The Morality Card versus the Race Card

To the inevitable chagrin of readers who lean to the right, it is time to restate the obvious: former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is blurring further the lines between the Democratic and Republican parties.

The only genuine differences between those two parties are their target audiences (in terms of appealing to their respective voter bases) and the occasional controversy du jour.

While I already have examined Santorum’s argument for Right-Wing collective salvation, his campaign stop at the Greenwell Springs Baptist Church in Louisiana on March 19 and the more notable activities therein have prompted me to take my analysis one step further.

Conservatives and libertarians alike have long lamented the left-wing propensity for playing the Race Card in political discourse – a tactic which especially hit overdrive when President Barack Obama began to emerge as a frontrunner in the Democratic nomination process in 2008.

However, in 2012 Santorum may have perfected a mirror image of this argumentation device and given the American Right Wing its own card to play when the debates and public sentiment aren’t going the way they like: the Morality Card.

Playing the Morality Card at this juncture of the primary and caucus process appears to be the logical next step for Santorum’s campaign. He has tried to portray himself as a fiscal conservative and staunch defender of Christian values. The problem for him is his voting record does not back that up, having cast “Yea” votes for No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, and various pieces of legislation he knew contained earmarks for Planned Parenthood. That is just the tip of the ice berg.

So, what is a candidate left to do when they cannot run on their record? The answer is find the quickest boogeyman against-which to redirect everyone’s attention. In Santorum’s case, it’s the steady decline in America’s moral compass. It is the perfect way to rally the GOP’s Christian Conservative base – pandering to voters who place much of their focus on issues of morality.

I am a lifelong Christian. I have recently come to understand the importance of Evangelism in spreading and promoting the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

I have no problem seeing right through Santorum’s rhetoric.

Please tell me I’m not the only Christian who does.

Due to budgetary concerns, the light at the end of the tunnel...

Thank God for small miracles!

Earlier today, Congressional Republicans managed to finally attach an amendment to the latest Continuing Resolution spending bill that will operate (for the time being) as a sort-of de facto repeal of the 2007 incandescent light bulb ban.

While it's about damned time this happened (the legislation's components were set to take effect the first of the coming year) there is no shortage of comedic misdirection being perpetrated by the right-wing.

Here is a sample of such posturing from the article linked above:

"'When the American people gave Republicans control of the House in January, one of the major issues involved was the Democratic ban on the 100 watt bulb,' said Rep. Michael Burgess, who fought to preserve the incandescent bulb. 'Republicans have fulfilled our promise to the American people by allowing them to continue to be able to choose what type of bulb they use at home. Consumers should drive the marketplace, not the government.'"

Burgess will make such a comment with complete disregard for the fact Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) -- who presently chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee -- was one of the ban's legislative architects and the bill was signed into law by then-President George W. Bush.

But, we're all supposed to believe this was a "Democratic ban."

My next-favorite snippet appears two paragraphs before the one quoted above:

"Stopping the bulb ban was a chief GOP priority coming into this year, with all of the candidates seeking to become chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee saying they would push through a repeal."

Be aware that I refer to the GOP's "policy rider" as a "sort-of de facto repeal" due to the fact it doesn't actually overturn the original legislation it merely places prohibitions on expenditures related to its enforcement.

And some people still wonder why I'm a Libertarian.

Thank you, Barack Hussein Obama

Recently, it struck me that I have reason to be thankful Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States.

Many conservatives have argued at length over the last 35 months that Americans elected the wrong candidate back in November of 2008.

I am not so sure about that.

That statement, however, is made for very different reasons than our more illustrious right-wing mouthpieces would have their viewers or listeners believe.

I am diametrically opposed to the vast majority of his party’s initiatives as well as his core ideology of redistribution as well as philosophy of social justice. Obama’s pace of spending in 2 3/4 years of governance has alarmingly accelerated the United States’ advance toward fiscal insolvency beyond anything perpetrated by George W. Bush and congressional Republicans.

