As George Neumayr wrote in the American Spectator, “Glib and cocky as ever, Barack Obama used his State of the Union address on Tuesday night to push his sophomoric and gimmicky socialism.”
On par with the boredom of Monday night’s Republican debate, and rolling out his latest campaign slogan, an America built to last, with all the faux emphases that we’ve become accustom to hearing from his oratory, Obama’s State of the Union speech presented a lot of disingenuous circular arguments and recycling of ideas that won't go anywhere (primarily due to his own administration's stance on them), more class warfare speech ('fair share', 'fair shot', 'same rules', etc.), more planning & executive fiat from our Ruler-in-Chief, more outright lies (and they were so blatant that you really didn’t even have to ‘fact check’ to recognize them)...and perhaps the most disturbing were the bookends of Obama’s speech.
The President attempted to compare the way our government 'should' work to the way the military 'does' work. Well then, that would be somewhere between totalitarianism & oligarchical rule, when taking into account all the liberty that our soldiers sacrifice in service to the country. A Democracy is not a military! As John Tabin notes, “America works as well as it does because it's made of citizens who jealously guard their liberty.” Now, Barack Obama doesn’t seriously believe Congress is just going to roll over and submit to his will, but his rhetoric is problematic, because it is the rhetoric of one who seeks power beyond the presidency, particularly when he dishes out yet another executive order during the speech (clean energy initiative through the Dept. of Defense?), not to mention, the blueprints of additional executive panels created: a Trade Enforcement Unit, a Financial Crimes Unit, a special unit of federal prosecutors over abusive lending, another request of Congress to grant him the power to consolidate executive powers, and a Veteran’s Job Corps.
Mix in a 'fair share' of egalitarianism, and you've got Obama's SOTU speech last night.
Oh, yeah…speaking on the previously mentioned ‘recycling of ideas’, theRightScoop points out, “The RNC has put together a great video showcasing how Obama used the same rhetoric last night that he’s been using in previous State of the Union address, sometimes using the same line in all three. And it’s all part and parcel of his failed record. He’s out of ideas.”
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels delivered the GOP response to Obama’s SOTU, starting with ‘loyal opposition’ & ‘salutes’ (blah, blah, blah…with a ‘personal admiration’ that could be seen as a slap at Newt), THEN quickly moving beyond the “sunny side of our national condition” that Obama lays claim to, to get to the meat of Obama’s tenure:
“But when President Obama claims that the state of our union is anything but grave, he must know in his heart that this is not true. …he cannot claim that the last three years have made things anything but worse: the percentage of Americans with a job is at the lowest in decades. One in five men of prime working age, and nearly half of all persons under 30, did not go to work today. … In three short years, an unprecedented explosion of spending, with borrowed money, has added trillions to an already unaffordable national debt. … Those punished most by the wrong turns of the last three years are those unemployed or underemployed tonight, and those so discouraged that they have abandoned the search for work altogether.”
Daniels also addressed Obama’s “grand experiment in trickle-down government” that’s done more damage to the economy than enabling its recovery:
“He seems to sincerely believe we can build a middle class out of government jobs paid for with borrowed dollars. In fact, it works the other way: a government as big and bossy as this one is maintained on the backs of the middle class, and those who hope to join it.”
Perhaps the most poignant part of the Republican rebuttal, was the differentiation of our embrace of individual liberty, as the Founders & Framers set forth, opposed to Obama’s view of how we should succumb to Big Government ‘team work’:
"You know, the most troubling contention in our national life these days isn't about economics, or policy at all. It's about us, as a free people. In two alarming ways, that contention is that we Americans just can't cut it anymore.
In word and deed, the President and his allies tell us that we just cannot handle ourselves in this complex, perilous world without their benevolent protection. Left to ourselves, we might pick the wrong health insurance, the wrong mortgage, the wrong school for our kids; why, unless they stop us, we might pick the wrong light bulb!
A second view, which I admit some Republicans also seem to hold, is that we Americans are no longer up to the job of self-government. We can't do the simple math that proves the unaffordability of today's safety net programs, or all the government we now have. We will fall for the con job that says we can just plow ahead and someone else will pick up the tab. We will allow ourselves to be pitted one against the other, blaming our neighbor for troubles worldwide trends or our own government has caused.
2012 must be the year we prove the doubters wrong. The year we strike out boldly not merely to avert national bankruptcy but to say to a new generation that America is still the world's premier land of opportunity.”
In addition to the Republican response, Herman Cain was asked to give the tea party response, and did he ever!
“Mr. President, stop the class warfare, discourage your surrogates from making racial innuendos, stop the attacks on business, stop the attacks on citizens by making government too big; and Mr. President, most of all, stop the blame game.”
ADDENDUM: U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (FL) shared his thoughts on Obama's SOTU speech afterwards with Sean Hannity...
House Budget Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (WI) also had economic concerns with Obama's agenda...
And the presidential contenders have weighed in as well: Gingrich, Santorum, Romney.
A couple other notables: CBS News runs through the top 10 highlights from Obama's speech, and Aaron Goldstein of the American Spectator presents twelve SOTU questions for Obama (these are good!).
