A.J. DiCintio
The Con Man as Demander-in-Chief
By A.J. DiCintio
Just as it takes two to tango, it takes two for a con to succeed, an ancient truth whose famous nineteenth century American iteration Herman Melville illustrated in his novel The Confidence Man, set ironically on April Fool's Day on the Fidèle, a Mississippi riverboat teeming with con artists and dupes.
Thoughts about the human frailty Melville placed before us have come to mind ever since recent events regarding the federal government's fiscal mess began sending the slobbering, eagerly willing media suckers made famous by Bernie Goldberg gushing that Obama "demands" reform, despite the moral and intellectual irony that clings to the president like the odor that envelopes every con artist polecat of every stripe.
However, living in the Information Age, we aren't dependent upon a few true-believing television Uncle News Anchors or their ilk in the electronic and print media who purport to give us "the" news.
Therefore, informed by facts only, let's begin an examination of how the man the elite media exalts as a brave, brilliant, all too often politically frustrated reformer has reacted to Washington's financial morass with this honest admission:
Barack Obama did indeed assume office not just as a near implosion of a corrupt banking/regulatory system vigorously supported by both political parties was ravaging the economy but at a time the piper was knocking at the public and private door regarding the nation's participation in what John Mauldin calls the West's "debt supercycle."
That allowance made, we then move on to this observation:
Given the true fiscal state of the union, a truly transformative, post-every-harmful-stodgy-thing president would have displayed real leadership in explaining to the public that while the country is fortunate to be able to prudently spend money to help citizens in need, it also faces the daunting task of beginning a slow, steady, serious, meaningful retrenchment and reform of government.
In other words, such a president would have explicitly announced that the days of paying for big and bigger government of outrageous spending, waste, special interest payoffs, unsustainable fiscal promises, and debt are coming to an end; for we have entered into a period Mauldin calls the "endgame," one that will turn out either bearably or horrifically painful depending on how we react to it.
Moreover, invoking the dire economic, social, and political problems now faced by Europe's stubbornly-ostrich "social democracies," that president would have emphasized the crucial importance of immediately beginning the task of straightening out the nation's spending and debt curves.
In doing so, that kind of president would have anticipated the behavior exhibited by Social Security and Medicare's current Board of Trustees, whose members, in stark contrast to the cowardice and selfishness spewed by Democratic politicians and insurance behemoth AARP executives, say this in their 2012 annual report:
"Lawmakers should address the financial challenges facing Social Security and Medicare as soon as possible. Taking action sooner rather than later will leave more options and more time available to phase in changes so that the public has adequate time to prepare."
Sadly, Barack Obama is no president of courage and honesty; for he has not just failed to square with the American people about the crucially important immediacy of putting the nation on a sound fiscal path, he has consistently behaved in ways that exacerbate its financial problems.
Here are the most disturbing examples of that behavior:
In one of the ugliest con jobs committed by an American president, Obama appointed a debt commission, only to summarily dismiss the group and its ideas, including those of its bravest members, as soon as Nancy Pelosi, a top leader of his party's leftist radicals, arrogantly denounced the commission's work as "simply unacceptable."
Thus, the man purported to "demand" action that will give the nation real budgetary change and hope revealed himself either as a cowardly, swivel-jointed political marionette or a kindred spirit of this nation's haggard, true-believing leftist extremists.
In another act as irresponsible as it is insulting, Obama has consistently sent Congress annual budgets so thoroughly devoid of fiscal and political reality that the Senate's majority Democrats not only have rejected them almost unanimously but also have decided against voting on any budget.
So it is that if no budget resolution is adopted by April 29, 2013, the banana-like Republic of the United States of America will have gone four consecutive years without a spending plan voted on by the people's elected representatives.
And so it is that by that date, "demander" Barack Obama will have gone four years stone cold silent with respect to insisting Congress act responsibly, either because he is secretly happy to become Harry Reid's status quo marionette or, more likely, because to the democratic process, this lover of "executive orders" prefers the ruling style of the autocratic fraud who tells "his" people, "Trust me."
Finally, there is the financial and political abomination wrought by a man the elite media slobbers over as innovatively modern, all the while ignoring his devotion to the decrepit, failed, centralization-preaching ideology whose ideas he admired and sought out from "Marxist professors. . . structural feminists. . . [and] . . . socialist conferences" (Obama's own words).
Specifically, Barack Obama could have worked for real, bipartisan reform of the fiscal time bomb that is the nation's entire healthcare system based upon ideas from non-ideological medical and financial experts. Instead, he chose not just to jam down the nation's throat a Big Government healthcare takeover based upon the failed sixties' Great Society welfare template but to lie an abominable one trillion dollar lie about its cost.
No wonder today he's attempting to fast-talk the nation into believing he can come up with the $2 trillion total needed to pay for "Obamacare" without further exploding the nation's debt or laying a heavy tax burden upon a smaller, weaker, fiscally beleaguered middle class.
Of course, the truth about the entirety of Obama's free lunch fiscal scam is that at best it dooms current citizens as well as their children and grandchildren to a lower standard of living and at worst produces economic conditions giving rise to social and political turmoil we don't even want to contemplate.
The bottom line, then, which will never be accepted by the drooling ideologues who are the president's media marks, is that when the nation desperately needed the adamantine probity of a Washington or the steely resolve of a Lincoln, it got con man Barack Obama, a reality that ought to motivate every common sense citizen to fight on for what is fiscally just and right, keeping faith that no merely-human being can fool a majority of the people all of the time.