On the other hand, there is no denying that if Senator John McCain had been elected, instead of recklessly hitting the gas pedal on irresponsible spending he would have sought to maintain what was then the status quo: the incremental march toward an all-encompassing, all-consuming federal government that swells to unsustainable proportions.

Most likely, if we had President McCain instead of President Obama, government’s bloat would have continued its creep toward the brink of fiscal collapse just slowly enough so that when Americans finally awoke to the need to reverse course it – in all probability – would be too late to do so.

Personally, there are additional reasons I am thankful events went the way they did three years ago.

If McCain were our president I’d likely still be in my Republican partisan intellectual slumber.

I’d still be embracing intellectually lazy talking points instead of researching constitutional arguments.

I would not have been motivated to research the Libertarian Party.

The idea of making a run for Congress two years ago would have been utterly ridiculous to me.

And, I wouldn’t be chair of a newly-formed county-level political party.

For society as a whole, in addition to the continuation of the incremental advance toward total statism (and being met with only token resistance), renewed interest in understanding the Constitution wouldn’t have arisen.

The Tea Party movement would not be the prominent force it is today.

We would not be discussing Progressivism and contrasting it against Free Market Liberalism (reference F.A. Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom).

So, thank you again, President Obama.

Thank you for beating Senator John McCain by employing a hokey, ill-defined campaign slogan. Thank you for setting the stage for millions of people to realize how positively ludicrous it is to vote for a candidate based on nothing more than an artfully meaningless catch-phrase such as “Hope & Change.”

Thank you for being so arrogant in your pursuit of redistributive legislation.

Thank you for being so disingenuous in your arguments and dismissive of those who disagree with you.

Thank you for buying into the “Astroturf” rhetoric by your fellow leftists and then being so smug toward the Tea Party during its early days.

Thank you – for awakening again the Sleeping Giant.

Default is a lie!

The soundbytes have been flying across the airwaves like missiles over Baghdad in 1991.

A succinct sampling of the news over the past several weeks would read something like this:

“We have bipartisan support.”

“We’re working on a deal to get this done.”

“No deal!”

“You’re not willing to compromise.”

“We have been in talks with the President to reach a deal.”

“No deal!”

“Why would you hold America hostage?!”

“You said the same things five years ago!”

“No deal!”

But, there is one soundbyte, one phrase, that inexplicably is being uttered and rehashed by the left, the right, and even some libertarians.

“We will default if the debt ceiling isn’t raised.”

Out of all components of the latest political circus on display inside the Beltway, that last non-stop, three-ring performance over the debt ceiling has been equally as nauseating as the doomsday rhetoric flowing out of the White House.

Ballyhooed by the party’s ringleader in chief, House Speaker John Boehner, congressional Republicans (and even a number of their talking heads) have also been prattling-on as though they believe the “default” hype.

But, there is one cold, hard truth being deliberately ignored.

Default is a lie.

As so many others have pointed-out already, given the fact the federal government is projected to bring-in $2.2 trillion for Fiscal Year 2011, payments on existing debt will run about $200 billion, Social Security is expected to exceed $700 billion, and the combination of Medicare and Medicaid will run almost $800 billion there will be enough in tax receipts to cover the $1.7 trillion in entitlements.

That leaves roughly half-a-trillion dollars to do the remaining federal business.

What does this mean?

The second-most-obvious answer is someone in the White House is going to (finally) have to understand how to prioritize spending.

Every other entity and operation in America has to learn to live within their means in similar situations… Although, they must do so since they don’t enjoy access to their own monetary printing presses while the federal government is immune from its own counterfeiting laws…

…But, as usual, I digress…

And then there is that pesky most-obvious answer I almost distracted myself from addressing.

The federal government has the money it needs to make all its mandatory expenditures. All the rhetoric, all the hype, and all the hysteria are predicated on lies.

Is default possible? Certainly.

