We Deserve What We Get if We Elect Obama

[barryr]

McCain is no better, but it's really amazing the lovefest for this Obama character with no experience, refusing to vote on so many bills in Congress, and his "spread the wealth" programs.

If we elect an admitted socialist president, we'll deserve what we get - Kevin O'Brien
Thursday, October 30, 2008 Kevin O'BrienPlain Dealer Columnist

Don't forward me any more he's-a-closet-Muslim e- mails.

Don't bother me about Barack Obama's birth certificate, either. With Election Day less than a week away, whether Obama meets the citizenship test to be president of the United States is about the mootest point imaginable. He's the Democratic nominee, and if he wins more electoral votes on Tuesday than John McCain, he'll be the president-elect.

We Americans literally don't have time for that nonsense.

At stake in this election is nothing less than the pivotal question of the individual American's relationship to his government - a question defined in what may be the only two moments of candor Obama has offered America during this campaign.

ABC's Charlie Gibson first lifted the veil back in April, during a primary-season debate among Democratic candidates. He asked why Obama would raise capital-gains taxes even if the result were decreased collections for the government.

Obama replied, "What I've said is that I would look at raising the capital-gains tax for purposes of fairness."

Then came Obama's chance meeting with Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher, who questioned Obama's tax plans and got this reply: "It's not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everyone who is behind you - that they have a chance for success, too. I think that when you spread the wealth around, it is good for everyone."

Obama's answers to those questions made it crystal-clear that he sees taxation as a tool not only to pay for government, but as a tool to reassign the wealth of individual Americans directly to other individual Americans as government sees fit. If he doesn't believe in trickle-down economics, fine. But having government decide precisely how full each American's glass should be - and then making the necessary adjustments - would be a whole new ballgame.

Columnist Mark Steyn, writing over the weekend for National Review Online (snipurl.com/4t9xl), argues that Obama's election "would front the fourth great wave of liberal annexation - the first being FDR's New Deal, the second LBJ's Great Society, and the third the incremental but remorseless cultural advance when Reagan conservatives began winning victories at the ballot box and liberals turned their attention to the other levers of the society, from grade school up. . . . All three liberal waves have transformed American expectations of the state. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it."

He's right. After 70-plus years of ascendant socialism, this country today would be recognizable to Thomas Jefferson only as the realization of his worst fears. That Obama wants to make a final and irreversible hard-left turn is apparent not only from his few unguarded utterances this year, but from much of what he said and wrote before his presidential campaign. Witness his 2001 interview with Chicago Public Radio (youtube.com/watch?v=iivL4c_3pck), in which he laments that the Supreme Court "never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth."

Now consider the likely possibility of an Obama presidency, a filibuster-proof Senate and two or three openings on the Supreme Court that he can fill with fellow redistributionists.

Forget e-mailed technicalities. Obama should lose this election because Americans wake from their trance, look over the precipice to which he has ushered them, and recoil.

Seventy years is a long time for a nation to wander from the principles and practices that brought it forth and made it great: limited government, individual liberty, individual initiative rewarded and the right of every citizen to assign the fruits of his own labors as he sees fit.

Obama has run a stealth campaign, because the left suspects that it hasn't succeeded in separating us entirely from those principles. An Obama victory would sever the connection, though. He has slipped twice, and told us so.

If Americans take the monumental risk Obama poses, they will deserve the government they get. More to the point, they will have proved undeserving of the government left to them by far greater, far wiser men.

O'Brien is The Plain Dealer's deputy editorial page director.

To reach Kevin O'Brien:

kobrien@plaind.com, 216-999-4146

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaind...l=2&thispage=1

[SJ Bronco]

Please, make me the last person to respond to this and let this thread die...

[ak1971]

dont talk about the Messiah like this..this guy is a POS

[Mr.Meanie]

Did anyone see his Maddow interview? His outlook for American infrastructure is really far-sighted. I like the logical and critical way he's thought about infrastructure to keep America competitive in the next 50 years.

Reagan was the last president I felt like had a a similar whole-picture long term view of the country.

