Our Confused President’s Press Conference

I admit I missed President Obama’s press conference yesterday: I was in enough pain already. My back is acting up again, and I didn’t want to add insult to injury. But I did make up for it by waking up at 3 this morning, so there's that.

I’ve watched replays of it and read the official transcript of it to know that all I missed was an exercise in confusion, class warfare, and demagoguery.

In other words, it was a typical Obama press conference.

It goes without saying that Obama, away from his teleprompter, is a national embarrassment. He cannot think on his feet and cannot make coherent arguments without resorting to needless finger pointing and blame-laying. His grasp of our current economic crisis is tenuous at best, and he seems to have great difficulty in understanding his role in it. He has no difficulty, however, in dodging responsibility for his mistakes.

Take his remarks on the deficit for instance. In his response to a question about the various dates that have come and gone without a vote to raise the debt ceiling, he laid the blame on Congress for the unprecedented and unsustainable amount of debt that’s currently threatening our economy, saying this:

And [the] last point I want to make about this. These are bills that Congress ran up.

It’s clear that he was trying to blame the deficit on the current congress when in fact these bills were the result of the previous Reid and Pelosi-led 111th Congress. He sounds as though he had nothing at all to do with it, when it was he who signed those bills into law, giving them his final approval.

He’d have you think that the failed $878B Stimulus was none of his doing.

I don’t care who you are, that right there’s just an attempt to confuse you.

And here’s another confusing point. In his opening statement, the President had this to say concerning the things that could be done to help our economy out of the ditch:

Right now, Congress could send me a bill that puts construction workers back on the job rebuilding roads and bridges…

Excuse me, but didn’t we just spend $28B on roads and bridges in the Porkulus Bill? And another thing, didn’t our local taxes go towards those needed repairs at one time? I mean, before public sector union pensions started eating up all that money?

Just checking.

But wait! There’s more! President Obama also continued his War on Prosperity by opening up a new front: Class Warfare. Again, from his opening remarks…

There’s been a lot of discussion about revenues and raising taxes in recent weeks, so I want to be clear about what we’re proposing here. I spent the last two years cutting taxes for ordinary Americans, and I want to extend those middle-class tax cuts. The tax cuts I’m proposing we get rid of are tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires; tax breaks for oil companies and hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners.


It would be nice if we could keep every tax break there is, but we’ve got to make some tough choices here if we want to reduce our deficit. And if we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, if we choose to keep a tax break for corporate jet owners, if we choose to keep tax breaks for oil and gas companies that are making hundreds of billions of dollars, then that means we’ve got to cut some kids off from getting a college scholarship. That means we’ve got to stop funding certain grants for medical research. That means that food safety may be compromised. That means that Medicare has to bear a greater part of the burden. Those are the choices we have to make.

So the bottom line is this: Any agreement to reduce our deficit is going to require tough decisions and balanced solutions. And before we ask our seniors to pay more for health care, before we cut our children’s education, before we sacrifice our commitment to the research and innovation that will help create more jobs in the economy, I think it’s only fair to ask an oil company or a corporate jet owner that has done so well to give up a tax break that no other business enjoys. I don’t think that’s real radical. I think the majority of Americans agree with that.

 Hoo boy, George Soros won’t like that, not one bit. Do you think that he’ll enjoy Obama biting the hand that feeds him? I mean, he’s one of the world’s richest men, isn’t he? And doesn’t he have his own corporate jet? And isn’t he a hedge fund manager?

And speaking of corporate jets, wasn’t there a tax break for them in the Stimulus Bill, written in there by Reid and Pelosi? Ace points this out...

Just a few months after lawmakers scolded auto executives for flying to Washington in private jets, Congress approved a tax break in the stimulus package to help businesses buy their own planes.


The incentive -- first used to help plane makers recover from the 2001 terror attacks -- sharply reduces the up front tax bill for companies who buy assets like business planes.


The aviation industry, which is cutting jobs as it suffers from declining shipments and canceled orders, hopes the tax break in the economic-stimulus bill just signed by President Barack Obama will persuade more companies to buy planes and snap a slump in general aviation that began last year.

I just want to make sure I’m not confused on that.

The rest of that quote tends to reinforce Obama’s mistaken idea that all things come from the government, that if Washington doesn’t provide funding for it, it doesn’t happen. In Obama’s world, the private sector doesn’t exist, except as the enemy. Never mind that those evil oil companies are publicly held, and their stock is part of a lot of Americans’ retirement portfolios. And, oh no, the private sector never invests its money into research and development. Nope. Not at all.

It’s almost like we managed to elect the worst president in our history. One with no experience in the real world and who has never held a job in the private sector where he had other people depending on him for their livelihoods.

Or something.

I’m glad I missed it. Sufficient unto the day is the bullshit contained therein.