But here is the ultimate truth in the discussion of such an event: should a debt ceiling agreement not be reached, the only way American debt payments, social security checks, and other domestic benefits won’t get paid-out would have to be as a result of a deliberate choice by the President.

So, no matter what chatter gets shot across the airwaves or splashed onto the front pages of all the periodicals about either the Tea Party “hijacking the process” or whatever other narrative gets manufactured, any withholding of payments which the government is legally (not to mention constitutionally) obligated to pay still boils down to a conscious decision within the White House.

And if the President makes that choice, all the “Impeach Obama” rallying cries which have rang predictably hollow so far just might unexpectedly get some teeth to them.


Related side notes

The single most nauseating talking point raised by Republicans so far has been the notion that forcing this administration to begin choosing where to drop the axe on federal spending means leaving all the discretion up to the Democrat-held White House.

The leading minstrel on this argument has been – surprise, surprise – Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

This is the same Mitch McConnell who practically broke into tears over mentions of reducing discretionary spending a year ago.

The Bluegrass State’s senior Senator continues to let his priorities shine like a beacon of patheticness.

Once again the tenuousness of Social Security has worked its way to the forefront political discussions. Every Libertarian across America ought to be beating this drum relentlessly in light of the opportunity presented.

For the first time last year, the Social Security Administration found itself having to dip into the so-called lockboxes and…

…Figure out what to do with stacks of worthless IOU’s.

And that has come to pass because of decades of borrowing against the Social Security Fund that was supposed to be funded by all the FICA taxes collected since the Roosevelt era.

Things were running smoothly until we finally reached that point – which had been predicted for years – when the amount owed in Social Security obligations exceed the amount of FICA taxes being collected to ensure the checks continue to go out in the mail.

There should be trillions of dollars in reserve to permit the seamless continuance of payments in transition from entitlement surplus to entitlement deficit without any hiccups. However, both parties kept dipping their digits into that cookie jar for years: now all we’re left with is the most extravagant Ponzi scheme ever fathomed – with 30-something sessions of Congress making Bernie Madoff look like a pocket change pilferer.

Potential libertarian implications may stem from presidential sloth

When I previously wrote about the Obama Administration’s announcement that the Department of Justice would be taking a pass on litigating on behalf of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), I stated then I would not engage in analysis of the legislation itself as I recognized how easy of a divisive trap it was.

I stand by that observation still.

What has been slowly percolating in the back of my mind since then is a perspective on the implications President Barack Obama has created in terms of unintended consequences. This time, instead of pushing open the door to socialism wider he and his fellow party members – I believe – may have inadvertently bumped (or, perhaps, “nudged”) open another door that can lead America on a more libertarian path.

Making sense in this essay requires tying the new White House attitude on DOMA with its legal proceedings against the State of Arizona over SB1070.

With Arizona’s attempt to enact legislation authorizing state and local authorities to enforce immigration laws found in the U.S. Revised Code, the legislature and Gov. Jan Brewer were seeking to shoulder a burden that ought to have belonged to the federal government.

In response, the Obama Administration swiftly invoked the Supremacy Clause of Article VI of the United States Constitution and sued to block Arizona’s new law in federal court.

So, here, we have an instance where our federal executive branch openly flaunts its choice to not exercise authority granted to it by legislation. Not only that, it pursued litigation to block one of the states from doing so as well.

Since that whole brouhaha played-itself-out in front of the media, I took the opportunity to pick the brain of a gentleman named Kevin Hawley, who approached me last year and identified himself has having taught constitutional law, and then offered to answer my questions concerning such subject matter.

My inquiry following the SB1070 deliberation centered on the notion of, “What if the states counter-sued the federal government?”

The idea is rooted in the premise that the Constitution serves as a legally binding contract between the federal government in Washington, D.C., and the governments of the Several States. Therefore if the federal government jeopardizes the general welfare of any of the states and their citizens by deliberately failing to act on a federal statute, it stands to reason that would constitute a breach contract.

