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Jewish World Review Sept. 2, 2011 / 3 Elul, 5771 My Fellow Americans ... By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | President Obama is going to give yet another Big Speech next week. Who among us can contain his excitement? The One can expect Obama to repeat certain verbal tics. He will quote himself a lot ("As I've said before ..."). He will insist that it's time to put aside partisan differences, by which he means everyone should agree with his ideas. And, he will insist he's a pragmatist who only cares about "what works." This has been the rhetorical theme of his presidency from the beginning. In his inaugural address he proclaimed, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works." Well, to that end, here is the speech -- or a portion of it -- I would like to hear from the president: "My fellow Americans, when I came into office, I promised to discard the tired dogmas of the past. I vowed to put partisanship aside. I made a solemn pledge to focus single-mindedly on what works. As I've said before, what I admired most in President "In May of 1932, "Well, we have tried many things. A few, I believe, have worked, but honesty and the national crisis both compel me to admit, too many have failed. "I can blame the mistakes of my predecessor all day long, but the simple truth is that the stimulus effort did not do what I or my own economic advisors said it would. "Worse, many of the programs and policies inherent to the stimulus were built on fictions. Indeed, much of the money we wasted -- at the behest of the Democratic congressional leadership at the time -- was never even intended to stimulate so much as bail out programs and local governments. "Moreover, as I have already admitted, 'shovel-ready jobs' were a myth. "Even more dismaying, much of our green-jobs program agenda has been an indefensible failure. In "I passionately believe we must transition to renewable energy, but it is clear the economy is simply not ready and government is ill-equipped to pick successful companies better than the market can. "Taxpayers gave "Just last week, a company my administration touted as the crown jewel of the new green economy, "I've said many times that green jobs cannot be sent overseas. But that, it seems, is not true. We subsidize solar panels here in the U.S., and the Chinese build them at pennies on the dollar and sell them to us. "However, you cannot drill for American oil in "No other country in the world refuses to exploit its natural wealth the way we do. This must end. "We will take the tax-revenue windfall from new oil and gas exploration and invest it in basic energy and sound climate research in the hope of solving our problems through innovation instead of immiseration. "Let me be clear: The reason there were no shovel-ready jobs is because government rules and regulations make it difficult to hire people. In "My fellow Americans, I've said many times I believe that government can do amazing things. I still believe that. But after more than two years of bold, persistent experimentation, it has become clear that in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
© 2006 TMS |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||
