>> ^rougy:

There is little correlation between what Obama says and what Obama does.


It's not even that, so much as what Candidate Obama said pre-2008 vs. what President Obama says now.

That's what's grating on me at this point. I expected him to be merely center-left in policy, but I figured he'd at least make an eloquent case for progressive ideals on a regular basis.

Instead, he seems to want to avoid any and all political or ideological confrontation.

We don't need unity, we need for the left to beat the right so thoroughly they can't win an election for dog-catcher until they tilt way back to the left themselves.

Date: April 27th, 2010

The Forgotten Man

By Robert Ringer

Why have the combined mudslinging voices of the media (so called), Congressional Democrats, and the thin-skinned boy wonder who occupies the Oval Office not been able to turn the tide against the tea partiers? If you look at the poll numbers, the answer is obvious: Most Americans are tea partiers.

However, most of them are not yet in enough pain to skip a day at the ball park and stand in a crowd of thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) and listen to tea-party speakers. That’s a shame, but it doesn’t change the fact that they identify with the tea-party movement.

So, what is the common bond with which they identify? Taxes? Healthcare? Financial regulation? I thought about this question as I was rereading Amity Shlaes’ landmark book, The Forgotten Man. In it, she quotes Yale philosopher William Graham Sumner, who, clear back in 1883, explained the crux of the moral problem with progressivism as follows:

”As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine … what A, B, and C shall do for X.”

Shlaes goes on to add: ”But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C to the cause. C was the forgotten man, the man who paid, ‘the man who never is thought of.”’

In other words, C is the guy who isn’t bothering anyone, but is forced to supply the funds to help the X’s of the world, those whom power holders unilaterally decide have been treated unfairly and must be compensated.

FDR, however, did a switcheroo on Sumner’s point by removing the moniker of ”the forgotten man” from C and giving it to X – ”the poor man, the old man, labor, or any other recipient of government help.” Very clever … very Obamanistic. As I recall, FDR originally used the phrase the forgotten man to refer to the victims of the dust bowl in the 1930s. Zap! Just like that, Sumner’s forgotten man was transformed into the opposite of what he was meant to be.

Today, I believe it is the tea-party people who represent Sumner’s Forgotten Man. They are taxed and told what they must do and what they must give up in the way of freedom and personal wealth every time a new law is passed. I believe it is this reality that bonds the tea-party people together.

Put another way, it is not healthcare or any other single issue the tea-party people are most angry about. It is all of the issues combined that have to do with impinging on their individual liberty. Above all, they are outraged by the fact that immoral politicians and bureaucrats not only violate their God-given right to live their lives as they please, they dismiss them as ”extremists.” Collectively, the tea-party people are today’s Forgotten Man.

In his essay (http://mises.org/books/forgottenman.pdf), Sumner went on to say:

”All history is only one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow-men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others. It is true that, until this time, the proletariat, the mass of mankind, have rarely had the power and they have not made such a record as kings and nobles and priests have made of the abuses they would perpetrate against their fellow-men when they could and dared.

”But what folly it is to think that vice and passion are limited by classes, that liberty consists only in taking power away from nobles and priests and giving it to artisans and peasants and that these latter will never abuse it! They will abuse it just as all others have done unless they are put under checks and guarantees, and there can be no civil liberty anywhere unless rights are guaranteed against all abuses, as well from proletarians as from generals, aristocrats, and ecclesiastics.”

Sumner was a man of great insight. He saw the absurdity of assuming that the poor man is morally superior to the rich man. This is where I believe that sincere revolutionaries go wrong. While their initial intentions (to help ”the poor”) may, at least in their own minds, be well-meant, they begin with a false premise (that the misfortunes of those at the bottom of the economic ladder are a result of the evil actions of those who are more successful) and, from there, leap from one false conclusion to another.

Which is why politicians who pose as conservatives to get elected so often take the Mush McCain-Lindsey Graham-Charlie Crist route and continually rush to the aid of their progressive Democratic pals. I believe that these philosophically lost souls do the bidding of the intimidating left because they have never given any serious thought to the possibility that the very premise of progressivism is morally wrong.

As a result, they have no feeling for the (perceived) rich man. In plotting their do-gooder schemes, he is easy to forget. They see nothing whatsoever wrong with society’s sacrificing his liberty for the ”public good.” Bring out the guillotine! As Montaigne said, ”Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.”

What gave birth to the tea parties is that the Forgotten Man syndrome is like a metastasizing disease. As politicians long ago realized, there aren’t enough rich people to support all of the X’s. As the number of X’s (i.e., those who live off the surpluses of others) increases, a lot of A’s and B’s must, by necessity, be reclassified as C’s. And that is when they become candidates for joining the tea-party movement.