Demonstrating greater wisdom than I, Mr. Hawley swiftly shot the notion down. He explained that to maintain the balance created by the Separation of Powers the Judiciary retains the power to tell the Executive Branch it must cease and desist with an activity but it cannot compel (or dictate) it to engage in an activity.

Then, in February, the present administration became more brazen in its insistence that it enjoys the prerogative to pick-and-choose when it is going to enforce or uphold certain laws: the aforementioned DOMA.

Now enters the libertarian potential for (pro-)constitutional hijinx.

Since this administration has invoked the Constitution regarding federal supremacy to suppress a state law (SB1070) but then turned around and invoked it on a federal statute they claim falls outside its purview (DOMA), then what are the limits, really, to be found here?

Many libertarians have argued the pair of measures cited above are constitutionally questionable. However, a far greater percentage stands in agreement that there is much, much more emanating from D.C. that is unconstitutional as well.

Just ponder the possibilities if – by the Grace of God – we can elect a libertarian (preferably of the capital-L variety) to the White House next year.

After all, if the President of the United States is well within his or her authority to pick and choose when to enforce any given law, then wouldn’t the President also enjoy the same authority to arbitrarily shutter any Executive Branch office, agency, or even entire department?

If the current president may decide, “This law no longer suits my needs nor agrees with my sensibilities,” then what is there to stop a future president from padlocking the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Regulatory Affairs and even the Internal Revenue Service and telling thousands of career bureaucrats, “Thank you for your time and dedication, here are some lovely parting gifts, and now beat it!”

Bear in mind that, based on the Separation of Powers, when Congress writes and passes legislation which establishes new laws, appropriations, and agencies it merely authorizes the President to engage in these activities and expenditures…

…It cannot compel the President to do so.

Thanks to the American Establishment Left, the precedent to play this game already has been set.

Tea Party sentiments went unnoticed

In a recent column, Ron Lederman examines why it took until a Democrat was elected president before people began expressing outrage over how the U.S. federal government has been handling its affairs.

http://lederman.freedomblogging.com/2010/04/15/column-tea-partiers-ignored-same-issues-with-gop/2399/

I need to disagree with Mr. Lederman on a very important point: there was discontent and outrage about how government was operating during the George W. Bush years among conservatives. The movement began gaining steam in 2007 with Ron Paul and his supporters in Texas.

I will freely admit that I was one of those individuals who overlooked glaring political transgressions by the Bush administration for the first seven-and-a-half years of his time in office. It finally took $700 billion in bailouts to a very select portion of America's population to shake me free of my Partisan Derangement Syndrome.

Also in 2007, the Ohio Liberty Council was getting off the ground in Columbus.

Undoubtedly, it's easy to dismiss those who have recently joined the Tea Party movement as rank-and-file Republicans who are trying to catch up to a sentiment that ought to have reached this level of furor decades ago. But to lump all of us together with such a small portion of Tea Party attendees is as unfair as those who cherry-pick images of rally-goers holding inflammatory and irresponsible signs and then declaring us all racists.

Now, where I must express not only disagreement but also annoyance with Lederman's column is his tone about why Tea Partiers took so long to get angry and organized. The insinuation (as I read it) is that somehow the Tea Party is mainly a conglomerate of Constitutional attorneys, economists, modern philosophers, and nationally syndicated political analysts who are only now coming alive to decry government abuses and excesses.

Attend a Tea Party and what you will see is average people exercising their God-given and Constitutionally guaranteed right to peaceably assemble. I have attended multiple Tea Parties, other events, and meetings of the Allen County Ohio Patriots -- and I am as unremarkable a person as you can expect to see at any of these gatherings.

What critics of the Tea Party movement are overlooking (unintentionally or deliberately) is the fact we have generations of Americans who have had to spend the past year-and-some-odd months cutting through the intellectual fog that has been directed at their/our minds by reporters, pundits, political analysts, the politicians themselves, (let us not forget the comedians) and the media outlets which for years have been printing and broadcasting reams and hours of nonsense.

