Free Republic

Now that President Obama and his apologists have spent a few days insisting – with increasing panic and desperation – that he didn’t say what he clearly said in Roanoke, Virginia, the spin itself has become a negative reflection on the President. He’s basically demanding that his supporters abandon their own senses, and the most elementary understanding of the English language, to un-hear his words, forget his contempt for individual achievement, and swallow him as a champion of the entrepreneurial spirit. “You didn’t build that” has become a sort of litmus test for pure, blind, unwavering faith in Barack Obama....

Kevin "The Geek" Kerwin, a business man who owns a computer shop in Lake Oswego, Oregon, said he was slapped by a woman over an anti-Obama sign in his window, Victoria Taft wrote Tuesday. According to Taft, "Kerwin came to Oregon to get a fresh start after being wiped out by Hurricane Katrina." She added that he started his business with the money he had in his pocket. After President Obama said business owners did not get where they are on their own, Kerwin posted a sign in his window saying that he built his own business and Obama had...

On the trail, Obama is calling for more taxpayer investment in infrastructure and other projects - investments he was touting when he uttered the phrase "you didn't build that" - a line Republicans chopped up and turned into a rallying cry. Several of the small business owners tapped by the Obama campaign say their businesses survived the recession thanks to government projects. "I am a product of all the great opportunities our country gives its citizens. I grew up with middle-class values, where I went to public school. I went to college at a public university, where I received a...

Ever notice how selective President Obama is when he bashes success? He implies that many wealthy peoples' success makes them greedy - that they don't pay their "fair share" in taxes. Yet he milks them for campaign contributions. He insults the success of small business owners, saying, "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." Yet he leans on small business owners to build jobs and the economy (which would help his re-election).

President Obama must surely wish he could undo the campaign speech he delivered in Roanoke, Va., on July 13. That was where he offered up the view that "if you've got a business, you didn't build that, somebody else made that happen." It is a line that could haunt him right to November, revealing as it does an unwillingness to credit success and a hostility toward the culture of entrepreneurship. But the remark came in the context of a broader argument that was just as telling on a different point, and no less troubling. The president simply equates doing things...

The president's speech calls to mind a "West Wing" episode in which speechwriter Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) explains to the staff of some liberal house members why he won't insert a line in President Bartlet's upcoming speech. They want the president to attack Republican tax cut proposals as financing "private jets and swimming pools" for the wealthy. As Seaborn argues: Henry, last fall, every time your boss got on the stump and said, "It's time for the rich to pay their fair share," I hid under a couch and changed my name. I left Gage Whitney making $400,000 a year,...

President Obama's message to entrepreneurs that "you didn't build that" prompted one Georgia business owner to respond with a not-so-subtle retort. "I built this business without gov't help. Obama can Kiss my ass," reads the sign outside Gaster Lumber & Hardware in Savannah, Ga. Owner Ray Gaster posted that and two similar ones at all three of his company's locations in response to Obama's comments during a speech to supporters in Virignia, which struck a nerve with small business owners around the nation.

When you make your living in the public arena as I do and when you let your opinion be known as I do in mainstream and social media, you expect some criticism and this is as it should be, this being America where our very way of life is centered around free speech. I don't mind the criticism and usually give as good as I get, respecting all comers, regardless of how far afield or how vehement I consider our differences to be. But, lately, I have been receiving a small amount of correspondence from people who resent the headway...

President Barack Obama's recent business-related comments in Virginia ("If you've got a business -- you didn't build that; somebody else made that happen") sounded more communistic than capitalistic, especially because the "somebody" to whom Obama referred was in fact the U.S. government. Progressives and the mainstream media were quick to come to the aid of the president by stating that similar statements have been said by other entrepreneurial moguls, such as Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Andrew Carnegie and Walter Chrysler. Others excused Obama by saying he "borrowed" his business verbiage from Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. No one...

