Many have been challenging the president to own up to his Socialism for sometime now – since well before he locked up the nomination. Yet, despite countless musings and paraphrasing of Marxist ideas coming from the president (as well as the first lady), President Obama and his surrogates have consistently brushed these accusations aside as if they were beneath addressing.
Last fall, when then-senator Biden was asked, point blank, by a reporter in Florida whether Obama was a Marxist (after comparing a quote by Marx with Obama’s most recent paraphrasing of the quote), Biden became indignant: “you’re kidding, right?”
When the son Saul Alinsky, one of the most prominent Marxist intellectuals of the 20th century, wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe the day after Obama’s convention speech, praising Obama as having learned well the skills of community organizing articulated by his father, no one dared ask what Obama felt about such praise.
(Never mind endorsements from Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.)
Since taking office, President Obama has suggested nationalized health care, to be funded in the ballpark of $700 billion, pushed a trillion dollar “stimulus” package through the Congress – More than the US House of Representative’s discretionary spending for the entire year 2008; costlier than any federal bill in U.S. history – he has promised raising taxes on Americans making more than $250,000 per year by a trillion dollars, and his Treasury Department has sent a half trillion to bailout defaulting mortgagees.
At the very least, this is all amounts to a textbook example of madness. Further still, how about socialism?
This week, the president again asserted his administration’s position that all such questions are silly and not worthy of an official answer. How grateful we should all be that he has condescended to answer.
Responding to a reporter for the New York Times, who dared to use the S-word, Obama said, “It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question.”
He went on: “I did think it might be useful to point out that it wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks. It wasn’t on my watch. And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement – the prescription drug plan – without a source of funding. And so I think it’s important just to note when you start hearing folks throw these words around that we’ve actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles and that some of the same folks who are throwing the word ‘socialist’ around can’t say the same.”
So, from what I’m hearing, he is a Socialist. Oh, but with one caveat: “Bush started it!”
As an aside, I’ve been observing this trend among Bush-hating-Obama-worshippers (which certainly does not comprise all Liberals, Democrats, or even Obama voters) to deflect from Obama’s Socialism by referring to Bush’s. The conversation goes something like:
Speaker 1: “You know, that Obama’s quite the Socialist with his nationalizing banks, intervening in private industry, promising to raise astronomically higher taxes, and suggestions about redistributing wealth.”
Bush-hating-Obama-worshippers: “Yeah!? Well, what about Bush? He started the bailouts and spent hundreds of billions in Iraq and Afghanistan!”
Of course, the response is a fallacy. Analogously, if I were to say:
“My, but, excessive consumption of chocolate cake is bad for one’s diet!”
A proper rebuttal would not be:
“Yeah!? Well, what about red meat?”
By adopting the same level of indignation and outrage against wasteful government spending and the nationalizing of private industry, the BHOW’s only underscore the point made by the Obama critic: Socialism is not sound economic policy, will not get us out of the recession, and is possibly quite dangerous with regard to our liberties.
Accepting as true that President Bush spent far too much (wrote checks the fed can’t cash, so to speak) on government bailouts, and a prescription drug bill (which many Conservatives opposed, along with countless other new spending projects), and that the wars started in the Middle East were immoral wastes of tax money, none of this amounts to a proper rebuttal to the argument that Barak Obama is in fact a Socialist.
At a minimum, it merely serves to suggest that, perhaps, George W Bush (or his economic advisers) was a (were) Socialist as well.
That’s a fair point; but it’s not the point being raised – at least not explicitly. For if one thought Bush’s socialism reflected poor judgment, one would have to think Obama’s socialism does the same. Moreover, Obama’s stimulus package, mortgage bailout, and universal health care proposal amounts to more money spent by the federal government than in all of the last eight years combined. A trillion dollars in new taxes will be the greatest transfer and redistribution of wealth in human history.
I’m not particularly surprised that intellectually insecure BHOWs would come up with such a childish fallacy. Although, I am a little concerned that our Harvard educated president has adopted it himself.