Playing Games With History

While predictable, it’s quite sad to watch the media elite marvel at Barack Obama’s 30-minute lecture on Race in America. They gaze in sheer awe as Obama took on such a delicate and politically landmine-laden topic.

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The problem is, besides the cloaked admission that he lied about not hearing Reverend Wright’s comments personally for days last week, and subtly inserting into the speech that he did, he threw his grandmother under the bus comparing Wright’s comments to ones he claims she said that made Obama “cringe”. “You can't change what you don't acknowledge.” – Dr. Phil Barack Obama had a golden opportunity to really clean the slate, but as it would mean addressing his own party’s sins and its deliberate rewriting of black history, he would have to show bravery beyond party politics. As we all know, bravery is seldom seen during election cycles, and Obama missed his real chance to shine. During the speech Obama said, "We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow." Had he taken the opportunity to show real bravery and admonish his own party for their past sins, as well as their successful, concerted effort to erase them from history for their political advantage, that may have not only gone down as one of the greatest civil rights speeches of all time, as he could have cleaned the Democrat’s slate for all time and given them the racial moral high ground they still lack. In the end, it just came back down to politics as usual. So let’s get back to the presidential campaign as the left still attempts to re-write history. Within an elongated, sometimes contentious "comments" thread on a website I posted the “Wrongs and Wright” column on, I received the following response,

“I think the last eight years of Bush rule has shown what the Republicans have done for America. When Bush took office, he had a fiscally healthy nation. Clinton had cut the national debt and we were not running a deficit every year. The economy was healthy. Look at us now.

“Trickle down economics has been proven wrong. Greed has run rampant in this country, and it was encouraged by the Bush administration. We are a nation borrowing from other nations and giving tax cuts. What is wrong with this picture? Even the "Economic Stimulus" package will cost the country over $600 million and that doesn't include the checks. We just continue to go deeper into debt.”

The economy is on dangerous ground right now, no doubt. But re-writing history all depends on the ignorance of those who receive it, and the skill of others to perpetually recite it. Think back. I find it beyond laughable that Democrats are taking credit for the economy President Bush inherited from Bill Clinton, especially when they lecture us all now on the morality of fiscal responsibility. When Clinton first ran for president in 1992, he did so promising a middle-class tax cut. However, shortly after his victory, he just up and changed his mind. After taking the oath, he and the Democrat-controlled Congress and Senate passed what was (at the time) the largest tax increase ever. The national debt exploded and that became one of the targets of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution. They proposed The Contract With America; the American people bought into the proposals, and pushed the Democrats out of power for the first time in 40 years. As part of that Contract, many bills were also introduced. One being The Fiscal Responsibility Act, which read:

“A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out- of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses.”

In other words, they couldn’t spend what they didn’t have. While this may be news to some, if not for the Republican Congress of the early 90’s, “fiscal responsibility” would still be a phrase demonized in the liberal lexicon. Because Clinton’s spending tendencies were reined in, there were balanced budgets with newfound yearly revenue surpluses, and the national debt was reduced. That is the financial legacy Bill Clinton left George Bush, by force. Granted, presidents get the credit and also the blame. So Clinton’s receipt of fiscal responsibility credit goes with the territory. Now let’s fast forward past 9/11 and the Iraq War, two events which forced America to spend money. Our economy was still doing fine. Last fall, our economy was booming. The stock market was setting new highs, albeit the subprime mortgage crisis was rearing its ugly head. Traders on Wall Street don’t care much for uncertainty. Unfortunately, uncertainty is what happened when Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats regained control of the House and Senate. When did the economy start its downward spiral? During the Fourth Quarter of 2006. While bragging about their tendencies towards fiscal responsibility, Democrats tried to push through the S-CHIP program, despite the unknown effect on the health care industry. They began their coordinated refrain that the war was “lost”, threatening to defund the effort right from under the feet of the soldiers on the ground. There was talk of impeaching the president for lying about the reasons for going to war, while those very Democrats forget the many times they threatened the forced removal of Saddam Hussein from power for his creation of WMDs, years before George W. Bush was elected. Democrats killed Social Security reform, and any attempt to allow America to drill domestically for our own oil (thus achieve some semblance of energy independence). The “worst economy since Herbert Hoover” became the party mantra. Democrat presidential candidates began pledging all things to their supporters, totally disregarding little things like how much they will all cost. If you think the national debt is bad now, just wait until a President Obama or Clinton starts uber-spending with a Pelosi-led congress. I’d like to see the left re-write themselves out of that.