Language: a canary in the coal mine (Part Two)

By A.J. DiCintio

With its focus on the perversion of language, Part One warned of the dangers of Obama's national security policies.

Part Two turns to the threat Obama's economic policies pose not only to America's prosperity but also to its social and political well-being.

The National Debt

President Obama likes to say that his trillions in deficits are "unsustainable." However, this attempt at intellectual honesty is abjectly disingenuous because he has never discussed even one negative consequence of his astonishing spending orgy.

But there is more than politics-as-usual that lies behind this egregious sin of omission; for it is motivated by an instinctive Alinskyite's avoidance of anything that will cause the public to understand that when he promised to "perfect this nation," he meant, "transform the United States into a nanny state a la the European Model."

To make matters worse, the president is supported by most of the elite media, which has freely chosen to sin a sin of omission a second if it means helping their hero make his dreams come true.

Faced with these truly frightening realities, what is one to do? Well, what else but firmly and persistently speak of consequences that Obama et al. would rather no decent person bring up, in polite conversation or otherwise —

. . . hyper-inflation, always especially cruel to seniors

. . . shocking tax increases, certain to choke investment, job growth, and innovation, levied sooner rather than later on the entire middle class

. . . cowardly, perverse, shamelessly ironic sin taxes, including taxes on "sinful" foods, disproportionately heaped on the backs of the nation's lowest income families

. . . a quantum leap in the size of the insatiably power loving, money sucking government bureaucracy

. . . social upheaval resulting from the crippling of growth in a diverse nation of 300 million that has historically depended upon economic opportunity and class mobility to avoid the tragedies that have befallen other cultures (The Swedish Nanny, for example, "works" for 9 million dour, homogenous souls.)

. . . the permanency of this cancer — Consider this. The Stimulus Bill borrowed $800 billion to fund projects such as building high-speed rail service from Las Vegas to LA. But in addition to payments on the loan, there will be a heavy "forever" state and local tax cost to operate and maintain the "essential" service.

No, not a word regarding consequences from Obama, no matter how frightening they are. And not a word from him about the fact that the European Model has been steadily collapsing under its wasteful, stifling, dead weight, as evidenced by the "lost decade" of Europe's past ten years.

But plenty of words from him in perfect harmony with Alinsky's idea that those who would marginalize their opposition should "freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

So does the modern liberal emperor eschew playing the fiddle, instead using his valuable time to demonize a talk radio personality and foment infighting among the opposition party as a superior way of distracting the public from his intention of burning down the nation so that he can rebuild it in accordance with the dogmas of his church.

Bankruptcy

In Obama's new lexicon, "bankruptcy" — in certain expediently selected cases — really means

an intervention by which government declares the rights of bondholders, stockholders, and creditors null and void for the purpose of placing ownership of a corporation into the hands of a government-union consortium.

Now, there is much that is rotten in the new state of bankruptcy, among which is Obama's silence about this incontrovertible fact:

Politicians can run a business only in one direction: into the ground, as evidenced by observing what they have done to the business called government, for example, in Washington and Sacramento.

To what we know from observation, David Brooks (NY Times) brings some social science as he reports on research by Kaplan, Klebanov and Sorensen ("Which C.E.O. Characteristics and Abilities Matter?") and then concludes that politicians are endowed with none of the abilities that make a CEO successful but "possess precisely those talents — charisma, charm, personal skills — that are of such limited value when it comes to corporate execution."

So why does Serious Intellect Obama completely ignore the profound consequences of placing corporations under the expedient, profligate thumb of politicians?

Easy. His boss, Community Organizer Obama, orders him not to threaten The Revolution.

Health Care Reform

If Obama were honest about health care reform, one of the five "pillars" upon which he hopes to build "the new foundation . . . for our economy," he would say, "This is the Democratic plan, and this is how every American will be taxed to pay for it."

But the president appears to have a health care vision as real as the one he has for relocating Guantanamo's terrorists. (The Washington Post characterized his non-existent health plan as based upon "2 Trillion and Hope.")

Therefore, no one knows what Obama's plan is or how he plans to cover its cost — though he has floated the idea to fund this "top priority" by taxing beer, soda, potato chips, Twinkies and every last one of their competing cousins.

The Potato Chip Tax! The courage, honesty, and fairness of that tax vision were surely borrowed from the Chicago Political Machine.

But taxing a cake bought to celebrate a child's birthday won't be the only part of health care "reform" to be cooked up Chicago style.

Obama himself let the secret slip when he once again revealed his kinship to Alinsky by telling the NY Times Magazine that the difficulty of creating a new health care model precludes "the country [from] making those decisions just through the normal political channels [and therefore requires] some independent group that can give you guidance."

Now, what Obama is really saying in that carefully calculated doublespeak is this:

Health care reform must be decided amid the pretentious fog of an exclusive back room or the arrogant vapors of an activist judge's chambers because it represents another important decision we liberals will never entrust to the people.

If that last example of perverse language employed to disguise a perverse idea doesn't convince a person that one of language's prime functions is to serve as a canary in the coal mine, nothing will.

© A.J. DiCintio