President Barack Obama’s Second Inaugural Address was
nothing if not a disguised Orwellian version of FDR’s infamous “Second Bill of
Rights” speech. The speech is a concise statement of President Obama's collectivist
Neo-Progressive vision of the United States.
The President begins by invoking the Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty,
and the pursuit of Happiness.
The re-elected Commander-in-Chief then speaks of these
natural rights upon which the Republic was built after a difficult and bloody
revolution fought against the oppressive English Crown.
For history tells us that while
these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that
while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on
Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with
the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a Republic, a
government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep
safe our founding creed.
While on the surface, President Obama’s words appear
patriotic, the intentions behind them are far darker. Aptly on Martin Luther
King Day, the President speaks of how the institution of slavery was
incompatible with the principles of the Declaration of Independence and was justly abolished.
Through blood drawn by lash and
blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of
liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves
anew, and vowed to move forward together.
Through rhetorical sleight of hand, President Obama then
proceeds to not so subtly compare the hypocritical and oppressive institution of slavery with
other important principles of liberty upon which the Republic was founded. For
example, a limited government which does not create public works and
institutions (that the private sector can more adequately provide) is as evil as
the institution of slavery and was rightly abolished just like that barbaric
practice.
Together, we determined that a
modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce;
schools and colleges to train our workers.
President Obama also compares the free market to slavery and
rejoices that the free market has been all but obliterated in the United
States.
Together, we discovered that a
free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair
play.
According to the President, a free market devoid of corporatist regulations was as
anachronistic and vicious as slavery, and was rightfully abolished. However,
the “rules” of which the President speaks do not “ensure competition and fair
play” except in perhaps a cynical Orwellian sense. The regulation of the once
free market just creates opportunities by which large corporations and other
powerful entities may lobby for rules that grant them a favored status in what
has become anything but an even playing field.
Obama continues by comparing the period of time prior to the
creation of the welfare Nanny State
with slavery.
Together, we resolved that a great
nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life's worst
hazards and misfortune.
Creating the machinery of the New Deal and later the Great
Society resulted not in emancipation but in enslavement. Not only has this
transformation trapped countless Americans in poverty and made them dependent
upon the state, but it has also enslaved future generations of Americans by
chaining them to a mounting national debt that will eventually destroy what is
left of the economy.
President Obama continues by giving lip service to the
private sector.
Through it all, we have never
relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the
fiction that all society's ills can be cured through government alone. Our
celebration of initiative and enterprise; our insistence on hard work and
personal responsibility, are constants in our character.
Nobody is less skeptical of central authority than the
nation’s latest and most Imperial President. No President has shown less regard
for the Tenth Amendment or for the private sector.
President Obama then reveals the truth of what he means by
unveiling the overarching theme of his address. The United
States and the American people need to be
collectivized even more than they already have been.
But we have always understood that
when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles
requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms
ultimately requires collective action.
He believes that the only way to preserve individual liberty
and natural rights is by turning to collectivism and violating the cherished
principles of the Constitution that he had just taken an oath to defend. Like
the Progressives of the early twentieth century, President Obama clearly
believes that the Constitution is anachronistic and needs to “evolve” in a
Darwinist fashion. If he were proposing Constitutional amendments, that would
at least be consistent with his oath to uphold the Constitution, but like his
Progressive forefathers, he does not have Constitutional remedies in mind to
bring about his collectivist transformation of the United States.
No single person can train all the
math and science teachers we'll need to equip our children for the future, or
build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and
businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things
together, as one nation, and one people.
The private sector and the individuals who fuel it cannot
create anything great in the eyes of the Neo-Progressive President Obama.
Likewise, the private sector and individuals will be inadequate for creating
the institutions that will be needed to allow the United
States to remain a great nation.
Even more subtly, President Obama finds a way to attack the
Second Amendment without making his intentions manifest.
For the American people can no
more meet the demands of today's world by acting alone than American soldiers
could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias.
Just as a powerful collectivist central government is
required to fuel the economy, a powerful collectivist central government is
required to defend liberty. The “militia” with their arms cannot possibly
protect the American people from tyranny, therefore the Second Amendment is
likely a dead letter just like much of the rest of the Constitution and Bill of
Rights.
From there, President Obama begins to sound even more like
Orwell’s Big Brother.
This generation of Americans has
been tested by crises that steeled our resolve and proved our resilience. A
decade of war is now ending. An economic recovery has begun. America's
possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world
without boundaries demands: youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless
capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention. My fellow Americans, we are made
for this moment, and we will seize it - so long as we seize it together.
War is peace. While President Obama ratchets up his
unconstitutional and endless drone warfare campaign and plans to keep a large
American military presence in the Middle East even if and when the “War” in
Afghanistan ends, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate calls this peace. Imminent
economic collapse is economic recovery. While the numbers of unemployed
Americans and Americans on government assistance remain high and the debt
continues to grow astronomically, the Harvard educated Constitutional scholar
speaks of economic recovery. Slavery is freedom. The possibilities for the United
States are “limitless” only if the nation is
further collectivized and all are made slaves of the state.
