Out of the Woods

Obama – advocate of violence.

The president is nothing if not upbeat in his public speeches. He would have made a really good football coach. He can get people fired up as he did before his election.

And he is all about winning. Again and again over the years he talked about America as the greatest country in the world. But that is surely foolishness. Different countries have different virtues. Why can’t we recognize that? It is a stupid chauvinist assumption that your country is better in every respect.

And he is all about competition. He thinks we should improve the education of our children so we could outcompete the Indians and Chinese. Education is not to make life better for our children. It is for us to be leaders -- in what? in glitzy gadgets for communication, in more GPS trinkets? Obama does not care; he only cares about winning. He is not embarrassed to talk about Sputnik when we decided to beef up education in the US not because we value education but because the Russians were ahead in space technology. And Obama is repeating that truly embarrassing admission: education has no intrinsic value. It is valuable only if it helps us win out over Indian or Chinese technology and industry.

What a pathetic view of education and of what really matters in human lives!

But it gets much worse than that. We need matters not only in commercial competition. As far as the president is concerned, winning is also important militarily. America -- according to Obama the greatest country in the world, bar none -- is bankrupting itself so it can bully everybody else militarily.

The government deficit is growing by leaps and bounds. Even Obama thinks we need to do something about that. But he is not willing to touch the tax cuts for the rich or, worse, the money we spend on the military. Nicholas Kristof has a chilling commentary on US military expenditures:

“• The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says that we spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China.

• The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?

• The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C.

• The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.

This is the one area where elections scarcely matter. President Obama, a Democrat who symbolized new directions, requested about 6 percent more for the military this year than at the peak of the Bush administration. “

Shall we cut the budgets that aid the elderly and the poor so that we can maintain troops in Germany, and South Korea, on Okinawa, and in many other places? To be sure, it may not be quite as easy to throw our weight around without all our far flung military bases and that, in the end, is the only thing that really matters to guys like Obama.

In the end what matters are macho bragging rights. Our technology is better..., our military is more powerful....

Our house is falling down around our ears, but our president is standing in the doorway yelling: “my penis is bigger than yours.” 

Poor Obama, poor America.