Obama, Too Often: Big Words, No Walk

One of the worst feelings of all: you’re speaking to someone and offer  an insightful, even dramatic, bit of admonition. Then something buried deep in your heart aims an accusatory finger straight back at you, demanding: “Howcum you’re not following your own advice?”

It’s happened to me many times and, trust me — not pleasant.

Over the course of his comparatively brief perch in the national spotlight, even wrong-about-everything Barack Obama has rhetorically contributed the intermittent, useful pearl of wisdom. He does talk a whole bunch, after all. Considering the avalanche of words turned loose by “The Greatest Speaker Who Has Ever Occupied the White House (Or Perhaps Ever Lived, Period) ” — well,  he’s gotta get something right sometimes. At least once in a great while.

The downside for the president? For America? Seems like, even on those rarified occasions when his nigglingly unrelenting grandiloquence bumps up against actual prudence, he rarely applies that same counsel to his own conduct. If Barack Obama ever mentally revisits some of his past declamations, and has any kind of functioning conscience  whatsoever, that terrible, self-accusatory finger must be cramping with overwork, blisteringly indicting this man and the party he incarnates.

For instance, in an interview with the Washington National Cathedral, the Chief Speechifier pretty forthrightly conceded religion (Christianity!!) influences him: “[M]y Christian faith gives me a perspective and security that I don’t think I would have otherwise … God is in control”

Theologically un-earth-shattering stuff, to be sure — except that we’re tirelessly schooled by the secularist Left, who won’t worship God but practically do worship BHO, that public officials shouldn’t even say “God bless you” to sneezers. At best, they sniff, such divine intimations are low-brow; at worst illegal.

Seemingly, their standard bearer disagrees – so, he might want to inform them slightly more energetically  than heretofore. (Regarding his insistence that a mention of God be reinstalled in the bowdlerized 2012 Democratic Platform? That decision would be a tad more impressive if it had preceded, rather than followed, a day of savaging publicity.)

Even more pointedly shocking on the government-and-religion front: “Faith has always provided a moral framework and vocabulary for this country to come to terms with its most pressing challenges,” continued the anti-Christian party’s Leader. “From slavery to the suffrage movement to civil rights, faith … ha[s] always helped us to navigate some of our greatest moral challenges.”

Wha-? Faith? In a God? Shaping American history and public policy? Barry Lynn, ACLU, Bill Maher — call your offices. Or call Barack Obama. He might actually repeat this to you personally; though I wouldn’t count on it.

How about this Lib-convicting beauty from  Denver’s 2008 Democra-palooza :”If you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters … If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things.”

Yes, Barack Obama disapprovingly enunciated those very syllables. The same Chicago-style Alinskyite whose supporters drone pauselessly about George W. Bush; whose campaign has slurred Mitt Romney as a crypto-murderer, responsible for a steelworker’s wife’s cancer death; about his dog-on-the-car-roof, tax returns, his wife’s equestrian pursuits, “war on women”, Swiss/Cayman Island bank accounts; about Paul Ryan’s throwing old ladies off cliffs and misstating a marathon running time.

Stale? Scary? Small? – you bet. But remember it was candidate Obama who finger-waggingly disparaged that approach short years ago.

The President in a 2009 interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd: “The last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession, because that would just … take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole.”

So, the President’s plan come January 2013? In the midst of an economy that continues to falter and stagger precariously? Allow the demonic “Bush tax cuts” — y’know, the same rates that have been the status quo for roughly a decade — to lapse  for anyone (and millions of small businesses) making over $250, 000/year. It’s a tax hike, properly dubbed “Taxmageddon” by its opponents. And, once more parroting the president, it’s “the last thing you want to do” if the goal is fueling job and economic growth.

In July 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama struttingly chided his adversary for overspending. ”[T]he way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents …so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back … That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.”

I’ll agree GWB’s careless and unconservative prodigies of government excess were intolerable for our Constitutional Republic. The current Overlord-in-Chief, nonetheless, is set to lap his predecessor’s borrowed-dollar mania by a factor of three. If Bush’s deficit habits were “unpatriotic”, Barack Obama’s have flatly steered him into Benedict Arnold territory.

One final self-incriminating biggee from our Chief Executive: To a February 2009 probe from The Today Show‘s Matt Lauer about righting the stymied economy, BHO attention-catchingly conceded, “I will be held accountable … If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s gonna be a one term proposition.”

I suppose that avowal was calculated to inspire countrywide oohs and ahhs: What refreshing candor! What straight-shooting gutsiness!

Only, we have to conclude now, nearly four years into Obama term one, as he takes aim at a second stint despite America’s enduring economic wobblies, that the president never meant that pledge.

No surprise there, though. This man specializes in opportunistic tough-talk plied before a microphone, addressing a TV camera or love-struck crowd. It’s living it out through tough-decision making, which requires integrity and honorable character, where Barack Obama is blindingly deficient.

Image courtesy of: Petty Officer 3rd Class Patrick Kelley U.S. Coast Guard Eighth District External Affairs