It seems the liberal media are more concerned about Sen. Marco Rubio's midspeech sip of water than about President Obama's State of the Union commitment to double down on his disastrous policies.
What will it take for once-reasonable people to become alarmed at the state of this nation's fiscal condition, its stagnant economy and its egregious unemployment? Is there no number of irresponsible liberal policies from an extremist liberal president that will exceed their willingness to tolerate? Do liberal media — and rank-and-file Democrats, for that matter — believe that this recklessness can go on forever?
Knowing President Obama's capacity for fiscal folly and for scapegoating others for problems he's caused, even I find it hard to believe he could stand before the nation and masquerade as a Washington outsider — as a crusader against the squalid conditions he is engineering and exacerbating.
Are these media people truly engulfed in as blinding an ideological fog as it seems? Or are they just cynical co-conspirators in Obama's deceitful self-depiction as a model bipartisan who is actually seeking a "balanced approach" to resolving our fiscal crisis — as opposed to leveraging the crisis to further gouge the "wealthy"?
Balanced? We all know — it's undeniable — that we have a spending problem and that we are not taxed too little. Our government is bloated beyond belief, and Republicans have already joined Obama in raising the rates and reducing the deductions for the evil ones. Yet he continues to resist meaningful entitlement reform and real spending cuts and all the while deceives the American people with the scandalous whopper that he has already implemented more than half the cuts we need to "stabilize" the debt problem.
Shame on the media for allowing him to get away with this! Shame on them for not refuting his misrepresentations about the enormous cost and tax increases unfolding with Obamacare.
While Obama is obstructing solutions for real crises and manufacturing phony ones (gun control), he is accusing Republicans of conducting "business by drifting from one manufactured crisis to the next." No other occupant of the Oval Office has come close to such an adolescent level of projection — of falsely accusing his political opponents of the very tactics he has employed. But his cohorts in the media and elsewhere gleefully give him a pass.
They sit silently as Vice President Joe Biden boasts that the administration will not permit the Constitution to get in its way of imposing further restrictions on guns. They say nothing as Obama proposes draconian solutions for mass shootings that violate the Second Amendment, downplay the real cause of the problems and outright ignore scientific research.
They are mute as Obama makes his dictatorial threats to take unilateral executive action if Republicans refuse to comply with his demands for more business-killing programs in service to the gods of global warming.
They dutifully disregard the inevitably negative consequences of Obama's calls for increases in the minimum wage. At what point do these self-congratulatory people feel a tinge of remorse for promoting policies that harm the people they promise to help?
Are they honestly unaware that there is a level beyond which you harm, rather than help, people by exploding our food stamp rolls, forcing employers to pay wages higher than they can afford, extending unemployment benefits and legislating other transfer payments?
Does it ever occur to them that we wouldn't need to have all these counterproductive programs of "compassion" if our most beneficent president would quit smothering the private sector with his onerous spending, taxes and regulations?
Apparently not, because we see no curiosity from them, much less any criticism, about Obama's grandiose plan for universal preschool for every 4-year-old in the United States, while he opposes school choice solutions to help free inner-city children from inferior schools. We see no economic analysis that would show the inverse relationship between the amount of money the federal government has poured into education and the results it has produced.
I don't expect the media to understand, let alone affirm, that it's free market competition, not government central planning, that has created wealth in this country, but how about a modicum of honesty from them about the utter waste and failure of Obama's stimulus package, which he promised would get the economy moving again?
Then again, how can we realistically expect the leftist media to hold the perennially unaccountable Obama to account for anything in his 2013 SOTU address when they have wholly ignored his broken promises from past SOTU speeches, such as his pledge to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, his assurance that his stimulus plan would save or create 3.5 million jobs in two years, his avowal that Obamacare would result in universal health insurance coverage and his declaration that he would create gazillions of green energy jobs?
America's liberty burns while the media fiddle.
David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His latest book, "The Great Destroyer," reached No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. Follow him on Twitter @davidlimbaugh and his website at www.davidlimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