Put simply: When A’s and B’s are transformed into C’s, they mysteriously lose their enthusiasm for new laws to help out X. Put even more simply, they suddenly realize that they are now the Forgotten Man. And that realization is what automatically qualifies them as tea-party people. No recruitment necessary, thank you.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'al, gore, daily, show, nobel, office shaped like oval' to 'al gore, the daily show, tds, nobel, office shaped like an oval' - edited by kronosposeidon

What would you do with the remaining $999,999,500?
>> ^kulpims:

I'd render a virtual Obama in the oval office inside this thing and sell it to teabaggers so they could poke him all day long. then, with my first billion $$$, I'd buy Videosift and ban blankfist

I'd render a virtual Obama in the oval office inside this thing and sell it to teabaggers so they could poke him all day long. then, with my first billion $$$, I'd buy Videosift and ban blankfist

And here I'd been thinking that the worst day of Obama's presidency was January 21st when he walked into the Oval Office and was given the complete list of all screwed up things he was being expected to fix in his first week in office.

>> ^acidSpine:
Well why didn't he just say that from the beginning? It's almost as if he wanted to waste 6 months of his presidency hearing toothless ingnorami call him Hitler.
Sure as there is no hell Sarah Palin won't diddle around that long dismantling these reforms when she's putrifying the oval office in 2012
I have begun to suspect that may have been exactly the plan.

Let the circus begin early so everyone gets tired of the spectacle by the time it matters. All the lunatics wear themselves out, the corporations exhaust their advertising funds and the lobbyists and pundits overstay their welcome on the issue. Let it all run its course and then step in to present a simple coherent plan.

This country only has a limited attention span for any one topic. The conservatives have already shot their wad on 'death panels' and the Socialism lie. No one wants to report on it anymore and no one wants to hear it. The table is now set to get this done.

>> ^acidSpine:
Well why didn't he just say that from the beginning? It's almost as if he wanted to waste 6 months of his presidency hearing toothless ingnorami call him Hitler.
Sure as there is no hell Sarah Palin won't diddle around that long dismantling these reforms when she's putrifying the oval office in 2012


It seems to me that the problem isn't his not explaining the plan. It is people who don't want to listen. Instead of doing research into the plan, they flip on Fox News or listen to Rush Limbaugh and their hate speech that has nothing to do with health care or the direction of this country.

Well why didn't he just say that from the beginning? It's almost as if he wanted to waste 6 months of his presidency hearing toothless ingnorami call him Hitler.

Sure as there is no hell Sarah Palin won't diddle around that long dismantling these reforms when she's putrifying the oval office in 2012

Totally! From what I heard Grumman was pretty proud of their original design and had convinced NASA to bust the Apollo lander out of the Air & Space Museum and use it for the next trip to the moon, but then some wiseguy said "AYFKM?!" and so they hired one of the most talented game developers on the planet to design a new one. I don't get it, personally, but I hope Carmack is able to leapfrog this achievement directly into the Oval Office.

I just can't wait until he gets a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky under his desk in the Oval Office so everybody will stop talking about his policies.

>> ^quantumushroom:
A 'Certification of Live Birth', which is the only paper released, is a shorthand version of a real, full birth certificate.
The full Birth Certificate--not Certification--would have the hospital and doctor that performed the delivery plus witnesses, etc. THAT'S the paper that's locked up, and BHO has already spent close to a million dollars to keep it that way.
Obama's Kenyan (paternal) grandmother, as well as his half-brother and half-sister, claim he was born in Kenya. His grandmother claimed she was in the delivery room in Kenya during his birth.
If that's true, BHO is not a natural-born citizen and therefore ineligible for the Office.
As the loyal opposition, all I can add is with the way BHO is running things, his schemes would be doomed even if he was born in the Oval Office.


Where was the outrage over McCain? He was born in Panama.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/01/AR2008050103224.html

A 'Certification of Live Birth', which is the only paper released, is a shorthand version of a real, full birth certificate.

The full Birth Certificate--not Certification--would have the hospital and doctor that performed the delivery plus witnesses, etc. THAT'S the paper that's locked up, and BHO has already spent close to a million dollars to keep it that way.

Obama's Kenyan (paternal) grandmother, as well as his half-brother and half-sister, claim he was born in Kenya. His grandmother claimed she was in the delivery room in Kenya during his birth.

If that's true, BHO is not a natural-born citizen and therefore ineligible for the Office.

As the loyal opposition, all I can add is with the way BHO is running things, his schemes would be doomed even if he was born in the Oval Office.

Liberals are scared shtless of Palin and it's why they attack her at every turn.

She has the same Gift as the media-elected marxist fraud in the oval office now.

She believes in the people while his highness believes in government.

Trancecoach is right on the money.

Anymore I believe it doesn't matter if her or Obama was sitting in the oval office. She actually might be less destructive than having a hooked-up lawyer in there.