By STANLEY ESCUDERODAYTONA BEACH SHORES, Fla. -- I remember well how things were in 1991. The USSR imploded and the United States was on top of the world.
In our embassy in Egypt I remember the pride, the tears of joy and the feelings of exaltation and relief. With the fall of the Soviet Union our great enemy was defeated. Our country – our way of life – was forever safe and as diplomats our life’s work was finished.
We felt that we had faithfully completed the task begun by our parents’ generation. We partied, we toasted victory and we cheered our country - but our cheers were premature. It turned out that the USSR was gone, but its Marxist evil was not destroyed.
Our people’s vigilance diminished as it always does in the wake of victory, and while we were feeling secure the evil shifted location, changed names and faces, won an election and now - as our own government - it reaches out to collapse our economy and steal our freedoms in the crisis that will follow.
Yet the American people threw back the Leftist advance last November and, working through the very constitutional system which the Marxists want to fundamentally transform, reasserted our commitment to the American way. But the crucial contest is only barely underway.
The enemy still controls the White House and the Senate and the critical electoral moments yet lie ahead. Some find the prospect daunting and say that it is already too late.
They cry out that our leaders are too weak and hesitant, that our Enemy enjoys the blind support of several racial and other minorities, the poor who live on the government dole, the media and of course the Left. They claim that the traditional America of faith and the Constitution is opposed from within by too powerful and too well-funded a force. They argue that times have changed and the most that patriots can hope to achieve is a subservient compromise and an eventual bow to the inevitable.
Well, I beg to disagree.
We may well be outnumbered today, but look what we accomplished in 2010. And look how we have driven Obama to focus on the debt reduction issue when he would so dearly have preferred to ignore it.
Remember that the Dems fought tooth and nail against even a tiny cut in the 2011 budget, and while $38 billion is barely more than the government is spending in a single day, still it established the principle.
Recall that Obama’s first 2012 budget proposal included no debt reduction whatever and even tried to freeze deficits for the foreseeable future at the $1.5 trillion level.
But the Republicans came forward with Paul Ryan’s budget proposal which would cut almost $6 trillion over 10 years, restructure Medicare and Medicaid to protect both benefits while reducing their cost, reform our tax structure to reduce tax levels, encourage the private sector and eliminate loopholes which some companies like GE have used to avoid taxes altogether.
Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican, redefined the debate for the next election and he smoked Obama out of his lair.
Clearly embarrassed and uncomfortable, Obama replied with a direct political attack on Congressman Ryan and the GOP, scrapping his original budget proposal and putting forward a pitifully vague alternative which relies on smoke, mirrors, yet more federal control through to-be-created commissions and that tired old bromide “taxes on the rich."
Even in the unlikely event that his rather weird idea is fully implemented and that it actually delivers the $4 trillion in cuts it promised over 12 years, it will still leave the national debt at $11 trillion.
This is yet another example of Obama’s hands-off style of leadership. It reminds me of his infamous stimulus bill on which he abdicated his leadership responsibility to Nancy Pelosi and then approved when that hack delivered over $800 billion in pork.
Challenged, Obama insisted that there were vast numbers of “shovel ready projects” on which the stimulus money would be spent. But when the funds were available they sat in their bank accounts for years – I’m not certain that they have all been spent even yet. In the end it turned out that there were no shovel ready projects. In fact Obama had no projects and nothing was ready. Hell, he didn’t even have a shovel. In truth, we should not expect more from Obama than to punt and vote “present” on any difficult issue.
Obama is no leader. He was never trained to lead. He was a professional outside agitator (what we call in this age of misbegotten political correctness a community activist) and philosophic disciple of the Leninist Saul Alinsky.
Challenged, Obama insisted that there were vast numbers of “shovel ready projects” on which the stimulus money would be spent. But when the funds were available they sat in their bank accounts for years – I’m not certain that they have all been spent even yet. In the end it turned out that there were no shovel ready projects. In fact Obama had no projects and nothing was ready. Hell, he didn’t even have a shovel. In truth, we should not expect more from Obama than to punt and vote “present” on any difficult issue.
Obama is no leader. He was never trained to lead. He was a professional outside agitator (what we call in this age of misbegotten political correctness a community activist) and philosophic disciple of the Leninist Saul Alinsky.
If you read Alinsky you will see that it is not the task of the activist to lead the community. Rather he comes in and identifies social problems or perhaps creates a community perception of such problems, urges the community to confront the community power structure and then leaves the solution to those he agitated.
Not unlike his work on the stimulus, Libya, and the budget. When the going gets tough, the president goes to Rio, or golfing, or someplace else on vacation.
Surely now there is another Rio out there somewhere beckoning.
Unfortunately for Obama, he can’t punt on the debt or the deficit.
Politics and the lies politicians tell are one thing, but our debts are real, they are gigantic and they cannot be lied away.
With every passing day it becomes clearer that our debt will swamp our economy if the deficit and the debt cannot be pared down substantially and soon.
Economic collapse will create crises so severe that it is more than possible that people will willingly trade their remaining freedoms to a government which would promise to make things better and return the freedoms later. Predictably, once our freedoms are given up, the crisis will never be resolved and the freedoms will never be returned.
I believe that many in the Obama Administration seek just such an outcome. These are not stupid people. Marxists certainly, evil perhaps, but not stupid.
They certainly understand that continued spending at current or increased levels year after year will collapse our economy and bring about insupportable chaos.
Yet they keep right on spending and they passionately oppose any serious attempt to roll back spending, deficit and debt levels.
It is difficult to draw any conclusion but that collapse and chaos is what the Obama Administration intends. But of course they can never admit this and that is one of their greatest vulnerabilities.
Like the vampires of legend, they and their policies can be defeated by the sunlight of transparency and exposure.
So now, however few we might be, we conservatives find ourselves about to challenge at the polls a man who will find it very hard to run on his record – a man whose recent budget speech makes it clear that he seeks only political victory without regard to the dire financial threat that we face. Indeed, a man who many suspect is willing to use the debt tsunami bearing down on us and the multiple crises it will cause to create a basis for permanent power.
If he wins in 2012, America could face that sort of future. Are we are too few to defeat him?
Well, however few we might be, we were enough last November. However few we might be, we have proven to be enough to drive him before us on budget issues. And however few we may be we will be enough in November 2012.
Every real American, man or woman, is called to stand together on election day and before to rid our beloved country of this threat and return the nation to its past prominence and prosperity. The American people are still the very same proud people who sacrificed to defeat the Nazis and the Empire of Japan – the very same who overwhelmed the Soviet Union. The spirits of our parents and grandparents demand nothing less of us now.
The tasks before us are challenging in the extreme. First we must block Obama’s destructive policies and use every opportunity – the debt limit bill, the 2012 budget, any “must pass” bill and the continuing resolution which will probably eventuate again this year, to carve away at the deficit.
Simultaneously we must organize to cast aside Obama and the Left in 2012. And then we must turn to the serious and unavoidably painful tasks of ending the deficit, balancing the budget through constitutional amendment and finally paying down the debt. This will take years of privation and sacrifice. There will be widespread political resistance as all sacred cows are slaughtered and all oxen are gored.
There is even a risk that some of the brave Republicans who champion the necessary austerity measures will be voted out of office as the pain of austerity sets in. But the sad truth is that we have lived for too many years too high on the hog on other peoples’ money. As a people we have to learn again to live within our means and learning that lesson will hurt – it will hurt a lot. Failure to learn that lesson will destroy us, with consequences too terrible to contemplate.
Stanley Escudero April 19, 2011