One line from Barack Obama’s unsettling Tuesday night speech that attracted considerable attention and analysis was, “Now it is time to turn the page.”
The Teleprompter in Chief and his brilliant speechwriters have unwittingly written the slogan that will follow Obama all the way through November 2012, down the U.S. Capitol steps and into the helicopter as he exits Washington — and the White House — in January 2013.
It is an affront to the men and women of the U.S. military who died at the hands of cowardly insurgent IEDs and other weapons to “turn the page” on a chapter that, thanks to the United States, surely will reshape human history. Obama also alluded, and none too cryptically, to the notion that seven years in Iraq cost way too much money and somehow contributed significantly to America’s financial crisis, which must have had several economists who know better either laughing hysterically or drinking excessively.
Obama figures it’s a lot cheaper to apologize for American values rather than to defend them.
Yet, believe it or not, “time to turn the page” was not the most clumsy transition in the Obama speech. It was this: “Now, it’s our turn.”
The message here is, to put it mildly, infuriating. What is to be inferred? That while selfless, brave American soldiers (and they most certainly are) were fighting and dying across Iraq (and Afghanistan), the slacker civilians back home have been partying like it’s 1999? That as jobs evaporate, lending withers on the vine, home values decline and foreclosures spike, Obama has been working himself to the bone while the population at large passively stands around, staring at its collective well-polished shoes, or fixating on American Idol?
Let’s see if we can make any sense of this blithering madness. To demonstrate his supreme benevolence in between rounds of golf, Obama essentially encourages unemployed people not to look for work for 99 weeks by extending jobless benefits recklessly; then, he chides the same individuals to try a little harder, to man up like an infantryman. When is it the “turn” of Washington lawmakers to create a jobs engine instead of a jobs incinerator? In this so-called “Recovery Summer” 283,000 jobs have been eliminated, and unemployment inched up to 9.6% in August.
“They have met every test that they faced,” Obama said in praise of our volunteer troops in Iraq. ”Now, it’s our turn. Now, it’s our responsibility to honor them by coming together, all of us, and working to secure the dream that so many generations have fought for — the dream that a better life awaits anyone who is willing to work for it and reach for it.”
This is not only hollow speechwriting of the worst order, it is a testament to the severe detachment syndrome that afflicts the Obama White House, starting with the Scolder in Chief himself. While we know there are ranks of unemployed who’ve stopped looking for jobs — and who can blame them? — the suggestion that millions have not been “working to secure the dream” is outrageous.
Who doesn’t know dozens of friends and family who are working longer even as cubicles shrink, wages freeze and bonuses disappear? Putting aside a good many people in the financial services world whose lives were ravaged by the 2008 meltdown and who are hardly Wall Street fat cats, what are we to make of those caught in the ripple effect of said meltdown? They haven’t been working hard enough?
What does Obama really know about these Americans? The folks who were years, or even months, away from retirement who now doubt they’ll ever retire. The construction company foreman who lost his job (when the housing market imploded) and volunteered to join the military in his 30s only to lose his life to an IED. Management-caliber people who can’t find jobs and now drive airport limos to make a living. School teachers who no longer have jobs because their unions vehemently resist wage, benefit and pension freezes, forcing local school boards to trim their teaching ranks.
Obama’s speech, upon closer inspection, is truly revolting. Think about it. Here’s a President who disparaged America’s mission in Iraq, first as an Illinois state senator, then as a U.S. Senator and during his campaign to take the White House. He did not support — in fact, he vocally opposed — the additional troop surge that changed everything. Obama was willing to leave our military heroes out on a limb, to just hang them out there in the searing heat. Good luck, guys, sort of.
Now he uses them as props, folded into his cheap metaphors about sacrifice and work and dreams of a better life. In doing so, the President of the United States insults our ultimate defenders of freedom and an American work force that is the envy of the world in one, tidy sound bite.