And, very simply, everyday Americans (conservative ones in particular) are not natural activists. Bit by bit we have needed to break out of long-held comfort zones in the process of not only calling ourselves Tea Partiers but also writing-up signs and gathering together in public rallies to voice our long-building displeasure.

Getting back to a previous point involving the start of the bailout trend, the vast majority of us who are part of the Tea Party movement (essentially, those of us who do not currently have a stake in the political processes in Washington, D.C., and Columbus) were boiling mad about T.A.R.P.

Then the proposal to include roughly $60 billion more for GM and Chrysler was the straw that broke the camel's back for many who feel the way we do.

But, not being adept at protest organizing, so many of us thought all we could do was what my father had done for decades -- including the first 28 years of my life -- and I adopted right in his footsteps: yell at our television sets and later gripe about it while at the bar with like-minded friends.

That is, it was all we knew until news trickled out of Cincinnati on March 15 of last year about a peculiar event that was being dubbed a "Tea Party." And then the long-overdue proliferation began.

For me, the intellectual awakening into Libertarianism was when I finally wrapped my mind around the altruism that when legislation or agenda items are wrong or flawed when the party with which we typically don't agree tries to push them on us, they are still just as wrong or flawed when the party with which we typically DO agree proposes them.

Yes, Barack Obama -- with the aid of fellow Congressional Democrats -- has accelerated federal overspending at a rate which is undeniably obscene. However, had Bush -- with the aid and blessing of nearly 300 Republican Congressional enablers of his own -- not ramped-up discretionary spending by about 50% during his turn in the driver's seat, Obama and the Democratic Party could not have ascended to such heights of popularity that led to the 2008 elections results -- thus emboldening them to act in the manner they have.

In summary on that point, Bush and his cronies running Washington the way they did paved the way for Obama and his gaggle of '60s radicals to step in and run Washington the way they have.

Now there's something for which people can accurately blame Bush.

Who else sees the confusion in these economic intervention policies?

In a year and a handful of days, we have seen an interesting disparity in the current administration’s approach to meddling with the U.S. economy.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (a.k.a. the stimulus bill) included in it programs that started some jobs but at the same time carried with them spending at such a rate that Washington shelled-out over $200,000 per “job created.” When you consider that the salary or wages for jobs in the U.S. average out to roughly $40,000 per year and only a handful of them will be permanent positions, that’s what most businesspeople would call a poor return on your investment.

President Barack Obama calls this successful.

Now, in his newest proposal he believes giving small business owners – as a reward for every new hire – a $5,000 tax credit will be the cure-all for our ailing economy.

In case the discrepancy between the two policies wasn’t obvious, can you imagine what kind of a boost to the economy we would have enjoyed if the White House and Congress would have simply allotted a $200,000 tax break to every small/independent business owner in the first place last year? Now that would have “created or saved” several million jobs.

Had that been the original approach businesses in every part of America would have seen a massive influx of cash. And, it would have been accomplished without having to print additional currency at a pace that threatens to devalue the dollar in a manner reminiscent of Zimbabwe and the Weimar Republic.

With that plan, independent businesses that had been struggling to stay afloat would have been better able to stay on top of financial obligations. This would carry with it a series of positive consequences: helping businesses with healthy credit ratings maintain them as a result; the ability to make payments to creditors would in turn help the various banks and other lenders maintain more solid financial standing; that would have led to enabling more lending and credit extensions as confidence rises in the financial sector; and all this would spur greater flow of money which would have actually led to some amount of recovery from the recession (“some” would amount to much more than what we’ve seen so far).

And Obama’s supporters can’t understand why his critics insist he is out of touch.

The health care plot thickens!

With all the writing I’ve been doing in the months since I made the decision to run for elected office, I have no doubt some readers may look through my body of work so far and wonder where are the epic novels about the health care reform agenda in Washington.

