Posted on 01/21/2009 5:21:23 AM PST by Kaslin
President Barack Obama’s inaugural speech was supposed to be one of the great inaugural addresses of all time. It was supposed to encourage us, to inspire us. Instead, it deflated us.
Obama’s inaugural address deflated us because it perfectly crystallized the quandary America now finds itself in: we wanted our faith renewed through a “transformational moment” -- but now we’ve got a faithless man for president. Obama has no faith in God’s stake in the American destiny; instead, God merely “calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.” Despite his protestations to the contrary, Obama has no faith in Americans; instead, he wishes to change our hearts of stone for hearts of flesh: “we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect.”
Obama has only one deep and abiding faith: faith in himself. He mentioned humility three times during his inaugural address. The gentleman doth protest too much. This inauguration, in Obama’s view, was about his personal elevation; his accession to the White House was “a moment that will define a generation,” a moment when the nation “set aside childish things.” Most evocatively, Obama cited his inauguration as a moment when all cynics were thrust aside because “the ground has shifted beneath them.” The imagery of Moses (Obama) facing down Korah (Rush Limbaugh and the political right) and the ground swallowing up Korah is unmistakable.
Obama’s faith in himself -- and by extension, faith in the government he leads -- is unshakeable. In his inaugural address, Obama dismissed the question of “whether our government is too big or too small.” Instead, he suggested, we should focus on “whether it works.” Yet there is apparently no situation in which Obama believes the government, led by Barack Obama, doesn’t work. The free market requires “a watchful eye”; “a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.” The government must build us “new roads and bridges,” “restore science to its rightful place,” “transform our schools and colleges and universities.” The government must bring about global equality via international redistribution: “poor nations … we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.” In Obama’s mind, the government he runs solves all problems and rights all wrongs.
What will happen when government fails?
Obama’s hubris -- the belief that he can do no wrong, that he can miraculously lead America to “harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories” -- will lead him to shift blame for his inevitable failures onto the shoulders of the American people.
Already, it has begun. If Obama’s policies fail, he will blame his partisan critics, the benighted Americans who refuse to acknowledge, “that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.” If our economy continues to shrink, as it certainly will under Obama’s “new New Deal,” Obama will blame our continued “collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”
In his fatal distrust of the American people, Obama echoes President Jimmy Carter. In his address, Obama noted a “profound … sapping of confidence across our land -- a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.” Here he echoes Carter, who famously declared an American “crisis of confidence … a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.”
This is dangerous stuff. Pessimism is a natural outgrowth of tough economic times, to be sure, but the American people do not believe that America’s decline is inevitable. In fact, the only commentators who have posited the inevitability of American decline are Obama and his supporters. As Obama puts it, “the world has changed, and we must change with it.”
But if Obama’s plans to “remake America” in the European image fail -- and, God willing, they will -- his grandiose self-involvement and blustering pomposity will lead him to condemn the very Americans who elected him. The meaning of Obama’s “transformational moment” will become naked in the light of day; it will become obvious that Obama’s election was Americans’ superfluous attempt to move beyond race, not a broad mandate to remold the country.
And Obama will learn the hard way that while Americans will never fail, presidents can.
The exact same way that the Depression is STILL being blamed on Hoover.
Spot on article. Thanks for posting it.
Bump
wow. - I hadn’t seen that before. When was that taken?
bookmark
The world is more or less the same fundamentally as it always has been. It is America that has changed.
While it is a national achievement of sorts to have elected someone with more pigment than past Presidents, the content of his character embodies the very philosophies our nation has fought against for generations.
If we must change, and indeed we must, the path and the goal are clear. We must change to align ourselves with the philosophies embodied by our Constitution.
Yeah, like that's gonna happen...
And...we need to leave him in place...just take a look at the line of succession for the presidency.
obammer is fine right where he is.
http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/12/05/Jon%20Favreau%20and%20Clinton%20cutout.jpg
Pride = the reason for the fall of Lucifer. So too will it be for the lawless man who is of his father, the devil.
How can he be held accountable for stringing words together that are essentially meaningless? I wonder if this is somehow part of the plan. When things don’t go his way, it will be everyone elses fault but his.
"The German people have failed me"
And that guy is still on Obama’s staff? Hillary has lost her power.
My son works in nuclear energy & he said "good luck with the alternative sources"!
He also said, dig out the candles, because no windmill or any other type of alternative source can put out what a nuclear plant does.
But, we all remember O saying that we need to give up our luxuries, like A/C in the summer & turn down those thermostats in the winter!
Two “Great Malaise” speeches in as many weeks, he really does love Carter.
It’s hard to see it now, but in two years or so, things will be very different for the Messiah.
Not only will his policies and initiatives make things worse, but a series of bad decisions and screw-ups will open him up and show him for what he really is - an arrogant, amateurish, socialist racist who is in way over his head.
“The speech writer, Jon Favreau, is the one on the left.”
But but but I was told that Obama wrote the whole speech himself... Why is this poor kid being blamed?
There is no such thing as an African-American. Either you are American or African. Having dual citizenship would have ruled him out for the presidency.
His Mother is American, His Father was African, and he HASN'T proved that he is legally qualified to be President, and has spent around ONE MILLION DOLLARS (and counting) in fighting law suits that might prove he is unqualified.
So - yes -he's an African-American.
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