I also like his approach with spending, calling out the hypocrisy of cutting taxes and running record deficit spending while calling yourself conservative.

If he actually comes through with what he's talking about, I agree we will deserve what we get for electing him.

[Denver Crush]

How does it feel to be on the opposite side of the ****heap? Ive been waiting for this since the cheney/pnac regime pulled their coup and started their reign of terror over the United States of America and the rest of the world.

[ak1971]

Originally Posted by Denver Crush

How does it feel to be on the opposite side of the ****heap? Ive been waiting for this since the cheney/pnac regime pulled their coup and started their reign of terror over the United States of America and the rest of the world.

I'm not on the opposite side of anything. I'm an American first and foremost..so what if someone with a different philosphy is in office.

[Denver Crush]

Originally Posted by ak1971

I'm not on the opposite side of anything. I'm an American first and foremost..so what if someone with a different philosphy is in office.

I was talking to the OP.

[ak1971]

Originally Posted by Denver Crush

I was talking to the OP.

oh...puff puff pass okay?

[Taco John]

We Deserve What We Get if We Elect Obama


That's amusing, as that's exactly what I felt about the Bush Administration, and what we apparently get from electing a dope for a president (twice) is a socialist.

[gunns]

"It's not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everyone who is behind you - that they have a chance for success, too. I think that when you spread the wealth around, it is good for everyone."

Obama's answers to those questions made it crystal-clear that he sees taxation as a tool not only to pay for government, but as a tool to reassign the wealth of individual Americans directly to other individual Americans as government sees fit. If he doesn't believe in trickle-down economics, fine. But having government decide precisely how full each American's glass should be - and then making the necessary adjustments - would be a whole new ballgame.

Crystal clear? The guy is obviously in a fog. I take it to mean, as Obama said, to make it fair, to let the indivduals behind the wealthy individuals have a chance to keep their own money as the wealthy have been doing. Trickle down has OBVIOUSLY not worked. It DOES NOT mean taking money from the wealthy and giving it to those that don't work. The socialist was Bush giving our money to the wealthy and us getting nada in return except the wonderful bailout. Stupid spins and deflections.

[Denver Crush]

Originally Posted by ak1971

oh...puff puff pass okay?

[Hotrod]

Barry is the devil

[Crushaholic]

Obama replied, "What I've said is that I would look at raising the capital-gains tax for purposes of fairness."

WRONG. Raising the capital gains tax is punishing a successful investment and is un-American.

[Mr.Meanie]

Originally Posted by Dortoh

Barry is the devil

Don't be too hard on the OP. He's learning.

[Hotrod]

Originally Posted by Mr.Meanie

Don't be too hard on the OP. He's learning.

I didnt even notice his name was also Barry

[Old Dude]

The socialist-under-the-bed / Joe the Plumber / tax terror stuff doesn't seem to be having any significant impact on the polls.

The people who are most concerned about that are republicans, who are already supporting McCain. Independents are far more ambivalent about the whole thing.

http://www.pollster.com/blogs/why_th...ber_tax_de.php

http://www.gallup.com/poll/111655/Am...xing-Rich.aspx


It's really hard, at this point, for anyone to "sell" or "educate" the populace on any particular economic theory or ideology. If that was going to be the thrust of McCain's appeal to independents, he should have started months ago.

[Paladin]

Originally Posted by Mr.Meanie

Don't be too hard on the OP. He's learning.

Nah. HE's retarded and has absloutley no ****ing clue. He lives in Bush's buttcrack....

[Rohirrim]

Gawd, am I getting tired of ignorance. Why does everybody blame FDR for this stuff? I guess the Republicans don't want to admit who really started it all, and why...

