Regardless how you feel about the federal government shutdown and who’s responsible, one thing has become evident: President Barack Obama is not a leader.
To witness the disgusting and childish behavior using the “shutdown” as leverage to try to stab the opposition party and being punitive and vindictive about it is appalling. I’ve seen more grown-up behavior from a Girl Scout troop.
It goes beyond my comprehension that the White House had to go out of its way to spend money (during the shutdown) to rent barriers to close an open-air war memorial, and yet right next door have a rally for illegal aliens with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi leading the charge. She even thanked the president for making it happen. That is off-the-charts insane! Men and women who died to allow people, including illegal aliens, to rally openly is so enormously disrespectful and just plain wrong.
When I was around 10, I remember telling myself how much I loved America over other countries because we were not corrupt. The naïveté of a child. We are all witness to the worst corruption in American history.
Leading the charge is our “freedom of the press.” How it came to be that the media have climbed in bed with the liberals of this country and highjacked honest reporting is something for others hundreds of years from now to discuss in political science classes. But today we have to deal with the vast amount of news reporters of this country being nothing more than cheerleaders for the left. China probably has more balanced reporting.
Our $17 trillion debt is still there, the Internal Revenue Service operating as an executive branch of the Obama administration hasn’t gone away, Benghazi will more than likely never be resolved, the government gun-running operation Fast and Furious was knocked aside by Attorney General Eric Holder, and yet this administration is going out of its way to keep vets from open-air memorials and taxpayers from entering national parks. It’s like a child keeping their toys away from the other kids just because — neener, neener. But are you reading or hearing about this in the press? No, you’re being pounded by how all of this is the Republicans’ fault.
Enter the Tea Party. As with all liberal tactics, whenever there’s a threat they don’t fight with facts but with fear and demonization (e.g., Sarah Palin and now Ted Cruz). The Tea Party is a bunch of folks who are fed up with paying too much in taxes and expressed their opinions when they suddenly found a bull’s-eye on their backs.
Liberals recognized how they grew in strength and launched their personal attacks, using race as the first wave. The media jumped on this without any facts or backup and joined in lockstep with the liberal talking points. Soon the uninformed started to believe the Tea Party as nothing more than another bunch of whackos. The liberals are masters at destroying people and have their support group — the media — to help them spread their poison.
And finally Obamacare. Have you ever seen a government-run program work? The IRS lost $67 million, but we’re still expected to pay more taxes. The U.S. Postal Service, no matter how many times it raises stamps, you know it won’t be enough. Amtrak, partially government run, is bankrupt. With Medicare and Medicaid, disability fraud is rampant. Literally everything the government has its hands in is broke, corrupt and inefficient.
Now we’re being led to believe that 900 pages of a document no one read is going to solve our insurance needs. No one still knows what’s in it (18 new taxes) and the impacts, but we do know it’s going to cost people a lot more (it was going to save a family $2,500 a year) to pay for others who won’t be paying anything. And once the illegals begin to sign up, the perfect storm will build and this monstrosity will become an unstoppable financial blob ever growing, gobbling up what makebelieve money the country has left.
And for what? To help 30 million uninsured? Who arrived at that number? Who are those people? Are they illegal? Are they people who would never have worked anyway? The idea was noble and should have been explored targeting that specific group for some resolution. But to have the entire nation suffer for it is an impeachable offense (maybe not, but it should be).
Like all liberal ideas, it’s never what you see on the surface. The underlying reason for national health care has always been obvious — to spread the wealth and socialize America. Only this time it’s going to be the younger Americans who will be spreading their meager amount of wealth to pay for us older Americans.
Some other facts to point out regarding how efficient the government is: It has had nearly four years to roll out this nightmare and it’s not working, and the original cost estimate to get the website up and running was to be about $60 million and instead it cost over $600 million. And we had to hire 16,000 new IRS agents (like we needed more corruption and expenses) to “police” us. The program also requires 7 million people to sign up in the next 12 weeks in a vain attempt to pay for it, and so far there are fewer than 100,000.
If we don’t arrest the direction we’re heading, we won’t recognize what used to be America three years from now when we can finally get rid of this administration. Heck, I don’t recognize it now.
Then there’s the debt ceiling. In five years, President Obama increased our debt by $7 trillion — more than all presidents in history combined! That point alone should be enough to tell you where this hope and change has gone. Yet we’re going to raise the debt ceiling again? How is it not possible that we can’t cut a measly 10 percent of expenses? We already know 50 percent is waste.
If Obama were a real leader, he could simply demand that every single department in government sharpen their pencils and cut back 10 percent, then demand the proof it’s been accomplished. The sad part is they’ll hire more people to oversee that a cut is implemented and expenses will go up 10 percent instead.
Government has run amok, and it appears there’s no turning back. That’s what you get when you vote in a liberal community organizer instead of someone who actually ran a business. If the Girls Scouts were running government we’d be better off; at least they know how to sell cookies.
Let the corruption continue.
— Henry Schulte of Santa Barbara owns and operates Dos Pueblos Ranch. He has been politically active in the community for years. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.