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Opinions/Editorials Title: Big Brother Reads Minority Report (If you read only one article today, this is it) While our friends on the left celebrate the fact that their president showed more life than the dead parrot in the Monty Python sketch, and convince themselves they won, someone needs to tell them any time – any time – they let Obama talk in public without a teleprompter, he lets ideology leak out. And that their ideology is scary to those of us in the real world. This is much worse, of course, when the press cooperate to enable him. I wonder when they will realize this is counterproductive. Martha Raddatz would have done the vice president a much greater service if, instead of covering for him, preventing Ryan from finishing his answers, and generally acting like his paid media agent, she’d told Biden, “Sir, are you feeling quite well?” Or “I’m sure you didn’t mean to laugh out of turn.” Or just prevented him from interrupting Ryan once a minute. And the inappropriately named Candy Crowley would have done the president a much greater service if she’d not forcibly inserted herself into the debate, generally giving the impression our weak-kneed commander in chief needs to hide behind a woman’s skirt. All the same, at least one of her insertions might have saved his bacon. By lying while backing him up, she made that the story of the evening and called attention away from Obama’s outright lies and bizarre assertions, which — in other circumstances — would have been the center of the debate post-mortem. I want to bring up at least two of those because they deserve not to be forgotten. One of them because it’s such an astonishingly brazen lie that you’d think even a politician would be afraid to say it; the second because it is, in and of itself, a terrifying pronouncement, which leads me to believe the left reads dystopian science fiction and thinks it’s a society owner’s manual. The first one is Obama’s implication that the reason gas is so expensive at the pump is that the economy is doing well, or at least recovering. “Well, think about what the governor — think about what the governor just said. He said when I took office, the price of gasoline was $1.80, $1.86. Why is that? Because the economy was on the verge of collapse, because we were about to go through the worst recession since the Great Depression, as a consequence of some of the same policies that Governor Romney’s now promoting.” To begin with, this is a crazy moment of “who are you going to believe? Us or your lying eyes?” Like the repeated Summers of Recovery which even the Wall Street Journal was touting at one point, this only makes the citizenry locked in the worst “recovery” in the history of the U.S. feel like not only does the Obama administration not care we’re suffering, but they think we’re stupid. Second, I guess all of us must have forgotten the late eighties, because, gee golly, I swear gas was really cheap and the economy was going like gangbusters. The worst part of this? I think Obama truly believes the economy is recovering, just like his wife believes it is booming. They are both the product of exquisite indoctrination. They don’t understand how the policies they’ve been TOLD would work can NOT be working. So, they must be working – they must! They also don’t seem to understand gas is used for more than pleasure jaunts. Possibly because it’s not used for anything else in their singularly sheltered lives. Which means they don’t understand the chilling effect of the cost of gas on the production and transport of … everything. They wanted gas prices to “skyrocket” to discourage consumption, but they didn’t see (probably still don’t) that this meant skyrocketing food costs and … everything costs. But because they believe it doesn’t mean we should let them get away with it. Does someone who knows economics better than I and has more time care to compare gas prices to the periods of economic boom and bust? The one thing I’m sure of is that the man making way too many executive decisions for our economy has the same understanding of economics as my cat. At that, my cat might be better. He understands he can’t eat food that’s not in his dish. The second of the president’s pronouncements that needs a lot more attention (and in many, many ways) is this: “And so what can we do to intervene, to make sure that young people have opportunity; that our schools are working; that if there’s violence on the streets, that working with faith groups and law enforcement, we can catch it before it gets out of control. “And so what I want is a — is a comprehensive strategy. Part of it is seeing if we can get automatic weapons that kill folks in amazing numbers out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. But part of it is also going deeper and seeing if we can get into these communities and making sure we catch violent impulses before they occur.” There are so many layers of wrong there that it’s going to take a while to unpack. The first one is that, despite the president’s later assertion that he doesn’t think the government is the solution to everything, he does in fact believe the government is the solution for everything. He’s not trusting the police and faith groups; he wants “we”–i.e., the government bureaucrats–to get involved and “catch it before it gets out of control.” Kindly keep in mind the only power–the only power–the