Sarah Palin's response to Obama's SOTU speech is on Facebook, and she damn well knocks it out of the ballpark. "Winning The Future", the title of the speech, is more accurately assessed by its acronym-WTF!-than by the speech's content, according to Palin.
From that point on, she proceeds to rip the President to shreds. Following is a few of her points. For example, with the following she nails the Democratic Party philosophy, from at least the days of Roosevelt, down as concisely as anyone ever has.
He couched his proposals to grow government and increase spending in the language of “national greatness.” This seems to be the Obama administration’s version of American exceptionalism – an “exceptionally big government,” in which a centralized government declares that we shall be great and innovative and competitive, not by individual initiative, but by government decree.
In other words, as far as Obama's concerned-nothing's changed, nor is there any reason to change any of his previous policies, nor will the Democratic members of Congress change any of their policies. They will just allegedly be warmer and fuzzier about the way they present them and the manner in which they debate them. What choice do they have, really?
Palin further elucidates on some of Obama's spending proposals.
And the Obama administration has a lot of half-baked ideas on where to spend our hard-earned money in pursuit of “national greatness.” These “investments,” as the President calls them, include everything from solar shingles to high speed trains. As we struggle to service our unsustainable debt, the only thing these “investments” will get us is a bullet train to bankruptcy.
She might have also added that these investments probably won't even break even, let alone pay any real dividends. They might provide a service for a small sector of society, and even in the best case scenario spur some job creation, but for ever job they create, they'll probably cost two. Or three. And like I said, they won't pay off in the long run, particularly if Obama insists on socking it to the oil and coal industries on which we now depend, something Palin also pointed out-
When it comes to energy issues, we heard more vague promises last night as the President’s rhetoric suggested an all-of-the-above solution to meeting our country’s energy needs. But again, his actions point in a different direction. He offers a vision of a future powered by what he refers to as “clean energy,” but how we will get there from here remains a mystery. In the meantime, he continues to stymie the responsible development of our own abundant conventional energy resources – the stuff we actually use right now to fuel our economy. His continued hostility towards domestic drilling means hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs will not be created and millions of Americans will end up paying more at the pump. It also means we’ll continue to transfer hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars to foreign regimes that don’t have America’s interests at heart.
And she also touched on education.
Take education for example. It’s easy to declare the need for better education, but will throwing even more money at the issue really help? As the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner notes, “the federal government has increased education spending by 188 percent in real terms since 1970 without seeing any substantial improvement in test scores.” If you want “innovation” and “competition,” then support school choice initiatives and less federal control over our state and local districts.
She was actually being more kind than she needed to be. Not seeing any "substantial improvement" is the least of it. The federal governments initiatives since 1970 has ruined the American education system in far too many states and neighborhood schools, where those students who do get a good education do so from their own initiative and due to parental involvement. What official help they get is derived from oversight from various state and local governments and school boards. Aside from federal dollars, which comes with myriads of strings, the federal government is a hindrance, not a help to public education.
But here might be the most important point of all-
On the crucial issue of entitlement reform, the President offered nothing. This is shocking, because as he himself explained back in April 2009, “if we want to get serious about fiscal discipline…we will have to get serious about entitlement reform.” Even though the Medicare Trust Fund will run out of funds a mere six years from now, and the Social Security Trust Fund is filled mainly with IOUs, the President opted to kick the can down the road yet again. And once again, he was disingenuous when he suggested that meaningful reform would automatically expose people’s Social Security savings to a possible stock market crash. As Rep. Paul Ryan showed in his proposed Roadmap, and others have explained, it’s possible to come up with meaningful reform proposals that tackle projected shortfalls and offer workers more options to invest our own savings while still guaranteeing invested funds so they won’t fall victim to sudden swings in the stock market.
What she didn't go into is the real reason Obama and the Democrats are dead set against entitlement reform, why they are so aghast at the idea of "privatizing" Social Security. Simply put, by keeping Social Security as is, it insures continued dependency, but that's not even the major reason. The real reason is, once those funds are transferred to private accounts, the government from that point on loses control of them. Never mind that there are no funds worth controlling at this stage, they are insistent that Social Security can be made solvent. They are determined to make it so, because it provides a steady stream of funds to borrow from to finance other projects. That's precisely why they don't want to reform the system.
They could in reality care less if the elderly lost their savings in the stock market. In fact, that would be the one bonus to the Democrats way of thinking. If that happened, they could come up with a government program to "save" them and make them more dependent on them than ever. And I have no doubt that if such a privatization program ever is implemented, Democrats will work tirelessly to insure that seniors are able to have free reign over how their money is invested, hoping for a resultant crash, and will do so on the grounds of protecting the rights of seniors to invest their money in the best way they see fit.
Let's face it, whether we are talking about foreign policy, energy policy, education, job creation, or entitlements, the Democratic Party agenda can be summed up as government power and control, and Palin sums it up succinctly.
Consider what his “big government greatness” really amounts to. It’s basically a corporatist agenda – it’s the collaboration between big government and the big businesses that have powerful friends in D.C. and can afford to hire big lobbyists. This collaboration works in a manner that distorts and corrupts true free market capitalism. This isn’t just old-fashioned big government liberalism; this is crony capitalism on steroids. In the interests of big business, we’re “investing” in technologies and industries that venture capitalists tell us are non-starters, but which will provide lucrative returns for some corporate interests who have major investments in these areas. In the interests of big government, we’re not reducing the size of our bloated government or cutting spending, we’re told the President will freeze it – at unsustainable, historic levels! In practice, this means that public sector employees (big government’s staunchest defenders) may not lose jobs, but millions of Americans in the private sector face lay offs because the ever-expanding government has squeezed out and crippled our economy under the weight of unsustainable debt.
That pretty much sums it up. I can't add anything at all to that, and that is precisely what made Sarah Palin, during her all too brief two year tenure, the greatest governor in Alaska history. Its also why she is so despised, not only by the Left, but by the corporatist, establishment Republicans that are really out for their own interests at the expense of all of us. They and the Left are not really ideological opposites so much as they are two sides of the same coin, forged from an alloy or corruption, special interest, and elitism.
And Obama is just more of the same, the same as always.
But mark my words, the most talked about part of Sarah Palin's Facebook response to the SOTU won't be any of her major points. It won't be her ideas, or her assessments of Obama and his big government agenda. No, the media jackals who support the Democrats, and promote the establishment Republicans as the voice of the GOP, will devote most of their response to Palin's use of the phrase WTF!
You can make book on it.
