XDA

Before the 'not the state of the union' speech President Obama made last night, I watched a bit of Matt Welch and (singularly unsexy looking) Anna Marie Cox agreeing that Obama can say "transparently untrue" things without blinking an eye. True. Primed with that phrase, I found it difficult to watch the President without either laughing or wanting to cry in frustration. Tucker Carlson felt the same way, as did John Hawkins (who noticed the blatantly obvious fantasy), as did Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei at the Politico (who translated the rhetoric usually to mean the opposite of what the President said).

The President continues to sink in the polls, he plans to spend a freakin' ton of money and he lies to us about how he will fund this additional spending (new tax on just 5% of the population. Yeah, right). I have noticed nine presidents now make their first speech to Congress after taking office and every one of them has said they will end waste in government spending. Yet the spending increases every year and the waste is somehow never discovered. Only a complete fool would believe that old lie now.

My father worked for a prestigious but now fallen stock broker firm in the '60s when it tried and failed, at no small cost, to go paperless. Computers are much better now, but there are still no savings to be had by putting all the information on a computer rather than on paper in individual files.

John Stossel has a lot of good sense to say about the fantasy promise speech last night, very little of it complimentary.

It's important to remember that government has no resources it hasn't first commandeered from the private economy. Anything it does to stimulate economic activity necessarily preempts private activity. Where is the gain?
Worse: Since monopoly bureaucracies are not as efficient as competitive businesses,
government efforts won't get as much bang for the buck as private efforts. They will likely destroy wealth.

Here is an official text of the speech, in case you didn't see it.

Transparently untrue. Obama is already in the bubble some presidents get into later when they have lost the ability to see that we are no longer buying their bullshit. And we're just 35 days (and a trillion more in deficit spending) into his administration. Now I'm really depressed.

Worst fantasy blunder:

But to truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy. So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.

Good bye, $2.00/gal. gas, it was fun. We're turning to pixie dust for our future energy needs, in order to waste Trillions to forestall a threat that doesn't exist. Where's that bottle of Makers' Mark?

UPDATE: The market is down about 150 two hours in. I guess it's possible the investors didn't like the speech too much either.

Labels: President Obama speech; transparently untrue