The other of my favorite Liberal memes from way back during the end of the Carter days is also raised in this clip, and that is, the job of being President is so big that no one man can do it anymore. I mean after all, if the messianic figure that currently inhabits the Oval Office has shown the complete inability to manage his duties so spectacularly, and we know him to be the smartest thing since the invention of Liquid Prell, than how could anyone do a decent job of it, like say Ronald Reagan, two George Bushes, and even Bill Clinton. (I threw Clinton in, not because I agreed with any of his politics, but merely that he was able to clear the extremely low bar set by Barack Obama.) The sparks start to fly in this video at 1:46, when the money quote comes into play. Ben Affleck really has no place on this panel, as he may be intelligent enough, his political leanings not withstanding, he really has not a single clue as to what he is talking about. Just another Hollywood dolt who believes that making a movie about political subjects gives him some sort of gravitas. Issa and Schweitzer however are political apparatchiks who really are equipped for this discussion. Affleck gets applause though, no matter how incredibly banal his rap, because he’s like such a cool star and everything.
Putting aside for the minute that our crack panel manages to miss completely the entire point, which as I have written before is not about the cover up, as bad as that may be, but the fact that ours was the, “last flag flying.” It is exactly the point that the entire situation was the only possible result of a foreign policy agenda that showed such a stunning level of narcissistic hubris as the one put into place by the Obama Administration. We projected American weakness around the globe. Not content with that however, Barack Obama decided to take his ques from the League of Arab Nations as to the question of which leader needed to be deposed. That answer was the cowed Moamar Qaddafi Duck, the man who had decided to stop being a thorn in our side once he saw us in action in Iraq. We then fought, as allies, with Al Queda, the same guys who flew planes into our buildings on 9/11, and toppled the existing regime. After that, lead from behind became the mantra of the day, which of course left a power vacuum. Guess who filled that. Those same Al Queda fighters who we aided in toppling Qaddafi Duck suddenly remembered that they hate us. Ironically, Mr. Schweitzer makes this entire point at 3:54 of the video, while intending to make the opposite point in support of our current President.
Putting all that aside, because believe me, Team Zero would much rather talk about the cover up than the actual reason for the cover up. The very next meme, as stated by Vice President, “Bozo,” Biden, was that those big meanie Republicans were so insistent on cutting spending that the money to properly protect our vital National Security Interests was just not available. If it weren’t so jaw droppingly disingenuous and maddening, it would have me laughing hysterically. If you are planning an event, here is The security you need. So Team Zero, what you wish me to believe is this. That our government, including your Administration, is so efficient with how it allocates the prodigious $3.6 Trillion at its disposal each and every year, that not one more penny could be found to insure that our endangered National Security Interests, endangered by you by the way, could be spared. That’s it right? That’s your story now?
Why is it that only the truly necessary things get cut when people talk about fiscal responsibility, and the nonsense moves on without consideration. Sometimes, I think we only elect the dumbest people on our planet as our political leaders. Or, maybe they just need a little help with setting priorities. I mean, while most of us in the real world live within our means, meaning having an actual budget, that apparently is not so for those people living in the Washington D.C. area. Apparently it is the only place on the planet where reality is not a necessary part of every day consideration. So, as a public service to our men and women who make up the federal behemoth, here is a list of 10 expenditures that could have been trimmed sufficiently to fund adequate security measures to prevent the death of four American Citizens, the theft of all of the compromising materials in our embassies, and the national embarrassment of having our flag go from the being the beacon of freedom around the world to being the very symbol of weakness and ineptitude.
1. Cowboy Poetry Festivals: I’m pretty sure we don’t really need those, and while we’re at it, I’m pretty sure that the entire endowment for the arts should be turned off when such vital services are too damned expensive for us to fund adequately. I don’t know how much of our precious tax dollars were spent on placing a crucifix in a mason jar filled with urine, and then parading it about the country in bizarre road trip of the offensive, but I am willing to bet that a vast majority of Americans would agree that our money would be better spent on preventing Al Queda from making off with our national security secrets from the embassy they’ve recently sacked. If I were forced to place a bet, I am sure Chris Stevens would feel the same way.
2. PBS: Big Bird and Elmo can go to hell. Even as this meme of Republicans being big meanies when it came to spending money, our annual $1.25 Trillion deficit not even being discussed, President Obama has taken to offering juvenile ridicule in defending Sesame Street. Elmo’s driving a white SUV is the quote that comes to mind. Here’s a thought, maybe the annual PBS expenditure should have gone instead into a top notch defense of our Embassy in Benghazi. With that kind of money, I am willing to bet that we could have actually afforded to hire real security personnel to guard our citizens rather than members of Al Queda who were really part of the invading force.
3. Solyndra and the Green Fairy: I hope you saw this one coming. Now that the green jobs subsidies have all, and I mean all gone bust, that entire boondoggle, just by the way like many of us predicted, turned out to be the single most wasteful expenditure of money in the history of man kind. What’s worse, our President, who refuses to learn from past boondoggles has promised more of the same for a possible second term. $100 Billion per year is not a negligible amount of money to simply flush down the Potomac River with out a single success to be pointed to. I am willing to bet that $100 Billion would have gone a long way towards defending American territory, which by the way is what our embassies are. Our embassies could have been garrisoned with an entire Battalion each, for $100 Billion per year, with a lot of cash left over.
4. The auto bailouts: There are 18 other manufacturers of cars in this nation besides Gm and Chrysler. Companies enter and emerge from structured bankruptcies every day in America, and usually emerge as stronger concerns when they do emerge. Not only was America not well served by the auto bail out, but GM and Chrysler were not well served either. $50 Billion dollars to make two weak companies even weaker companies so that you could force them to build and attempt to sell cars that nobody wanted to buy in order to satisfy your political ambitions was by itself poor policy. Probably that money would have been better served in the effort to provide security for our embassies over seas.