government has is the power of coercion. Ultimately, people do what the government tells them because otherwise the government puts them in jail (or fines them. Or makes their lives living h*ll). Now consider that sentence again “We’re going to coerce faith organizations to tell us things possibly told them in confidence and we’re going to coerce local law enforcement into working with us so we can stop violence ‘on the streets.’” Um… mkay. Because those groups aren’t trying to stop violence? Or because everything goes better with government? Also note the almost misty-eyed belief that when people turn to crime it’s because they “lack other opportunities.” This deterministic view of individuals as cogs in society is pure Marx. It is also stupid. A lot of our criminals are well-educated and relatively well-to-do. Think of the killer in the cinema in Aurora, Colorado. He might have failed a graduate exam (but that can happen to anyone, and it was not lack of education), but he was exceedingly well-educated and well-to-do. So was the professor who shot faculty colleagues. The idea that poverty = crime is an insult to all the poor, law-abiding people out there. It is also, on the face of it, laughable. And yet our president is not ashamed to say this in front of millions of people. He’s either completely out of touch with reality and wrapped in an impenetrable cocoon of indoctrination, or he thinks we’re stupid. Take your pick. Neither of the hypotheses to explain his statement is good or reflects well on him. But wait, it gets worse. His comprehensive strategy is “seeing if we can get automatic weapons that kill folks in amazing numbers out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill.” First note that automatic weapons are already illegal. Second, note that he seems to think automatic weapons kill folks. I know, I know, it sounds silly to say that guns don’t kill people. People kill people. It is nonetheless true. If you could make every gun disappear tomorrow, it wouldn’t usher in a society of perfect peace, just a society were the stronger could murder the weak without fear. There’s a reason the Colt was called the equalizer. There’s also a reason murder rates go up in every place (like Chicago!) where gun laws make it unlawful for law-abiding citizens to own guns. Which brings us to the second piece of absolute idiocy in that statement. He wants to see if he can keep the weapons out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. Mr. President, you do realize that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results, right? Gee, I hope you don’t own a gun, Mr. President, because I’d like to point out we’ve been TRYING to keep weapons out of the hands of criminals with restrictive laws for about a century and we KNOW we can’t. It appears–wait for this, I know it will shock you–that criminals don’t obey the law. Who would have thought it? As for the mentally ill–speaking seriously–I have friends who would be considered mentally ill, or who are on record as being so because of one prolonged and atypical bout of depression. This type of thing often ensures people live in substandard housing in high-crime neighborhoods. Are my friends a risk to society? Oh, h*ll no. But if you disarm them, you leave them at the mercy of those who are. Not that you care, Mr. President, because in the perfect society in your head, human beings are the Homo Sovieticus that never materialized in Soviet Russia: cogs of the state with no volition and no ability to disobey the law and regulations. Fortunately, the rest of us live in the real world. Which brings us to the last part of the statement. “But part of it is also going deeper and seeing if we can get into these communities and making sure we catch violent impulses before they occur.” Keep in mind this is spoken by the leader of what was once quaintly called the free world. He wants to go “deeper” in the “communities” and catch “violent impulses” BEFORE they occur. Big Brother is watching you and he’s read Minority Report. I can’t even begin to guess how he thinks this could be accomplished, barring mind-readers, and I hope he’s not talking about mind-readers. I grew up in a “traditional community” where we had gossip coming out of our ears. It was not fun or pleasant. They could take the smallest incidents and embroider them into total fable. For instance, because I worked in Germany for a summer and attended the Italian institute, when I got married, a year later, everyone “knew” my husband was Italian (on account of having dark hair) and I’d met him in Germany. It wasn’t a noxious story, but it was annoying because everyone “knew” this. Now I’m envisioning the same with these people empowered by the government and able to recommend me for forcible psychiatric care on the basis of that sort of wildly inventive nonsense. I can tell you the society that would result. Double thinking. Keeping any real trouble to yourself and always, always watching your slightest expression and word where people could see you. This point needs to be hammered over and over again. I get the feeling that Obama thinks both 1984 and Minority Report would be fine and dandy with “the right people in charge.” It is time we tell him we don’t want the federal government in our communities, in our homes, in our beds, or in our heads. We just want to be left alone to be Americans.
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