President Obama’s State of the Union address said more about the state of his approach to governing than it did with the present condition of this nation under his governance.
It was an uninterrupted march of platitude upon platitude, with nary a solution offered to any of the problems facing the United States.
As anyone with one cent’s worth of intellect understands, the United States is not only broke, but up to its thinning hairline in debt to — of all places — China, which despite its communist government is acting more like a capitalist regime than an old Moscow-style dictatorship.
He was clearly in favor of virtue and opposed to sin in all of its many forms -- except, of course, to homosexuality in the armed forces, which seems to have won his unspoken acceptance. It was a joy to behold the stolid reaction of the Commandant of the Marine Corps to Mr. Obama’s apparent acceptance of the legitimacy of same-sex relationships in the armed forces of the United States.
For the most part, the speech was his attempt to disguise his quasi-socialist agenda as being an approach to political and social moderation — not an easy task for a chief executive who has just shoved a version of socialized medicine down the throats of the American people.
With the sole and surprising exception of CNN, which unlike the other networks chose to broadcast the Tea Party response delivered by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., the president’s speech went mostly unchallenged.
Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., spoke for his party but his remarks were lukewarm compared to those of Rep. Bachmann, which cut right to the heart of the Marxist aspects of the president’s address.
Needless to say, it wasn’t the president’s speech which raised the ire of the so-called mainstream GOP, but Rep. Bachmann’s well-aimed barbs.
She was right on when she declared, “Two years ago, when Barack Obama became our president, unemployment was 7.8 percent and our national debt stood at what seemed like a staggering $10.6 trillion,” she stated.
“We wondered whether the president would cut spending, reduce the deficit, and implement real job-creating policies.
“Unfortunately the president’s strategy for recovery was to spend a trillion dollars on a failed stimulus program, fueled by borrowed money. The White House promised us that all the spending would keep unemployment under 8 percent.
“Well, not only did that plan fail to deliver, but within three months the national jobless rate spiked to 9.4 percent.”
As the perceptive Mike Banerian, one of my valued readers, wrote to me: “From the very beginning of the speech I saw a very different Obama, I saw a new face of a more moderate president. Of course that’s how he wanted to come off; I wasn’t fooled. I have talked with many people who, though [they] found the speech flat, said they liked the moderate stance Mr.Obama has taken. However looking at the context of the speech I found the same old, Liberal, Barack Obama.”
Mr. Banerian wrote that he thought that the overall speech was “weak,” and it was merely “just a mask for his liberal views.
His conclusion: “We need a president and a government that bases its decisions on Capitalism and Democracy, not Socialism and Communism. I hope leaders such as yourself, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and many others take a stand and change America for the better. I love this country, let’s not let the little time we have left to fix this be squandered by a president who looks after his image, over the American image.”
To which all I can say is “Amen.”
(Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his website at www.reagan.com.)