Four score and seven lies ago

By Rob Janicki

President Obama's speech on Wednesday was both shallow and outrageously insulting on several levels. Set aside for the moment the continuing arrogance of Obama and look at the substance of his speech. Oh, wait! There wasn't any substance. Peter Wehner observed, "It was not a serious substantive speech; it was a political missile whose intention was to destroy, through libel, the House Republican’s 2012 budget." Remember that Paul Ryan was an invited guest to this savaging of the Republican House FY2012 budget plan of which Ryan was the architect.

Obama's speech was a heavy handed attempt to bludgeon his opponents once again using both high sounding rhetoric of smoke and mirrors and low gutter politics, while rolling out almost all the old and tired liberal/regressive shibboleths including the classic appeal to class warfare. The rich didn't get the country into the fiscal disaster that it finds itself in despite what Obama inferred. Politicians spending other people's money hand of over fist is what got the country off the fiscal superhighway and onto the boulevard of bankruptcy.

Another classic canard Obama employed was the old, "we need to spend more money to save more money" for the intellectually challenged walking among us. Additionally Obama specifically snubbed any possibility of tax relief in this perilous time for our economy saying he and Warren Buffet didn't need any tax cut. This is a special variation of the argumentum ad ignorantiam or appeal to ignorance. Tax relief across the board has proven time and again to actually increase business activity resulting in economic growth and greater tax revenue as a result of the increased economic activity. Taxing the rich is just a means to cover the ineptitude and incompetence of the liberal/regressive politicians. As 19th-century economist Frederic Bastiat put it: "Government is that fiction whereby everybody believes he can live at the expense of somebody else."

Basically this was a stump speech for Obama's loyal leftist followers to energize that base for the upcoming election cycle. Because there was no substance to this speech, it will quickly be forgotten for its lack of statesman like leadership in laying out any specific road map to right the ship of state.