Stimulating Times

by Lance Thompson

As the stimulus bill staggers through committee, its egregious profligacy more obvious with each passing hour, President Obama remains its steadfast defender. If Obama had made no other decisions during his first three weeks as president, this suicidal spending package would be enough to reveal his incompetence. But he did not stop there.

After his Air Force One joy ride to the Democrat conference in Williamsburg, Obama whined to sympathetic pols that he’d inherited a massive debt by the previous administration, “wrapped in a big bow and waiting for me.” Yet Obama’s response to this burden is to quadruple that debt and leave that much more insidious legacy to the next few presidents. Obama came to office saddled with a heavy credit card balance. His answer is not only to ask Congress for a drastically higher credit limit but also allow them to spend every dime of it immediately.

The President has focused a great deal of energy and political capital on a bill that he had little or no hand in shaping. In fact, this bill, consisting of 647 plus pages before amendments, could not possibly have been written in the short time Obama has been in office. This stimulus bill, purportedly the last best hope of our nation for fiscal health, is not the work of economists grappling with a financial crisis. That would have taken weeks or months. No, this massive piece of legislation could only have been compiled so quickly by the cut and paste magic of word processing. Every liberal chestnut on the Democrat wish list was double-clicked into this “emergency” stimulus bill, under the supervision of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. This was their chance to get it all in one go, with the nation evidently willing to try anything, and the newly-elected president content to cheerlead from the White House.

But the stimulus bill is not Obama’s only foray into executive action. He also has made many presidential appointments to cabinet and other positions. Judging from the unsavory nature of many of his picks–Daschle, Geithner, Richardson, Killefer, Holder, Lynn--this seems to be Obama’s jobs program for at-risk Democrats. He lures them away from lives of tax evasion and influence peddling with character-building jobs in the new administration. Some, like Ricahrdson, Daschle and Killefer, withdrew in the face of mounting outrage over their above-the-law behavior, went back to their day jobs, which suggests a high recidivism rate for this particular effort.

Not content to cripple the American economy, Obama has also been active in foreign policy. In an al-Arabiyah interview, he apologized for America’s tendency to “dictate” to the people of the Middle East. He doesn’t seem to understand that freedom, of the kind our military provided for the people of Iraq, is a precious gift. It is the oppression Iraqis and Kuwaitis suffered under Saddam Hussein that had to be dictated and brutally enforced. Obama’s statements were a slur on every American serving in uniform and especially upon those who fought for the freedom of Muslims in the Balkans, in the first Gulf War, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama’s backpedaling on placing American missile defense systems in Eastern Europe has already emboldened Russian president Mevedev and puppetmaster Putin to threaten the fragile freedom of the former Soviet republics still living in the shadow of the Russian bear. Under Russian pressure, the independent state of Kyrgyzstan closed its Manas air base to US supply flights to Afghanistan. The Kremlin has also announced it will aid the Iranian terrorist-sponsoring regime of Mahmoud Achmadinejad to bolster its nuclear program, which Achmadinejad has vowed to pursue at all costs.

The president recently vowed to unilaterally keep space free of American weaponry. He must believe that the accelerated space programs of Russia, Red China, North Korea and now Iran are all being undertaken for humanitarian purposes. Our nation has many implacable enemies. They have already taken the measure of our president and found in his equivocal manner an opportunity to advance their antagonistic designs.

On the home front, neither Barack Obama nor his exceedingly inarticulate spokesman, Robert Gibbs, likes to answer substantive questions. Obama treats any press inquiry about a matter of policy as a breach of manners, and is likely to scold the reporter. I am more forgiving of Gibbs. If I had to explain the mind-numbing incompetency of Obama policy, I would perspire, stammer and obfuscate as well.

Obama’s first three weeks in office have antagonized and united domestic opponents, confused and frustrated Democrat allies, and left foreign leaders–both friendly and otherwise–unimpressed. What we needed at this moment of crisis was a leader with courage, experience and resolve. What we got was a paper-hatted trainee who each day gives us a new reason to hope for change.