Jonah Goldberg: Obama is a kung fu master at defeating straw men

Consider this your must read of the day:

Sounding as if he were still running against George W. Bush, Obama laid the blame for our problems on the “most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history.” Of course, he leaves out that those tax cuts also went to the middle class.

He also forgets his own favorite metric of jobs “created or saved.” It’s a bogus, unprovable gimmick, used to defend his failed stimulus, but who is he to say Bush’s tax cuts didn’t save millions of jobs after 9/11?

Obama describes the Bush years as a libertarian dystopia of “‘you’re on your own’ economics,” when we ignored vital spending on things like education and poverty programs. This is Obama’s favorite straw man, and he’s a kung fu master when it comes to defeating it.

He leaves out that Europe already has his preferred policies and is about to go under.

More significantly, Obama leaves out that under “compassionate conservatism,” Bush was the first president to spend more than 3 percent of GDP on anti-poverty programs. Under Bush, federal spending on education grew 58 percent faster than inflation. Obama forgets that Bush fought for the biggest expansion of entitlements since the Great Society (Medicare Part D). He airbrushes away Sarbanes-Oxley, a new cabinet agency, faith-based initiatives, etc.

“Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as 1 percent,” Obama barked. “That is the height of unfairness.” Except, when the Washington Post asked the White House for evidence to support the claim, an official confessed they “had no actual data to back up the president’s assertion.”

That’s okay. Who cares about the facts when you’re fighting to make America safe for cynicism again?

Read the whole thing.  Pass it on.

Obama is attempting, as he promised, to remake America and he’s been largely successful.

He must be stopped.  And it will be a fight to overcome his lies and the army of willing accomplices in the media and the ignorant on social media, leftist blogs and elsewhere who gullibly pass his lies along as truth.

Engage. 

To quote the leftists themselves… and this time be correct… it’s for the children.

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Posted by Rick Rice on December 10, 2011.
Filed under 2012 Presidential Race, Barack Obama.
I blog more regularly at my own place where plain thoughts are delivered roughly. My about page gives you more on who I am.

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