Humbling America

admin — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 00:12:19 +0000

by Gene Lalor

In a forthright and unsettling piece on CNS.com, Ben Shapiro writes of “Obama’s Plan to Humble America” in which he compares the president’s machinations with “gargantuan” domestic expenditures coupled with equally expensive wars to LBJ’s vain efforts to provide America with “Guns and Butter.”

The guns were intended to win the war in Viet Nam, or at least not lose that war, the guns. At the same time Johnson wanted to effect his Great Society programs, the butter. The end result of that juggling was that we kept the welfare and other domestic programs and ignominiously lost the war due to half-hearted commitment.

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According to Shapiro, our current president is on the same social welfare/wars path with one notable twist: Obama knows where he and the country are headed and is planning for failure: “First, Obama wants to weaken us on the home front by ‘spreading the wealth around’ in the name of equality. Second, Obama wants to use that aggravated economic weakness to undermine America’s foreign policy standing around the world.”

That’s a strong charge to make and it’s what makes Shapiro’s article unsettling.

As big and as boorish an oaf that LBJ was, no one to my knowledge has ever suggested that he anticipated much less planned the loss in ‘Nam; it was an unintended consequence of America’s finite resources. The nation simply couldn’t afford both the butter and the guns without huge tax increases which Johnson proposed and in the end there weren’t enough guns, nor much Democrat desire to provide them.

Essentially, Shapiro is saying that Barack Hussein Obama doesn’t like our country, even despises the inequities he sees on the homefront and the “brutishness” of our foreign policy stances and he’s striving to cut us down to the size he envisions for the United States.

That would explain his maniacal tax and spend schemes at home and his penchant for traversing the planet and apologizing for the nation at every stop he makes. Antagonizing proven allies, Israel and Britain, and a necessary ally, Afghanistan, are other surefire techniques to undercut America’s supremacy and influence.

His intended domestic consequence is not only to spread the wealth but to create class warfare of some sort with his constant badmouthing of businesses and industry. At the same time, he’s creating an image of weakness and indecision overseas.

Both policies can only have negative outcomes for the people of the United States.

Despite its many glaring flaws, capitalism is the financial and social foundation not only of our success and wealth as a nation but of the character of the American people: confident, brash, industrious combined with generosity, religious faith, and courage, all former hallmarks of the collective American psyche.

To undermine the capitalistic foundation of our society is to undermine the very bases that made America great and enabled it to fight and help win what were basically European wars in the twentieth century at very high human and economic costs.

If Obama is allowed to continue on this deadend road to perdition and financial ruin, if Obama gets his way and converts America into a second rate power, the international perception of our weakness and indecisiveness combined with a crippled and bankrupt economy can only mean the next time we’re needed somewhere on the globe, we’ll be too weak and broke to help anyone.

As Shapiro concludes his article, “Unlike LBJ, Obama acts not out of ignorance, but insidiousness. Like LBJ in 1968, he must be made to pay the price:” http://bit.ly/bnQ946

The only problem with that truth is that America will already have paid a steeper price. We will have been humbled beyond redemption.

Words from the SoapBox » Humbling America

Humbling America

by Gene Lalor

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