The Conservative Soldier

The Barack Hussein Obama brain trust has got to be positively awash in salivation as red flags pop up daily across the U.S. economic landscape. With each passing hour, Obama’s hollow campaign platform — CHANGE — surely will grow more powerful as Americans come to grips with significantly higher energy costs. Invest heavily in the blame game, his brilliant advisers will tell him privately, and coast into the White House on a tide of economic despair. The working class will be re-defined as the economy class, a group of Americans paralyzed by indicators and analyst forecasts, eternally waiting for their tax cuts and stimulus checks.

More government. More relief for the little guy. More unchecked spending in Washington. The Perfect Storm for B.H. Obama & Co.

But, lest we forget, Obama also has declared that during his presidency “the oceans will begin to slow” (in a lame reference to appease the global warming nuts). So he had better be careful about choosing the waves he rides into the seat of power. From this seat, empty campaign word crafting soon must be replaced by important, sometimes unpopular decisions. Waves can weaken into ripples and, next thing you know, you are dog paddling.

Sen. Obama, who has rarely ever engaged in writing or passing serious economic legislation as a Senator, is turning up around the country talking about his stimulus-in-every-pot strategy for “saving” the U.S. economy. The middle class will get tax breaks and free spending money to offset high prices — middle class to be defined by Obama on an as-needed basis. For now, we can assume middle class means all of those people making just south of $75,000 a year, or looking at it another way, people who are one pay raise away from becoming not-middle-class and, thus, subject to Obama’s massive income tax increases.

While the expanding economy class (expanding because, presumably, illegal immigration will remain rampant under an Obama presidency) becomes dependent on electronic direct-deposits from the U.S. Treasury, all of the “obscenely wealthy” small-business owners and independent investors finally will be derailed from the free ride they’ve been on for too long, Obama will preach. Oh, and while we’re at it, we’re going to ratchet up capital gains taxes to stop all of these insensitive white folk from clearing so much money from property and stock investing. (The consequence being that this is the very activity — investments returns being reinvested — that fuels economic rebounds and growth).

Oh, and don’t forget death and inheritance taxes. That one-two punch will surely come back in Obamaland, more destructive to more longtime family owned farms and other businesses than ever.

By any (even casual) historical measure, Obama will bask in a struggling U.S. economy at his peril. The nation was so blinded by its desire for “change” in 1976 that it ushered in the untested Governor of Georgia, James Earl Carter, who was run out after one term by crippling inflation and heavy taxation. It was so extreme as to overshadow his foreign policy ineptitude. At least Carter was not naive enough to try ramming nationalized healthcare down our throats.

Team Obama will not be deterred by historical warnings. In his twisted view, an America near collapse is a beautiful vision to behold. Gas prices spiking to $4.50, then $5, and beyond. Airlines parking airplanes and, in some cases, disappearing, even as Obama and the radical left wing ignore the public’s cries for energy independence. (”We can’t drill our way out of these problems,” the old liberal Matriarch, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chortled last Sunday on one of the talk shows). Housing prices stagnating because legitimate real estate investors (not “flippers”) will avoid rising capital gains taxes if, as some predict, the tax doubles to 30%.

How can he relish these scenarios? Perhaps he simply does not care. Could not care less, in fact.

Writing for the electronic magazine American Thinker, Prof. Ed Kaitz explains Obama’s indifference by reminding us how strongly Obama is guided by anger (as are longtime associates and friends). For anyone who cared to listen, Obama stated this all too clearly in his much analyzed speech on race during the Democrat primary season. “The anger is real;” he said that March day in Philadelphia, “it is powerful. And to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm (between races).”

Kaitz, a UC-Berkeley educated professor, believe it or not, addresses the roots of Obama’s anger deftly in his American Thinker piece written soon after the Philadelphia race speech. He examines the stark difference between those in the black minority and those in Asian minorities. He recalls a conversation with a black acquaintance years ago that has stayed with him in which the black gentleman zeroed in on the differing attitudes between black and Vietnamese residents of the Louisiana Bayou.

“We’re owed and they aren’t,” the man told Kaitz.

Kaitz concludes that Obama’s race speech and, as I would interpret it, his campaign for President, tells us that Obama is not invested in the audacity of hope. He is invested in being, as Kaitz puts it, “a peddler of angst, resentment and despair.”

That’s quite a bit different than being an agent of change, isn’t it?