To be perfectly honest, it’s been a process of amassing as much information and perspective as possible on the current push to enact this new incarnation of nationalized medical coverage. I have a stack of newspaper pages and clippings waiting for me to revisit and extract from them any useful and relevant knowledge to be gained from them. I’m not an expert in this area – it ain’t easy!

The biggest hurdle in analyzing the mess that is America’s health care debate is the collection of 1,000-, 2,000-, and 2,500-page legislative behemoths our Democrat-controlled Congress has dropped on us all like someone who finally defecates after suffering from five days of constipation.

The original bill that was under consideration by Democrats in the House of Representatives, HR 3200, was difficult enough to read at more than 1,000 pages. The legal verbiage contained on page after mind-numbing page coupled with the bill’s constant references to the Social Security Act and the Medicare Act (“this paragraph supercedes/replaces paragraphs 3 through 5 of Article 4, Subsection C, blah blah blah blah blah!!”) made it utterly incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t enjoy 24-hour access to the Library of Congress.

Disseminating the contents of HR 3200 meant carefully reading the legislation that created the Social Security Administration as well as Medicare in order to understand what exactly was being changed there – on top of trying to evaluate the provisions of the bill that were designed to enact new regulations and appropriations which served to fulfill the original spirit of that particular piece of proposed legislation.

I am a reasonably intelligent, college educated individual. For God’s sake I was an English major specializing in the technical writing field. Yet despite my best effort, I could not make heads-or-tails of that thing!

HR 3200 – which eventually was shelved in favor of a bigger and better bill – was half as thick as the bill passed by the House and only 40% as enormous as the Senate version voted-on Christmas Eve morning. Now imagine trying dig through and comprehend both of those bills – more than 4,500 pages of legislative gibberish that would make Chapter 12 of a typical organic chemistry text book found on Ohio State’s campus more fun to read – while Democrats in the House and Senate negotiate a final bill in Conference.

As I have attempted to wrangle the health care issue since it entered the political forefront of America last year, I have seen my share of comedy (and I’m not simply referring to Rep. Alan Grayson’s [D-FL] foolhardy comments on the floor of the House). In one discussion thread on Facebook I was amused by one person’s assertion, “I wonder how many people who oppose the health care bill have actually read it!”

In light of how all three proposed bills have been composed (including HR 3200), I would love to see a show of hands as to how many people who support them out in the general public have actually read them.

Furthermore, complicity with members of Congress writing proposed legislation in this manner is the most overlooked way in which President Barack Obama’s administration has failed to live up to his promise of transparency. They employed this tactic with the Stimulus, the House’s Cap and Trade Tax bill, and now with health care.

To me, the most reprehensible part of the Democratic Party’s efforts over the last year has been their unwavering insistence that health care reform can only be accomplished with their all-or-nothing strategy: “either everyone adopt our massive plan or none of it gets done; meanwhile we reserve the right to place the blame on and vilify all who oppose us as each and every tragic story of any kind makes the news.”

What is truly nauseating about this whole production – since the debates began last summer in the Senate and House of Representatives – is in the time that has been spent trying to ram 2,000-2,500 pages of legislation down our throats, Congress easily could have written several smaller bills that would have dealt with the major components of the health care issue about which Democrats claimed they are most passionate.

We’ve been inundated with commentary about ending the practice of insurance companies denying coverage due to preexisting conditions. There has been true bipartisan support for this. I wholeheartedly endorse this idea. And by my estimation Congress could easily have produced a bill of about 50 pages that would have more than satisfied this order of business.

The discussions in Congress over health care began in June, right around the time school was letting out. For the most part, such a bill ought to have required roughly two weeks to be authored. Another week of dialogue in committee also would have been reasonable to hammer out details on such a bill, assuming expedience was a major concern. After that, several days of open debate on the floors of both the House and Senate about the bill would follow.

By the August recess, an effective law prohibiting preexisting condition denials could have been on the books. We could have had that in America if a little common sense had been applied.

But now we don’t.