"A heavy progressive tax upon a very large fortune is in no way such a tax upon thrift or industry as a like would be on a small fortune. No advantage comes either to the country as a whole or to the individuals inheriting the money by permitting the transmission in their entirety of the enormous fortunes which would be affected by such a tax; and as an incident to its function of revenue raising, such a tax would help to preserve a measurable equality of opportunity for the people of the generations growing to manhood.
"We have not the slightest sympathy with that socialistic idea which would try to put laziness, thriftlessness and inefficiency on a par with industry, thrift and efficiency; which would strive to break up not merely private property, but what is far more important, the home, the chief prop upon which our whole civilization stands. Such a theory, if ever adopted, would mean the ruin of the entire country--a ruin which would bear heaviest upon the weakest, upon those least able to shift for themselves.
"But proposals for legislation such as this herein advocated are directly opposed to this class of socialistic theories. Our aim is to recognize what Lincoln pointed out: The fact that there are some respects in which men are obviously not equal; but also to insist that there should be an equality of self-respect and of mutual respect, an equality of rights before the law, and at least an approximate equality in the conditions under which each man obtains the chance to show the stuff that is in him when compared to his fellows."

And this…

"At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth......

"No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar's worth of service rendered, not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective, a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate."

Teddy Roosevelt

[ZONA]

Republicans have some nerve to say "we deserve what we get". Are they in coma or something. Look outside the window idiots. And I quote from one of my favorite movies "eden isn't burning, it's burnt". What Bush has done to this country for the last 8 years automatically disqualifies anything the Repubs have to say right now. There shouldn't even be an election. After the last 8 years it should be a right that a Demo gets the office. That's how bad things are.

[BroncoBuff]

Barry is confused, and Rohirrim is correct. President Theodore Roosevelt (McCain's hero) started progressive income tax brackets.

Obama merely wants to return the tax bracket structure to where it was when Ronal Reagan was president. Barry should really have more respect for Ronald Reagan.

[BroncoBuff]

And the title of this thread, "We Deserve What We Get"?

Does that mean we deserved catastrophic ruin in every aspect of domestic and foreign policy ... merely because we elected Georhe W. Bush? We deserve 9/11? Failure to get bin-Laden? Invade the wrong country? Quagmire in that country, half a million dead? Largest budget surplus ever converted by all-GOP into largest deficit ever? Torture? Avoiding Geneva Conventions? Economic collapse? Socialist Bailout of Wall Street? Iran on verge of nuclear weapons? Hamas in power in Palestine? Fourth Amendment trashed? CIA agents outed in the media? Presidential pardon for that treason?

I disagree, Barry. I don't think we deserved all that.

[Orange_Beard]

What a ****ing victim.

[Old Dude]

Originally Posted by BroncoBuff

And the title of this thread, "We Deserve What We Get"?

Does that mean we deserved catastrophic ruin in every aspect of domestic and foreign policy ... merely because we elected Georhe W. Bush? We deserve 9/11? Failure to get bin-Laden? Invade the wrong country? Quagmire in that country, half a million dead? Largest budget surplus ever converted by all-GOP into largest deficit ever? Torture? Avoiding Geneva Conventions? Economic collapse? Socialist Bailout of Wall Street? Iran on verge of nuclear weapons? Hamas in power in Palestine? Fourth Amendment trashed? CIA agents outed in the media? Presidential pardon for that treason?

I disagree, Barry. I don't think we deserved all that.

Well, now that you mention it ...

[theAPAOps5]

So if this country turns around and the economy becomes strong and its Obama who is leading the way does that We get what we deserve claim still stand? Or are you going to be like every republican who will claim its Bush's policy finally coming to fruition?

Lots of idiots posting crap in a last minute panic lately!

[SportinOne]

Originally Posted by ZONA

Republicans have some nerve to say "we deserve what we get". Are they in coma or something. Look outside the window idiots. And I quote from one of my favorite movies "eden isn't burning, it's burnt". What Bush has done to this country for the last 8 years automatically disqualifies anything the Repubs have to say right now. There shouldn't even be an election. After the last 8 years it should be a right that a Demo gets the office. That's how bad things are.

Referring to your sig: What do you call the person who graduates almost last in his class at the Naval Academy? Ensign.

Not arguing with your views at all, just thought it was funny..

On the topic of "spreading the wealth".. is that such a bad thing? I don't even know what i would do with 250K if i made it in three years let alone one year.. that just seems greedy. Give back to the people who need it.. capitalism blows.