Yeah, Barry, Words Really Do Matter

Remember the phrases "Change We Can Believe In" or "Hope and Change" along with the ever popular “Yes, We Can”? They were used quite effectively by the Barack Obama Snake Oil and Dream Factory Corporation in 2007-2008. Change, for Obama, was simply a synonym for Progress. And Progress, again for Obama, meant moving ahead to a changed human condition that was superior to the one which existed when his self-proclaimed exalted person appeared on the scene.

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But both words, change and progress, merely describe movement. Neither describes arriving at a destination or achieving a goal. Without a destination or achievement being clearly defined, the words themselves are meaningless. They bring to mind the old joke about the pilot who announces to an aircraft full of passengers that they are lost, “but we’re making great time!” As for “Yes, We Can”, there is a sense conveyed of doing something, just a complete absence of what exactly that something actually is. So our President never described what exactly it was that we were going to change not what exactly it was that we were able to accomplish, other than provide himself and his family and assorted hangers on with the power to destroy the human condition that we were used to in exchange for something unknown, unknowable, but decidedly different.

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So how’s all that Progress working out for you, huh? Unemployment certainly has changed. Based on the labor participation rate, new job creation hasn’t even kept pace with the number of graduates leaving schools all over the nation every June. Well that’s progress I suppose, at least the number of people employed has changed. What about average earnings since Obama moved in to the White House? Oh, they’ve been reduced a few percent, but as Obama himself clearly stated, “At some point you’ve earned enough.” Sorry if you thought that enough meant a million bucks a year, because apparently the President’s estimate of “enough” and your estimate of “enough” were somewhat different. Did you think that race relations were going to show progress once we elected a black President and a black Attorney-General? I guess you forgot what a huge sports fan Obama was when you went into the voting booth. And since Obama and his “Thugs’R’Us” administration are so comfortable with synonyms, guess what word is synonymous with “sports”? How about games, will that work? Games, such as what is being called the “Knock Out Game” which apparently involves scoring points whenever youths sucker-punch passers-by and cause serious injury, permanent brain damage or even death. But it’s an odd sort of game. Apparently the rules of this “Knock Out Game” impose a penalty if the attackers are white and the target is black. This penalty is known as a hate crime indictment. If the attackers are black and the target is white, there is no penalty or indictment, but the attackers get to see themselves on YouTube in a sort of not-quite-instant replay. When speaking of his signature “achievement”, the now rechristened Affordable Care Act, Obama droned on about the 10, 20, 30 or 40 million Americans without health insurance. Apparently, the number of uninsured varied depending on how lucky he felt about immigration reform passing. He promised that the ACA would make sure that we would make progress, and change the paradigm of health insurance in this country to make sure those “folks” were covered. He unfortunately skipped over the part of his Progressive ObamaCare plan that in addition to giving those without health insurance coverage, something between 90 million and 125 million other Americans would lose the coverage that they already had. Oops! But it sure is change, isn’t it? Change doesn’t always mean progress toward a better world, a concept that Obama either fails to realize, or is unwilling to deal with because his ego will not admit that anything he involves himself with could possibly have an undesirable outcome. No doubt Hitler, Stalin and Lenin, Castro, Chavez, and others who have referred to themselves as Progressives, had similar thoughts when they began to change their respective nations. We can see, looking through the lens of history, just how well their visions of “progress” turned out. They were wrong. Dead wrong. And right now it looks like the name Barack Hussein Obama’s name will be added to that list. I hope the President’s thesaurus shows the word “infamous” as a synonym for “transformative”. At least then it actually would be accurate.

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