"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye…We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
- Remarks after 9/11, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, retired pastor, Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago and former pastor of President Obama.
By: Linda Case Gibbons
You know how it goes. Your kids start a job and you buy them whatever stuff they need. You realize that when they’re done with that lemonade stand or the newspaper gig they probably won’t make any money and you’ll probably end up footing the bill. But it’s okay. You’re building self-esteem.
You tell them: take responsibility if you make a mistake, be honest, don’t spend more than you make, and remember that success is good. The basics.
But when it comes down to it, when they’re walking out that door, it is all up to them. They can’t blame mom or dad…or George Bush. It’s all up to them.
Hopefully they’ll still come to you and share their dreams, their best ideas. And you listen even if you have misgivings. So when Barack Obama got this job, I had misgivings.
I didn’t think he’d be very good at this whole presidency thing, but when his Food and Drug Administration started running ads featuring a middle class, white, older woman excited that she had food stamps, excited at all the great food she could now buy, I wondered if Barack knew that "getting on food stamps” wasn’t a goal to be aimed for.
I thought, now if he had advertized the General Motors Volt, maybe that would have made sense.
But even at that the thing was losing about $49,000 on each sale and cost over $80,000 to manufacture. The plug-in hybrid electric vehicles’ batteries had a test history of bursting into flames and the biggest negative of all, nobody liked it or wanted it.
But after the bailout, Obama owned the company, or at least American taxpayers did...and the unions. So I figure, let him give it a whirl.
Unfortunately he backed a loser. For an original taxpayer investment of $27 billion, GM stock took a consistent nose dive, leaving American taxpayers with a loss of $16.6 billion.
And administration claims (lies?) that the company paid back $49.5 billion were untrue. In reality it was only $6.7 billion and that money came from another TARP escrow account.
End result? The troubled auto company is still troubled.
But Obama likes autos and he likes green, so he dumped half a billion of taxpayer money into Fisker Automotive.
Unfortunately despite promises made by the company, jobs never materialized in Joe’s home state of Delaware. And now, two years behind production, Fisker is still manufacturing American taxpayer-financed cars in Finland because according to its CEO "there is no affordable place to produce in the U.S.”
Fisker Karma also had operational problems, the Fisker Karma's was "mysterious fires” that in one case resulted in the partial destruction of a home in Sugar Land, Texas. And financially, it seems the only guys who can afford the $102,000 luxury ride are Leonardo DiCaprio and Justin Bieber.
All right, so maybe cars aren’t his thing. We just have to find his thing.
How about green companies? He loves them and declared in 2010 that "the true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra.” So maybe that’s his strong suit.
Well, no. We all remember Solyndra. It was the first company to receive taxpayer dollars to set it on its feet, $627 million, but more importantly, it was the first green company to go belly up and there are at least 12 lesser known green companies that have followed the same path as Solyndra. Each received millions of dollars of federal funds from the Department of Energy.
Obama chose to finance green businesses that couldn’t make it on their own, that did not create jobs and couldn’t make it with taxpayer funding.
Too bad for the American taxpayer, but too bad for Obama, too. It doesn’t look like he’s good at this entrepreneurship thing. He doesn’t understand how businesses work, profit and loss. Even though his dad’s area of expertise was economics, it seems that gene skipped a generation.
After that Obama moved along. With his party always looking out for the poor, the children and the victimized, Obama felt sorry for the illegal Mexican youngsters who were brought to the United States "through no fault of their own.” He said to them with the strength of a presidential fiat, "Come on in, stay,” to at least 1 million illegal aliens.
It’s a wonder that someone, maybe Michelle Obama, didn’t tell him that you can’t do that, squat, stay, get a job. You couldn’t do that in France for instance. They wouldn’t stand for it. But Obama had befriended Mexico’s President Calderone and thought that his friend had many good ideas on how we should run our country because so many of his people lived here, so he said "Oh, what the heck. It’ll look good on my resume.”
But the back-door amnesty turned out to cost a bundle and a lot of people weren’t pleased, namely the border states that had to pay the piper for health, education and police protection for a newly inflated population, the Americans that lost jobs to the illegals (now called "undocumented” by the administration) and just about everyone else you can think of in America.
It’s a wonder someone, maybe Valerie Jarrett, didn’t tell him that this isn’t the way the presidency works. You can’t just do what you want.
And it started Americans thinking, like ignored, middle children, why the president sought out those who weren’t citizens of this country to help while admonishing the job-makers, the small businessmen that, "If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”
Then one thing led to another and they wondered about many things: why this president pays more attention to the Muslims in our country than he does to other religions, even when they attack U.S. Embassies; why he has an antipathy to the mention of our Christian God in his party’s platform and then denies he knew about the platform change; and why he tells third world countries that we are a Muslim nation.
It made citizens wonder why we have a health care act pushed and pushed by this president that deliberately lied to the American people about costs and provisions, a law that is rife with taxes and penalties on citizens, insurance companies, medical supply companies and anyone else you can think of.
It made U.S. citizens wonder why our president backs the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, bows to Saudi sheiks, and why he ignores and insults our allies at every chance he gets, today turning down a face-to-face, denying there was a request for a face-to-face with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu so he can continue campaigning while the Middle East is exploding.
But Barack Obama presses on with his priorities. There must be something we can find that he’s good at.
He did reach out to the war torn Susan Fluke, taking her stumping with him so they could both let women know that in this country they will receive free contraceptives whenever and wherever although Ms. Fluke was the only one who said she needed them. What else? I can't think of anything.
The good news is now we have a track record for Barack Hussein Obama and it turns out he’s not good at much of anything.
Unfortunately for this novice president, his instincts are all wrong for this job. Although he had a loaded Democratic Senate, his own judgment caused all his deals to go bad. Bad, that is, if you wanted to succeed. Good if you wanted to fail. And with him, we’re not sure which one he wants.
He broke the basic rules we set for our kids: responsibility, honesty, frugality and a respect for success. In addition, he continues to whine for four long years about the full plate, the raw deal he inherited from George W. Bush.
Curiously even though at one time or another Obama’s mainstream media have fancied him as Abraham Lincoln, FDR or even JFK, Abe never complained about his predecessor, James Buchanan who left him with a widening North/South rift over slavery which ultimately became the Civil War.
And we never heard Franklin D. Roosevelt bad mouth Herbert Hoover who left FDR with 24.9 percent unemployment rate and 5,000 banks that had failed.
Apparently Obama did not inherit the political and spiritual fortitude of those presidents.
So as the days grow cooler and we approach what people say is the most important Election Day of our lives, we have to do some careful thinking, some careful choosing.
We’ve seen the candidates at their conventions. We were left wondering where the bold, clear-speaking leaders have gone, not only the ones who aspire to the Oval Office, but those in local and federal government.
And we look at the man who for four years has had a chance to prove his mettle. We feel sorry he hasn’t fit in well in his new job and don’t really know where he does fit in, but we’re not sorry enough to give him another chance.
He’s had his one shot at his lemonade stand with his parents waiting in the wings. There is too much at stake for all of us and now we have to undo what he has done to our country if that is possible.
At least now we know that after watching this president in the driver’s seat, if indeed he was handed lemons from the previous president, he wasn’t very good at making lemonade.
Hold the line, America.