Robbing Peter to Pay...Peter?

It's been nearly a week since Barack Obama's second national press conference, and I'm back from mini-vacation and ready to jump in while the water's still warm.

As I watched the rebroadcast of Obama's stumpage from the comfort of my Manchester Grand Hyatt bed, several oddities and controversies immediately struck me. But from the sheer boredom of the whole affair, I wonder how few folks caught them.

First there were the trivial things, which my uber-critical nature just couldn't let slide. Amid the hubbub over Obama's teleprompters having become a permanent resident along the O-cross America Tour, the White House staff thought they'd pull a fast one on us. Here the presumptive C-in-C strutted up the red East Room carpet toward the podium and took immediate command of an eloquent speech, a mini-State of the Nation, if you will (albeit, a repackaged campaign stump speech). He stood confidently, glaring into the television camera as if demanding the American people's attention.

But something was amiss. Alas, he wasn't...quite, shall we say...looking at the camera. He was looking a tad bit down and to his left. Now, of course the mainstream media wouldn't reveal this, but the New Media certainly would. Yes, it was later revealed that firmly fixed just below the camera lens was a big screen television scrolling his speech line by line. We were expecting an Obama 2.0--sans teleprompters--and instead we got Obama 1.1 (only because it was a really slick looking big screen TV).

After the grandstanding, Obama immediately opened up for questions from the press corps. ABC's Jake Tapper, a well-respected journalist from the MSM, posed a fairly straight forward question: "Will you sign a budget that does not include a middle-class tax cut and cap-and-trade?" Now, at this point Barry-O could have declared his resoluteness and confidence in his policy and principle by simply replying with an emphatic, "No"...or perhaps "Yes." Instead, the O consumed a full three minutes (an eternity in press conference terms) to convey to Jake that he wasn't entirely comfortable answering such a direct question. But, of course it didn't quite come out like that. His answer hemmed and hawed between the minutiae of the congressional budgeting process and "broader" goals and the fact he hasn't seen the completed budget yet. The Church Lady's words are ringing ever true, "Hmm. Isn't that convenient."

That's just for starters.

There were three very stark questions that served to highlight the truth about Obama's socialist agenda, and his answers to them warrant retelling.

The first was a humdinger gotcha question: "At both of your townhall meetings in California last week, you said quote, 'I didn't run for president to pass on our problems to the next generation.' But, under your budget, the debt will increase seven trillion dollars over the next ten years. The Congressional Budget Office says 9.3 trillion dollars, and today on Capitol Hill some Republicans called your budget--with all the spending on health care, education, and environment--the 'most irresponsible budget in American history.' Isn't that kind of debt exactly what you were talking about when you said 'passing on our problems to the next generation'?"

Watch Obama's response here...



So let's boil this all down here. Obama would have us believe that by spending trillions of newly-printed and newly-taxed dollars on building schools, public health clinics, and windmills, somehow we'll magically save $2 trillion. Now, that's what I call "fuzzy math." The tragic assumption in Obama's magical Marxist wonderland is that taking money from one pocket and putting into the other somehow creates value. The compounding problem is that the second pocket has a hole in it.

Somewhere along "road to serfdom" we'll discover that pouring into the economy all these dollars, extracted from the folks most likely to invest them, will only further prop up the facade of consumer confidence and spending--all the while, no new wealth and capital investment will have been produced. And we'll be the poorer for it. Such a spending spree coupled with the flood of newly printed paper can only result in a hyper-inflated economy in which consumer spending is at a record high and consumer confidence at a record low. Enter Timothy Geithner's "global currency"...

Stay tuned for the next installment of Obama and the vanishing teleprompters...

"Rebekah, your uncle Cameron never answers his phone." 5-yr-old Rebekah replies: "Then just send him a text."

Loving Montana's "Made in Montana" bill asserting 10th Amendment privileges on guns...Oklahoma too should pick this fight with the Fed.