way now that he’s President Obama? You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him.
The left is still railing about the right "lying" about Obama's remarks in Roanoke:
The left argues that Obama was not talking about businesses in the quote above, but about roads and bridges. It doesn't matter. Even straining credulity to concede the point for the rest of this post, it shows that Obama fundamentally misunderstands the economy.
In Obama's mind, the government is the key to prosperity, and American's owe it obeisance. Under either interpretation, it is crystal clear that Obama sees government as that which allows the growth of private enterprise and wealth. That is precisely backwards.
Every penny of wealth in our nation comes from private enterprise. The government creates, of itself, nothing - it is a parasite, albeit a necessary one, on the private sector. The dollar is worth more than the paper it is printed on solely because of the goods and services produced by the private sector, period. Moreover, before government can build a road or push out a defense contract, it must first collect tax - and those taxes are wholly taken from wealth that first arises in the private sector.
This is not a 'what came first' question, 'the chicken or the egg?' For example, go to England and you will find countless very narrow roads. None of them were originally "built" by government. They were, for millennia, roads cut by individuals on horse and cart taking goods and services to and from market. As this developed, the famed medieval markets were co-opted by the king - so that he could tax the private enterprise that went on there.
Government is wholly dependent on the private economy for tax dollar one. It is not, as Obama and the left seem to think, a goose that will always lay golden eggs solely for the benefit of government. It turns reality on its head. The key to government revenues is through growing private sector wealth, not raiding it and demanding yet more. For Obama to make the remarks he did in the video above show beyond doubt that he doesn't grasp this most fundamental of concepts, irrespective of what he meant.
And if there is any doubt about his inability to grasp basic economic concepts, later Obama made the following comment in an interview in July, claiming that Romney's business experience has nothing to do with job creation, adding that “[a]s the head of a private equity firm his job was to maximize profits and help wealthy investors."
How does Obama think jobs are created - by government without the private sector footing the bill? Does he think a single job in the private sector is not tied to the creation or protection of wealth? This is not the Soviet economy, where the old joke was, "I pretend to work, the government pretends to pay me." That economy failed for precisely that reason. Jobs don't come first, the creation of wealth does. No one in the private sector creates a job simply for the sake of doing so. Make work jobs are solely the province of governement.
At any rate, the left is daily screaming the mantra that the right is "LYING" about Obama's remarks in Norfolk. It doesn't matter, as any way you slice it, Obama is an economic special needs child who needs to be removed far from the reins of government if we are to have any chance to recover.
Paul Ryan's speech at the RNC last night was superb - and thus has brought the left out with in shrill and strident response. First, the speech - and if you haven't seen it, do please watch:
Each one of those articles is a cookie cutter. Let's take a look at what Walsh, for example, claims are lies:
His most brazen lie accused President Obama of “raiding” Medicare by taking the exact same $716 billion that Ryan and the House GOP notoriously voted to slash. It was stunning.
But that’s not all. He attacked Obama for failing to keep open a Janesville GM plant that closed under Bush in 2008. He hit him for a credit-rating downgrade that S&P essentially blamed on GOP intransigence. He claimed that all taxpayers got from the 2009 stimulus was “more debt,” when most got a tax cut (and the stimulus is known to have saved between 1.4 and 3.3 million jobs). He derided the president for walking away from the Simpson Bowles commission deficit-cutting recommendations when Ryan himself, a commission member, voted against those recommendations.
He blamed Obama for a deficit mostly created by programs he himself voted for – from two wars, tax cuts, new Medicare benefits and TARP.
And of course, he riffed on the tired central lie of the GOP convention: that the president said “government gets the credit” for small businesses, not the business owners themselves.
Other than that, it was a great speech.
Okay, one at a time:
"His most brazen lie accused President Obama of “raiding” Medicare by taking the exact same $716 billion that Ryan and the House GOP notoriously voted to slash."
Obama has raided Medicare for current seniors and applied those funds to pay for Obamacare. Indeed, Obama bragged about it at the time of Obamacare's passage. So, the lie here is what? Yes, Republican's want to cut about a trillion from Medicare - so that our nation remains fiscally solvent, not to fund yet another welfare program. The left utterly refuses to acknowledge the elephant in the room - that Medicare, left unchanged, cannot possibly survive without bankrupting the nation. Moreover, and most importantly, Walsh ignores that Ryan's plan for Medicare doesn't touch current seniors or those close to being able to rely on Medicare.
"He attacked Obama for failing to keep open a Janesville GM plant that closed under Bush in 2008"
Ryan's lie here is apparently that he had the temerity to point out that Obama came to the Janesville GM plant in 2008 and said "I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years." The plant closed and remains closed. Nowhere in his speech does Ryan blame the closing on Obama, but he did use it to highlight the larger issue of Obama's horrendous failure to restart our economy. Indeed, at several points in his speech, Ryan went out of his way to say that Obama did not cause the failed economy - only the failure to recover.
He claimed that all taxpayers got from the 2009 stimulus was “more debt,” when most got a tax cut (and the stimulus is known to have saved between 1.4 and 3.3 million jobs).
Ryan talks about the net impact of the Stimulus, and Walsh calls that a lie why? Apparently, Ryan can only address the failed Stimulus if he itemizes each individual line item. And as to those jobs "saved," we are in the worst recovery in our modern history. Does Walsh really want to pretend that Obama's record on jobs is something to be celebrated?
"He derided the president for walking away from the Simpson Bowles commission deficit-cutting recommendations when Ryan himself, a commission member, voted against those recommendations."
And the lie here is? Obama has wholly ignored the Simpson Bowles commission - and he did so in order to avoid having to make any cuts or reforms. Ryan did in fact vote against Simpson Bowles, but did so because "it not only didn’t address the elephant in the room, health care, it made it fatter." To say that Ryan and Obama are both the same on this issue is utterly disingenous.
He blamed Obama for a deficit mostly created by programs he himself voted for – from two wars, tax cuts, new Medicare benefits and TARP.
Apparently its not Obama to blame for the $5 trillion increase in debt during his presidency, its Paul Ryan for voting for things that - Walsh neglects to tell us - wholly predated Obama's presidency. Shameless.
"And of course, he riffed on the tired central lie of the GOP convention: that the president said “government gets the credit” for small businesses, not the business owners themselves."
Yes, because we all know that Obama never said that:
Apparently, the word "lie" now means to raise any fact that the left doesn't like. The left, Walsh and seemingly every other leftie in the MSM, is misusing the word no doubt for its impact and to create a narrative demonizing Ryan so they don't have to have the adult arguments. Any time over the past half century, that would have worked. But today, its whistling past the graveyard and, if 2010 is any indication, a majority of the voters know it.
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