And this same process could have been applied to several of the major sub-issues within the whole health care issue debate. By now, we could have seen as many as four key areas of the so-called health care crisis resolved.

But because of all-or-nothing, now we don’t.

Now, because of the Democratic Party’s gross miscalculation on how the general public across America would respond to their tactics, they have lost a Senate seat in a state that had elected one of their own exclusively for almost 40 years. The day after the special election in Massachusetts, Democratic leaders have been tripping all over themselves to get in front of microphones and cameras for an opportunity to discuss how their party needs to alter their policy strategy.

I believe the proper term to sum it all up is, “Oops.”

What Democrats should be discussing publicly – but are not – is their refusal to weigh Republican proposals during all the health care discussions played a large role in angering the American electorate.

Proposals such as tort reform, tax breaks for physicians who work in community clinics, and reforming minimum coverage laws that state governments have enacted which prevent insurers from offering policies that ought to be available in any state where customers (or prospective customers) would want them were all ignored by the majority party.

Additionally, these three examples above would not need to be packaged together in one massive, all-encompassing bill either.

If either Democrats or Republicans are as unfailingly confident in each item of health care reform for which they have argued so vehemently, then both parties ought to have no problem debating in favor of each one individually – presented in its own independent bill.

But instead of this more open and effective approach to resolving some very real problems with health care coverage in America, Democrats preferred to sidestep all questions as to why we needed such mammoth pieces of legislation. Instead of getting into the nuts-and-bolts of the House and Senate bills and defending each component within them, Democrats chose to fall back on the same appeal to emotion arguments with which they started the entire discussion and fell back on accusing opponents of hating the poor and underprivileged. When asked to defend the constitutionality of their legislative efforts, Democrats opted to arrogantly mock anyone who posed such a question to them.

So: Representative Pelosi, Senator Reid, how has that strategy worked-out for you guys so far? Perhaps we should get the answer to that one from Senator Scott Brown.

Now, I have realized where I’ve made my mistake when it comes to blogging about Obama’s health care agenda. Much like this administration and their congressional enablers, I too adopted an all-or-nothing approach to my commentary on the subject. Perhaps I can set an example, in my own small way, for the Establishment Left and tackle the behemoth sensibly: one critical element at a time.

Transformational Speech serve as punch line for Obama's, Napolitano's first year

As I begin (finally) to do my look-back at 2009 I cannot help but focus first on the Obama Administration’s insistence upon trying to introduce new, misdirectional euphemisms into our vernacular. My need to go in this direction is inspired by our President’s speech on Thursday (January 7) regarding the foiled terrorist plot Christmas Day on Flight 253.

As President Barack Obama begrudgingly orates about the United States being at war with al Qaeda, I am reminded of his efforts shortly after his inauguration to refer to the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns in the Global War on Terror as “overseas contingency operations.”

And so the next domino of memory falls as that phrase by the President reminds me of then-newly-appointed Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and her attempt to nudge us toward using the expression “man-caused disasters” instead of allegedly more inflammatory terms such as “terrorism” and “act of terror.”

It was a rough start to Napolitano’s new career path in politics. In March she became the poster child for irresponsibly sweeping items under the proverbial rug when she was called to the carpet over the now-infamous report by the Missouri Information Analysis Center. This was the government-produced piece that weighed-in on the growing threat of home-grown terrorists and extrapolated on the notion that as people become more disgruntled in these economic times they are more likely to engage in radical anti-government activity. Among the talking points, the report stated these people are easily identifiable by their affinity toward clothing or any other paraphernalia that has a camouflage color scheme and displays of bumper stickers with right-wing slogans. Additionally it suggested veterans returning from the war are more susceptible to embracing violent rhetoric.

2009 ended for Napolitano much like it started. She has been ridiculed and derided for her recent comments that “the system worked” when asked how Umar Faruk Abdulmutallab was able to board Flight 253 in the first place.

The negative publicity she has faced in all these instances could have been avoided by exercising just a little responsibility.