President Obama invokes the necessity of a strong middle
class for American prosperity while at the same time the economic policies of
his first four years in office have continued the erosion of the middle class
and have created further obstacles to upward mobility.
For we, the people, understand
that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing
many barely make it. We believe that America's
prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class.
Giving lip service to the American middle class is to be
expected in any political speech, but such platitudes are even more heinous
when delivered by a President who has stocked his administration with former
Goldman Sachs employees and attacked small business at every turn with
“Obamacare” and dozens of other weapons of mass economic destruction.
President Obama again speaks of “change” and makes it even
more clear what this “change” actually entails. As if his actions in the last
four years did not make it obvious enough.
We understand that outworn
programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. We must harness new ideas and
technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools,
and empower our citizens with the skills they need to work harder, learn more,
and reach higher. But while the means will change, our purpose endures: a
nation that rewards the effort and determination of every single American.
The “outworn programs” clearly includes the Constitution and
the Bill of Rights. What will replace the foundations of liberty are new and
higher taxes, more authoritarian public schools even more controlled by the federal
government rather than by local communities, and even more centralized economic
planning.
Just like FDR before him, President Obama then sings the
praises of a “Second Bill of Rights” right after lamenting the archaic nature
of the true Bill of Rights.
We, the people, still believe that
every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make
the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit.
But we reject the belief that America
must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and
investing in the generation that will build its future. For we remember the
lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty, and parents of
a child with a disability had nowhere to turn. We do not believe that in this
country, freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few. We
recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us, at
any time, may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a
terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other - through Medicare, and
Medicaid, and Social Security - these things do not sap our initiative; they
strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the
risks that make this country great.
For President Obama, true freedom and true dignity do not
emanate from the inalienable natural rights that predate the state but instead
emanate from the Nanny State.
True freedom is dependency upon the state. The destruction of the free market
and the private sector at the hands of the federal government creates a
situation where the Nanny State
appears to be the only safe harbor for Americans. While perhaps it is laudable
that President Obama does not blame the victims – “the takers” – it is the
federal government that made “the takers” what they are.
From there, President Obama creates a new bogus “right” of
which even FDR did not conceive – freedom from “climate change.”
We, the people, still believe that
our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity.
We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do
so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the
overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of
raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards
sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America
cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations
the technology that will power new jobs and new industries - we must claim its
promise.
The science on “climate change” is anything but settled, but
this does not stop the President. What “obligations” to posterity do entail is
bringing the debt under control, but instead, President Obama claims that true
“obligations” to posterity entail a new "path" that likely includes schemes such as more stifling
environmental regulations, a carbon tax, and more corrupt corporatist “green jobs” programs
such as the next Solyndra. Al Gore and other “climate fear” opportunists will
benefit while the United States
will likely suffer ill economic effects from a “green economy” as Spain
did. What a “green economy” means is
more “green” in the pockets of the “banksters” who will benefit from a carbon
tax scheme. What is also means are more
needless draconian EPA regulations that will harm small businesses.
President Obama then turns his attention from domestic
policy issues to foreign policy, and the effect of his words is no less Orwellian.
We, the people, still believe that
enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war. Our brave men
and women in uniform, tempered by the flames of battle, are unmatched in skill
and courage. Our citizens, seared by the memory of those we have lost, know too
well the price that is paid for liberty. The knowledge of their sacrifice will
keep us forever vigilant against those who would do us harm. But we are also
heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war, who turned sworn enemies
into the surest of friends, and we must carry those lessons into this time as
well.
If peace does not require perpetual war, then why did
President Obama undertake his unconstitutional “military kinetic action” in Libya?
Why did he risk the inevitable blowback which tragically occurred in Benghazi?
Why does he continue to wage a limitless drone warfare campaign without regard
to checks and balances or due process? Why does he want to keep American troops
in Afghanistan
even after the “war” ends? Why does he seek affiliation with the radical
Islamic resistance in Syria?
We will defend our people and
uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law. We will show the
courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully - not
because we are naive about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more
durably lift suspicion and fear. America
will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe; and we
will renew those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad,
for no one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful
nation.
In other words, the United
States will continue to ignore the warnings
of the dangers of “entangling alliances” – the very sort of alliances that set
the state for World War I and nearly engulfed the globe in nuclear annihilation
during the Cold War. The United States
will continue to be a warfare state that polices the world and makes that world
“safe for democracy.” Or at least safe for corporatism.
President Obama concludes by labeling any who disagree with
him or oppose his collectivist policies as being irrational.
For now decisions are upon us, and
we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or
substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate. We
must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect. We must act, knowing that
today's victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who
stand here in four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence to
advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia
hall.
Senator Barry Goldwater famously said that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no
vice.” Defending an absolute is not irrational if that absolute is important
enough. The natural rights embodied in the Constitution are such absolutes. If
the natural rights to life, liberty, and property are not justifiable
absolutes, then no freedoms can be secure in the Age of Obama.