The president recently told a campaign gathering that, "[W]e tried our plan – and it worked." "Worked" apparently means something different to Obama than to, say, working Americans. Did the president mean that it "worked" when U.S. business startups dropped from 554,109 in 1987 to 394,623 in 2010? When the president says "invest," he means the government should take money from people whether they want to give it or not, to pay for things they already have decided are not worth their voluntary investment. Think Solyndra. In that same Virginia speech, the president described government "permitting" private-sector growth. Permitting? We...

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows Mitt Romney attracting 49% of the vote, while President Obama earns support from 44%. Three percent (3%) prefer some other candidate, and four percent (4%) are undecided. The numbers are similar to the 49% to 43% advantage Romney enjoys on the question of who is trusted more to handle the economy.

Obama's desperate protests that his anti-business rant was taken out of context are betrayed both by that very context and because they are a part of a piece -- just one more component of his war against the American entrepreneurial spirit. He would have us believe that his words "you didn't build that" referred to roads and bridges and not businesses. Given his accompanying statements -- "you didn't get there on your own," etc. -- that is an absurd construction. But even if that's what he meant, why would he have felt compelled to point out that businesses don't succeed...

What's the difference between a calm and cool Barack Obama, and a rattled and worried Barack Obama? Four words, it turns out. "You didn't build that" is swelling to such heights that it has the president somewhere unprecedented: on defense. Mr. Obama has felt compelled—for the first time in this campaign—to cut an ad in which he directly responds to the criticisms of his now-infamous speech, complaining his opponents took his words "out of context."

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: George Lakoff (rhymes with). Bill Jacobson has the details at LegalInsurrection.com. By now you have heard the Obama and Liz Warren speeches about how no one got rich on his or her own. ... This narrative is cribbed almost verbatim from the narrative of George Lakoff, a progressive [liberal] linguistics activist and Professor at Berkeley," and he has been advising the Democrats on how to change and use language in order to hide who they really are. That's what it boils down to. Lakoff advises Democrats on how to say things that mask and cover up who...

For a long time, the United States had one economy. Now we have two economies that compete for America's wealth: A private economy and a public economy. The 2012 election will decide which will be subordinate to the other. One economy will lead. The other will follow. How the U.S. arrived at the need to choose between two competing economies reveals a lot about the political polarization in the country. Any history of the Democratic Party in the 20th century will recognize its roots in the American labor movement. The party was defined by the names of those unions. The...

Click here to watch funny video song parody based upon Starship's 1985 song "We Built This City."

Isn't it obvious? Of course he didn't mean what he said four times while off script a few weekends ago! What the president genuinely meant is written right in the teleprompter, after his messaging team spent more than a week figuring out how to "clarify" his comments. He's slipping, guys. Historically, Team Obama has been much faster at turning the truth on its head. Time's Mark Halperin says The One finds himself on the defensive: A campaign never wants to let the opposition dictate what it advertises on. I don’t know if this purely defensive move is based on the...

“And if you don’t like folks talking about you, you probably shouldn’t run for president. The one thing I do have no patience for is this argument that somehow what I’m criticizing is success… I want to promote success," Obama said.

How can you tell when a campaign knows it has stepped into quagmire? It shifts to defense and starts complaining about context. After several days of attempting to defend his “you didn’t build that” remark, Barack Obama shifted last night to a defense that originated with some of his on-line apologists — that Mitt Romney took his remark out of context: The president, after taking a few-day hiatus from campaigning along with Romney out of respect for the victims of the Colorado mass shooting, set out on a round of fundraisers where he tried again to douse the still-simmering controversy...

Obama’s musings on the way the economy works come from a man who never invented anything, never built anything, never took a chance by sinking every cent he had into a start-up company, never had to beg for a loan based on a hunch, never had to put in 16-hour days, never had to meet a payroll or agonize over the effects of government regulation. Then again, Marx wrote volumes about what was wrong with capitalism without every setting foot on a factory floor. I know where Obamaism began — with ‘60s whack-jobs like Barack’s buddy Bill Ayers. And I...