The Degenerate Presidency

Must read journalism – Mark Steyn’s latest weekend column.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/331806/incredible-shrinking-president-mark-steyn

For future reference just go to the NRO website every Saturday (it should be there among your bookmarks) and click on the featured column – it’s Steyn’s.

As usual, it’s difficult to select just one representative excerpt, but here’s one involving (old reliable) Joe Biden. (Charles Woods is the father of Tyrone Woods who died while courageously defending the Benghazi consulate. The son died along with three others, as Steyn relates in his column, because of a political calculation made by President Obama).

At the photo-op staged for the returning caskets, Obama et al. seem to have been too focused on their campaign needs to observe even the minimal courtesies. Charles Woods says that at the ceremony Joe Biden strolled over to him and by way of condolence said in a “loud and boisterous” voice, “Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?” One assumes charitably that the vice president is acknowledging in his own inept and blundering way the remarkable courage of a man called upon to die for his country on some worthless sod halfway across the planet. But the near-parodic locker-room coarseness is grotesque both in its inaptness and in its lack of basic human feeling for a bereaved family forced to grieve in public and as crowd-scene extras to the political bigshot. Just about the only formal responsibility a vice president has is to attend funerals without embarrassing his country. And this preening buffoon of pseudo-blue-collar faux-machismo couldn’t even manage that.

I’ve linked the video of the “voting for Barack Obama is like losing your virginity to a really cool guy” ad that Steyn references. The Romney campaign should help Democrats get this message as much exposure as possible. It appeals to the idiot youth demographic, which is large, but already locked up by Obama. Meanwhile, serious undecided voters will view it as silly (at best), irritating and repulsive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3jzyKF6M7g

As a contrast to the garbage above, here's an ad that has been running locally. It was produced by a private citizen, Thomas Peterffy, who grew up in socialist Hungary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2QtDExs6lM

One more thing. To elaborate on what Mr. Peterffy is saying, here is George Will, citing Nicholas Eberstadt's "A Nation of Takers : America's Entitlement Epidemic".

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-slouching-toward-disability/2012/10/26/2befb014-1ec3-11e2-ba31-3083ca97c314_story.html

Will, Eberstadt and the countless other conservative commentators (Steyn is one) who repeatedly identify and condemn our dependency culture, are not motivated by avarice or to engage in some abstract academic exercise. They do so in the genuine hope that their warnings will inspire policy makers to dismantle that culture and repair the damaging effects it has had on our society. Will's column quantifies many of these effects and (without going into details) I have seen some of them on a personal level. My own experience is infinitely less extensive than that of Thomas Sowell who has noted, "the war on poverty has been able to accomplish what slavery, Jim Crow Laws, and other forms of discrimination has not: it has largely destroyed the black family."
That is the true cost of the welfare state.