© A.J. DiCintio
January 13, 2013
Just as it takes two to tango, it takes two for a con to succeed, an ancient truth whose famous nineteenth century American iteration Herman Melville illustrated in his novel The Confidence Man, set ironically on April Fool's Day on the Fidèle, a Mississippi riverboat teeming with con artists and dupes.
Thoughts about the human frailty Melville placed before us have come to mind ever since recent events regarding the federal government's fiscal mess began sending the slobbering, eagerly willing media suckers made famous by Bernie Goldberg gushing that Obama "demands" reform, despite the moral and intellectual irony that clings to the president like the odor that envelopes every con artist polecat of every stripe.
However, living in the Information Age, we aren't dependent upon a few true-believing television Uncle News Anchors or their ilk in the electronic and print media who purport to give us "the" news.
Therefore, informed by facts only, let's begin an examination of how the man the elite media exalts as a brave, brilliant, all too often politically frustrated reformer has reacted to Washington's financial morass with this honest admission:
Barack Obama did indeed assume office not just as a near implosion of a corrupt banking/regulatory system vigorously supported by both political parties was ravaging the economy but at a time the piper was knocking at the public and private door regarding the nation's participation in what John Mauldin calls the West's "debt supercycle."
That allowance made, we then move on to this observation:
Given the true fiscal state of the union, a truly transformative, post-every-harmful-stodgy-thing president would have displayed real leadership in explaining to the public that while the country is fortunate to be able to prudently spend money to help citizens in need, it also faces the daunting task of beginning a slow, steady, serious, meaningful retrenchment and reform of government.
In other words, such a president would have explicitly announced that the days of paying for big and bigger government of outrageous spending, waste, special interest payoffs, unsustainable fiscal promises, and debt are coming to an end; for we have entered into a period Mauldin calls the "endgame," one that will turn out either bearably or horrifically painful depending on how we react to it.
Moreover, invoking the dire economic, social, and political problems now faced by Europe's stubbornly-ostrich "social democracies," that president would have emphasized the crucial importance of immediately beginning the task of straightening out the nation's spending and debt curves.
In doing so, that kind of president would have anticipated the behavior exhibited by Social Security and Medicare's current Board of Trustees, whose members, in stark contrast to the cowardice and selfishness spewed by Democratic politicians and insurance behemoth AARP executives, say this in their 2012 annual report:
"Lawmakers should address the financial challenges facing Social Security and Medicare as soon as possible. Taking action sooner rather than later will leave more options and more time available to phase in changes so that the public has adequate time to prepare."
Sadly, Barack Obama is no president of courage and honesty; for he has not just failed to square with the American people about the crucially important immediacy of putting the nation on a sound fiscal path, he has consistently behaved in ways that exacerbate its financial problems.
Here are the most disturbing examples of that behavior:
In one of the ugliest con jobs committed by an American president, Obama appointed a debt commission, only to summarily dismiss the group and its ideas, including those of its bravest members, as soon as Nancy Pelosi, a top leader of his party's leftist radicals, arrogantly denounced the commission's work as "simply unacceptable."
Thus, the man purported to "demand" action that will give the nation real budgetary change and hope revealed himself either as a cowardly, swivel-jointed political marionette or a kindred spirit of this nation's haggard, true-believing leftist extremists.
In another act as irresponsible as it is insulting, Obama has consistently sent Congress annual budgets so thoroughly devoid of fiscal and political reality that the Senate's majority Democrats not only have rejected them almost unanimously but also have decided against voting on any budget.
So it is that if no budget resolution is adopted by April 29, 2013, the banana-like Republic of the United States of America will have gone four consecutive years without a spending plan voted on by the people's elected representatives.
And so it is that by that date, "demander" Barack Obama will have gone four years stone cold silent with respect to insisting Congress act responsibly, either because he is secretly happy to become Harry Reid's status quo marionette or, more likely, because to the democratic process, this lover of "executive orders" prefers the ruling style of the autocratic fraud who tells "his" people, "Trust me."
Finally, there is the financial and political abomination wrought by a man the elite media slobbers over as innovatively modern, all the while ignoring his devotion to the decrepit, failed, centralization-preaching ideology whose ideas he admired and sought out from "Marxist professors. . . structural feminists. . . [and] . . . socialist conferences" (Obama's own words).
Specifically, Barack Obama could have worked for real, bipartisan reform of the fiscal time bomb that is the nation's entire healthcare system based upon ideas from non-ideological medical and financial experts. Instead, he chose not just to jam down the nation's throat a Big Government healthcare takeover based upon the failed sixties' Great Society welfare template but to lie an abominable one trillion dollar lie about its cost.
No wonder today he's attempting to fast-talk the nation into believing he can come up with the $2 trillion total needed to pay for "Obamacare" without further exploding the nation's debt or laying a heavy tax burden upon a smaller, weaker, fiscally beleaguered middle class.
Of course, the truth about the entirety of Obama's free lunch fiscal scam is that at best it dooms current citizens as well as their children and grandchildren to a lower standard of living and at worst produces economic conditions giving rise to social and political turmoil we don't even want to contemplate.
The bottom line, then, which will never be accepted by the drooling ideologues who are the president's media marks, is that when the nation desperately needed the adamantine probity of a Washington or the steely resolve of a Lincoln, it got con man Barack Obama, a reality that ought to motivate every common sense citizen to fight on for what is fiscally just and right, keeping faith that no merely-human being can fool a majority of the people all of the time.
© A.J. DiCintio
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