The “You didn’t build that” fiasco, including the incoherent spinning Obama’s minions around the mainstream media have been doing ever since, provides us not only a wonderful opportunity to peek inside the liberal hive mind but a chance to dissect and examine their damage control tactics as well. First, the notorious statement itself:
“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”Let’s be really clear what Obama is saying. He’s saying that entrepreneurs and small business people do nothing special, that they are parasites just like his own constituents. We know he’s saying it. He knows he’s saying it and, further, that he believes it. It’s profoundly disrespectful, and purposely so.
It’s aimed at Obama’s core constituencies of trust fund/showbiz liberals, lay-about welfare sponges and unwashed occupiers – none of whom ever built anything and few of whom pay income taxes – with the short term goal of building a false moral case for stealing more money from the productive and using it for the benefit of his loser voters. Over the long term, delegitimizing hard work and personal initiative independent of government supports the progressive dream of a nation of serfs begging for handouts from their elite overlords.
So, he said what he said, he meant what he said, and he had a specific reason for saying it. And, as many folks have pointed out, it’s substantively ridiculous.
What Obama seeks to do is eliminate the significance of the variable in the equation by treating the constant as the variable. One frequent refrain of the lefty cover-up crew is observations along the line of “Well, you wouldn’t have been successful if you were in Somalia!” Perhaps true, but irrelevant, as we are not talking about enterprising Somalis.
We’re talking about the United States, where everyone has access to the vaunted infrastructure that taxpayers in the past built. Let’s leave aside, for a moment, the fact that most of the lay-abouts Obama is trying to sucker with his rhetoric are not federal income tax payers, much less federal income tax payers “in the past.” Let’s just assume the kind of underachievers who respond to this envy-fueled nonsense were writing the same kind of checks to Uncle Sam as the people running businesses have been writing all along. If you want to, you can believe in unicorns too.
So, everyone has the same ability to use this awesome infrastructure that Obama was pointing to as the key to success. So, the infrastructure is a constant – it’s present on both sides of the equation.
Gee, what’s different that makes two people with access to the same infrastructure that makes success possible? What’s the variable?
Could it be the very things that Obama wants to delegitimize, that for his progressive vision to prevail must be delegitimized – hard work and personal initiative?
Let’s put it in math terms:
(Roads + Bridges +Internet) x (Hard Work + Initiative) =/= (Roads + Bridges +Internet) x Zero EffortThere’s why we have unequal results – and thank God for it.
All those roads, bridges and the system of tubes that is the Internet, all that awesome infrastructure, mean nothing without hard work and initiative. Multiply the opportunity America provides by hard work and initiative and you get iPhones, 747s andThe Dark Knight Rises. Multiply it by zero effort and you get signs reading “EBT Cards Welcome,” Womyn’s Studies majors and downtown Detroit.
Now, the media spin is highly amusing on its own because all the liberals screaming that Obama is being taken out of context and that it is hideously unfair and evil and (probably) racist to actually attribute to him what he said are really just admitting that his whole thesis is political poison to the majority of Americans who don’t want their country fundamentally transformed into the United States of Welfare.
So, liberals, the question is not whether Obama said what we conservatives think he said. We can just disagree on that point. The question is whether Obama disagrees with what the conservatives think he said.
From all this wailing and gnashing of teeth, it seems like the liberals are saying that “Oh no, Obama does not think that entrepreneurship and small business owners are nothing special, nor does he think that they did not get where they are through hard work and sacrifice, and he certainly does not think that freeloading bums have a moral claim to the fruits of hardworking business owners’ labors because long ago other people paid federal income taxes!” In public, they’re keeping as far away from the real messages as swing state candidates are for the Democratic Convention.
If Obama really doesn’t think those things – and we all know he does to the core of his socialist-born being – then he should get up and say it loudly and proudly, that he believes what Mitt Romney, all of us conservatives, and all real Americans believe: That small business and entrepreneurship are what makes America great, and that these are people to be respected and admired, not hated, envied and stolen from to subsidize deadbeats.
If Obama really doesn’t think those things, he should stand up and say, “Gosh, I was misunderstood! I love small businesspeople and even though they represent something intolerable to progressives, a center of power we cannot control like we can big corporations such as GM and GE, I do not think anyone has any moral claim to what they earn! I wholeheartedly and unequivocally reject any notion to the contrary, including the nonsense spewed in that ridiculous video by noted Cherokee Elizabeth Warren!”
Don’t hold your breath. Obama’s got quite a balancing act, dog whistling to his constituents that he sure as hell does mean what he said while denying to normal, productive Americans that he does.
A note to the mainstream media and other liberal enablers: It’s really a poor argument technique to assert that “Obama was totally and unfairly taken out of context even though he believes precisely what you are asserting he believes!”
The “You didn’t build that” fiasco is one of those special moments where not only do we get a chance to see the reality behind the Potemkin Village of liberal propaganda but also to watch liberal media enablers scramble to cobble together a spin that will pull the covers back over the truth.
Our job is to not let that happen, to point out their faulty premises, flimsy arguments and outright incoherence, and to enjoy the hell out of watching our opponents clumsily tap dance in the unwelcome spotlight.
And most satisfying of all is that when it comes to the mess Obama and his liberal pals have found themselves in, they truly did do it all by themselves.
Big Government
