If Only
October 30, 2011
As reported by ABC News, apparently with a straight face:
At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.
(Hat tip to Mark Steyn.)
Posted by Chillingworth
Filed in Good Lines
Tagged: Barack Obama, big government, liberalism caricatures itself, liberty, news, politics, self-reliance
Tagged: Barack Obama, big government, liberalism caricatures itself, liberty, news, politics, self-reliance
Enjoyment and Contemplation 
October 31, 2011 at 8:20 AM
“And, given that sinking bazillions of dollars into green-jobs schemes to build eco-cars in Finland and a federal program to buy guns for Mexican drug cartels and all the other fascinating innovations of the Obama administration haven’t worked, who’s to say borrowing money from the Chinese Politburo and sticking it in your kid’s diaper isn’t the kind of outside-the-box thinking that won’t do the trick?”
Ummm. What?
October 31, 2011 at 10:01 AM
Yes, it’s a hilarious line, isn’t it? Except maybe you don’t know enough of the background to understand it, possibly because you keep dismissing my recommendation that you get a balanced diet including at least some conservative news media. Which parts specifically don’t you understand? Maybe I can catch you up some.
October 31, 2011 at 1:30 PM
Two things I don’t understand. (1) What Operation Fast and Furious has to do with the economy. (2) That incomprehensible double negative in the last clause.
October 31, 2011 at 2:23 PM
For item 2, sure, “Fast and Furious” doesn’t have as much impact on the economy as some things, but it does have something to do with it, in that it’s one of the things the federal government and bureaucracy are doing. It’s a huge bloated government with a lot of employees, and this is one of the things with which they occupy their time while being paid on our dime. It’s a remarkably bad thing for them to do with their time, and it’s distinctive to the Obama administration; so it makes sense to mention it.
For item 1, on my reading, you’re right, he should have said “will”, not “won’t”. You still understand what he’s saying and it’s still hilarious. Alternatively, my less-likely explanation is that he intentionally says “won’t” where you’d expect “will”, to express that he actually thinks it won’t.
October 31, 2011 at 2:37 PM
Leaving aside the economic impact of law enforcement operations (which is next to nothing), are you saying that the federal government should not be trying to dismantle the Mexican drug cartels?
October 31, 2011 at 3:27 PM
Actually, “Project Gunrunner” (which includes “Operation Fast and Furious”) got $10 million in “stimulus” funding. Even if it hadn’t, I think it’s symbolic of the larger problem of big government: huge, bloated bureaucracies, which cost a lot of money just to maintain in existence, but it’s not clear that that money is well spent, or even that the expenditure is doing more good than harm—even if we could afford it, which we can’t.
Anyway of course I’m not saying law enforcement shouldn’t try to go after cartels, but what “law enforcement” did in this case is let guns “walk”—i.e., a gun store calls the federal government and says, This buyer is suspicious, I think he may be buying for a drug cartel, and the federal government says, Go ahead and let him buy the guns anyway—at least 2,000 guns, 1,400 of which have never been recovered, and 200 of which have been used in crimes in Mexico. At least one has been used to kill an American border-patrol agent. For more information, see the Wikipedia article on Operation Fast and Furious, and/or the longer linked article on Project Gunrunner. These articles cite their sources, most of which are major news organizations, but if you doubt any particular claim they make, let me know and I’ll even go out and look for news-media corroboration for you.
October 31, 2011 at 4:46 PM
There is no doubt that the execution of F & F was flawed; the agents lost track of the purchased weapons. The design of the operation, however, was not. Allowing low level straw purchasers to lead agents to middle to high level cartel operatives is an effective ruse if conducted properly. So the problem had nothing to do with bloated government and ineffective policies (10 million is next to nothing compared to our entire defense/law enforcement budget); it was the result of agent negligence.
October 31, 2011 at 5:06 PM
Right, and I’m sure it’s only low-level agents who were negligent.
As to your “next to nothing” argument, it proves too much; you could take any millionth of the federal budget and say, This part is only a millionth of the total, don’t worry about it, nothing to see here. But if you add them all up, we’re spending more than a trillion dollars we don’t have every year. As someone has said, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money!
October 31, 2011 at 7:56 PM
I don’t understand your position on national defense. You seem to want robust national defense (you support or have supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), but you don’t want to allocate 10 million to fighting one of the biggest threats to our security? If the agents had not lost sight of those weapons and had tracked down high-ranking cartel operatives, would you support Operation Fast and Furious then? Of course you would.