5. Obamacare: Billed as something that would actually save us money on our growing deficit troubles through the magic of accounting tricks, slight of hand, and outright fabrication, this particular baby gorilla has already grown into an entitlement which by itself amounts to about 40% of our considerable annual revenue raised by taxation. Let’s start with the easy stuff first. The 16,000 new IRS agents hired to implement the expense of this monster alone, could have been replaced by 80 machine gun wielding soldiers of fortune at each American diplomatic mission around the globe, which would represent 78 more security professionals than what we had at Benghazi. That amount of security by the way is what we get from just the auditors added to our payroll as a result of Obamacare. Just imagine what we could do with the whole nut.
6. Dodd Frank: This will be a similar argument as the one above, but with a twist. I’m going to throw in the entirety of the added cost of all of our government’s added onerous regulatory growth over the last four years. We have gone from being the most economically free nation on Earth to being 10th on that important list in only four years time. When ever anyone mentions deregulation, the political left begins their whaling and hand wringing, as if every single law on our books is endangered somehow and we have just advocated for anarchy. Surely there is a point between anarchy and having people who cut hair for a living being required to put in more class time than surgeons. Not only are these regulations destructive to our economy, choking off revenues to the government which could be used to pay for more things like embassy security, but they are expensive as heck to audit. We could easily add another 80 machine gun wielding soldiers of fortune to those embassies with the savings of Obama’s added regulation put into place by executive fiat alone. I am willing to bet that 160 embassy guards would have presented a much more formidable resistance than the two turncoats who we had.
7. Michelle Obama’s initiative to starve children in school: Just under the radar in all of this is Michelle Obama’s school lunch program which gives our high school students a lower calorie diet during the day. The cost of reducing the caloric intake our our school kids to the levels seen in third world nations is 25% more expensive to run than the already expensive program in place. Add to that, the cost of monitoring the kids who try to avoid hunger by bringing lunch from home, and we have us one expensive infliction of the nanny state. I am willing to bet that every hungry child around this great nation and their parents would rather see us protecting our embassies with that money. I feel that it would be safe to say that Chris Stevens, were he still alive today to voice his own opinion on the matter would say the same thing.
8. Michelle’s Vacations: O.K., I admit that this was a cheap shot, but it is well deserved. It is not just the lavish life style of Michelle that has us all scratching our heads, but the entire optics of a President who seems tone deaf to the daily events which require Presidential leadership. George W. Bush was savagely beaten for his retreats to Crawford Texas, times during which he was still actually working, for being lazy and out of touch. Barack Obama has managed more rounds of golf in three years than pro golfers. 400 so far, and that is only the very tippy top of the ice berg. Watching the reaction of George Bush spending 5 minutes with elementary aged school kids on the morning of the first 9/11, and comparing that to the reaction of Barack Obama jetting off for a party in Las Vegas on the second 9/11 is telling to say the least. Parties with the rich and famous may be one of the perks of power for despots and dictators, but it has never been an optic that Americans have enjoyed seeing in their Presidents. When Michelle jets off to celebrate her kids birthdays in Spain and takes a hundred or so guests, add to that the Secret Service contingency, housing and feeding, for a couple of weeks, and we have a hell of a lot of money that could have been used to keep all of those stolen secret documents lying on the floor in Benghazi secret. Multiply that kind of extravagance across a four year period of time, and it boggles the imagination.
9. The Stimulus Package: A huge pile of money, which by the way is now officially added to the base line budget, that is simply flushed down the Potomac each and every year. We have gotten nothing for our money, except of course for the usual payoffs to unions, lobbyists, bribes, and other examples of malfeasance. Each of us has seen shovels hit the ground to repair roads that did not need repairing, while the same decaying bridges used for Obama photo ops are still decaying and used for newer Obama photo ops four years later. Add the annual automatic increases to the base line used to calculate this budget, and we are well north of $1 Trillion per year. With that being added to the base line, it angers me to no end that nobody points this out when a Stimulus two is mentioned, when we in fact are already spending the money from Stimulus four. Probably, $1 Trillion per year, would go a long way towards providing embassy security.
10. Food Stamps: We have unnecessarily increased the number of American citizens dependent upon the government to a dangerous level. Almost half of Americans are receiving some sort of assistance from Uncle Sam. Mitt Romney’s remarks about the 47%, while not politically deft, were essentially correct in one respect, and incorrect in another. Having that many people not pulling the weight needed for their own existence is a dangerous place for any society to be at. We are at a tipping point in this county. If we make the wrong decision collectively speaking on November 6th, our next stop will be Greece. Where Mitt Romney got it wrong was with his assumption that every member of the 47% is happy with that being the case. Barack Obama is also miscalculating on this particular point, and it is my belief that he will learn this lesson 21 short days from now. Those additions of people being placed on the public dole by the way costs our nation in two ways. First the straight expense of distributions from public largess, and secondly in the contractions of revenues raised, by shrinking the tax base. As Milton Friedman so forcefully told us so many times, it is a nation’s productivity that is important, and not its aggregate demand. Paul Krugman, Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geitner have teamed up to give this President some of the worst advice imaginable, and have served to insure that we would not be able to protect our diplomatic staff the world over.
My list is by no means all inclusive, feel free to add your own. I look forward to reading the suggestions of others, as to where we might save a few bucks here and there, so that we won’t be forced to see our dead citizens being dragged around the streets as if they were toys.
Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.