I get that the Obama Administration has felt a sense of mandate bolstering them – between the President’s election and the sweeping majorities his party claimed in both houses of Congress – and it is not difficult to see how this situation would lead anyone in such a position of authority to believe they could roll out their agenda unquestioned. Obama was voted into office based in large part on his promise of change in how business would be handled in Washington.

What people in America were hoping to see first were a change in how money would be spent (or even not spent), a rapid departure from the policies of George W. Bush, and greater transparency in how government activity will be handled. What people saw before anything else was a bait-and-switch game of terminology: essentially an adolescent effort to coerce the public into adopting new speech patterns using a mindset of, “see, we popular people are talking like this therefore you should, too.”

This, of course, was accompanied by the trillion-dollar crap sandwich better known as the Stimulus Bill – but I digress as usual.

To offer a real-world example of why, a year later, I still cannot get over the Obama Administration’s terminology bait-and-switch, a previous workplace of mine implemented something just like this several years ago. Management’s title for it was “Transformational Speech.” (hmmm, “transformational…” seems to me I’ve heard this term used to describe Obama before – apologies, another digression on my part)

At my previous job, we were instructed to never use the phrase, “I don’t know,” in response to a member’s question if we didn’t genuinely know the answer. We were trained our reply had to be, “That’s an excellent question! Let me go find someone who can answer that more effectively.”

Also, the front desk was renamed “The Connection Desk” as this was the primary area where our facility “made the connection with our members” – we were expected to purge the phrase “customer service” from our lexicon.

I have nothing sarcastic to add here that you the reader haven’t been able to formulate on your own.

In case you were wondering, the list of transformational euphemisms went on and on.

The problem here was not much really had changed in the way we operated beyond the subliminal effort to make our members feel good about doing business with us. The whole phraseology ploy by the White House employs the same premise. Unfortunately, untold millions of taxpayer dollars were wasted doing the research on such dribble by this administration.

Related side note:
One subject at which I have hammered before and will belabor for the remainder of this presidential administration is the aforementioned MIAC report on potential domestic terror threats. As I stated earlier, some responsibility would have accomplished a great deal for not only Obama’s public image but his cabinet secretaries’ as well.

The MIAC story created the most visible early chink in the administration’s transparency armor. America’s secretary of Homeland Security took the single-worst course of action imaginable: Napolitano slid that report toward the bottom of a pile of paperwork on her desk as quickly as it had come to her attention.

All the White House needed to do was quickly go to the public with it once they were aware of its contents. The comedic part of this whole story is the truth was on their side: this report was initiated during the Bush Administration.

Napolitano could very easily have held a press conference with the report in hand, looked everyone in attendance in the eye and told them the report was initially published before Obama was sworn-in, and then declared the current administration did not subscribe to the conclusions reached by the MIAC.

This simple yet direct course of action would have shown a bright positive light on the new administration. It may even to some extent have stemmed the rising tide of the Tea Party movement in America, which was just beginning to gain momentum at this time. After all, President Obama was elected on a wave of anti-Bush and anti-Republican sentiment. Such an act of undeniable transparency combined with pinning this document onto his predecessor would have been a PR boon for a President whose approval numbers already were slipping not even two months into his term. And since the MIAC report focused almost exclusively on so-called right-wing extremists, outing this document on their own accord would have demonstrated the kind of bipartisanship Obama insisted he sought during his campaign.

Instead, the “keep quiet and maybe no one will notice it” approach only served to fuel suspicion surrounding Obama’s agenda. This action combined with the endless rhetoric attempting to paint Tea Partiers as “angry mobs,” racists, and a general bastion for potential violence, as well as the President’s decision in September to continue several “key provisions” of the Patriot Act, the so-called Net Neutrality Act, and the appointment of Mark Lloyd as FCC diversity officer (Lloyd having gone on record recently as saying the Fairness Doctrine does not go far enough) all come together to begin painting an alarming picture of how the left intends to deal with political dissent.