If Elected (A Fantasy)

By Alan Caruba

I suppose we all wonder what we would do if elected President of the United States. In the run-up to the 2012 elections we will first have the primaries in which the candidates seek the nomination of their party.

It will be easier on Democrats because no one expects Barack Hussein Obama to face any opposition. That’s good news for the Republicans because there hasn’t been a President this incompetent since Jimmy Carter and never one as malevolent.

The Republicans have a surfeit of rather good candidates from which to choose. I do not agree with everything each one says and I have some concerns about some of the positions some have already taken, but the only way to keep the nation from being deliberately destroyed by progressive policies and legislation will be to remove Democrats and RINOs from office.

Twenty-six States have joined in a court case against the implementation of Obamacare and the House of Representatives has voted to repeal it. It was, if you recall, the central focus of Obama’s first two years in office. During those two years unemployment increased and the value of the dollar declined. He didn’t take notice until it came time to run for the office again. Famously, he called them “bumps in the road.”

So, if elected, what would I do? Here’s my fantasy!

I would make shutting down the Environmental Protection Agency a priority. It is a rogue agency that appears to think it is not accountable to Congress or the American people. It is filled with fanatics who have no regard for real science. It is costing the nations jobs and thwarting our energy needs. If I was President there would be no further mention of “global warming” or “climate change.” The climate is always changing; it’s called “the seasons” or “warming and cooling cycles.” There will be no regulation of carbon dioxide. That’s a scam.

I would shut down the Department of Education next. This department has almost single-handedly destroyed education in the nation, depriving all those passing through the government schools of knowledge of the U.S. Constitution and how the nation is governed. It has foisted “fuzzy” math on them. Mostly, though, teachers have been told they are “agents of change” responsible to indoctrinate students with liberal views including the odd notion that they can choose their gender and should be taught homosexual practices.

I would begin to strengthen our defense capability because we are going to need a larger navy, an Air Force with newer fleets of aircraft, and other improvements in an age of digital warfare. At the same time, I would begin to draw down the large numbers of troops still in Afghanistan and Iraq. Let them fight their own terrorists. If Iran continues to make threats, I would light up the skies over military and nuclear facilities in a fashion comparable to the elimination of Osama bin Laden. It would be quick and lethal.

I would install a missile shield in Poland as formerly promised, provide military assistance to Israel and make it known that a threat or an attack on Israel will be regarded as an attack on the U.S.A. We offer this protection to Taiwan, as well as Japan and South Korea.

I would restructure the Department of Homeland Security and put someone serious in charge. Currently it is just a monstrous bureaucracy. Those airport pat-downs would be among the first programs to go.

I will make it known to the Department of Energy that I want more energy, not less. Therefore I want to see permits being issued for exploration and extraction of oil, natural gas, and coal. I like coal-fired plants that generate electricity. I like nuclear power. I like pipelines to ensure we get what we need when we need it.

I would build a tall fence between the United States and Mexico. Even though we are economic partners in many ways, it has long been Mexico’s policy to send its people north so they can take jobs from Americans and send money back to Mexico. That has to stop along with the wholesale invasion of our nation. Illegal aliens would be told they have six months to either apply for naturalization or go home. No more free schooling, hospitals, and welfare.

I would withdraw the U.S. from the United Nations. I would tell the UN to find new headquarters elsewhere. As corrupt as it was under Kofi Annan, it is even worse under Ban Ki-moon, the latest Secretary General.

I would cut the individual and corporate tax rates so people have more of their own money to spend as they wish, save or invest. I would create a commission whose mission is to identify regulations that need to be ended. And, yes, I would restructure Social Security and Medicare so they don’t go broke.

All federal departments and agencies would see their budgets reduced and there would have to be a reduction in force across the boards. The government is simply too big and wastes money like a demented Willy Wonka candy factory. The savings would be plowed back into debt reduction. And, while I was at it, I would put the U.S. back on the gold standard. Right now our dollars are based on nothing but a promise.

I could go on, but I promise I will not take up golf, though I am likely to install a pool table in the West Wing.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → If Elected (A Fantasy)

Our National Day of Prayer

By Alan Caruba

Thursday, May 5, is our National Day of Prayer. Among my many friends few regularly attend a house of prayer, nor even believe in a greater power.

I have heard it said that “Courage is fear that has said a prayer” and every time I get a request to say a prayer for someone who is ill, has passed away, is facing some adversity, I pause to do so. My favorite and most constant prayer is “Thank you” for my health, my family, my friends, my life.

The greater power to whom I address my prayers has no face, nor form, but one cannot see the beauty or experience the power of the planet we share without being impressed by an unseen intelligence and the physics and the poetry that it reflects it.

In 1952, President Harry Truman proposed that one day a year should be designated a National Day of Prayer. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan designated the first Thursday in May as the National Day of Prayer.

On June 28, 2006, Barack Obama said, “Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation—at least, not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of non-believers.” In 2002, however, 82% of all Americans were Christians while other faiths constituted about 1% each.

Obama is wrong. America was and is a Christian nation, formed as much by its values as by natural law and the precedents of English law. The Founding Fathers all believed that a democracy could succeed and survive only if led by men of virtue.

In March 2009, CNN reported that ”America is a less Christian nation than it was 20 years ago, and Christianity is not losing out to other religions, but primarily to a rejection of religion altogether, a survey published Monday found.”

“Seventy-five percent of Americans call themselves Christian, according to the American Religious Identification Survey from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1990, the figure was 86 percent.”

On May 6, 2009, The Washington Times reported that, ”President Obama is distancing himself from the National Day of Prayer by nixing a formal early morning service and not attending a large Catholic prayer breakfast the next morning.

On April 29th, Obama signed an obligatory Presidential Proclamation—National Day of Prayer, in a statement that said “The Congress, by Public Law 100-307, as amended, has called on the President to issue each year a proclamation designating the first Thursday in May as a “National Day of Prayer.”

Americans have always expected their elected leader to possess some measure of religious commitment and, beginning with the election of John F. Kennedy, the long resistance to having a Catholic in office ended. Jimmy Carter was known to have taught Sunday school classes and was a “born again” Christian. Ronald Reagan did not wear his faith on his sleeve, but there was never any doubt that he possessed it. George W. Bush was proud to be a “born again” Christian.

So what faith does Barack Obama profess? After twenty years attending a Black Liberation church in Chicago and having been married by its pastor, Jeremiah Wright, he was required to denounce him during the 2008 campaign for having said “God damn America.”

He professes to be a Christian, but from his first day in office, Obama has demonstrated a strong “tilt” toward Muslim nations and, as time went on, an unseemly and dangerous animus toward the Jewish homeland, Israel.

In a nation that is still predominantly Christian, but also the gracious and tolerant home to believers of the world’s other religions, signing a proclamation declaring the National Day of Prayer is an official act, part of the duty of any President.

For the first time since he became President, Obama will be in New York to lay a wreath at Ground Zero on Thursday, but it has already been announced that he will not release the photos of bin Laden’s death. He has thus thwarted the desire of all Americans and many others for true closure.

Many believe that America these days is in great need of prayer. It is good to know that the nation has set aside a day to remind us of the power of prayer.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Our National Day of Prayer

The Smartest Man in the Room?

By Alan Caruba

Harry S. Truman did not have a formal college education and George Washington acquired enough education to become largely self-taught thereafter. All the other presidents had a diploma.

In his youth Truman was too busy working the family farm, fighting in World War One, and failing at business. Hardly the most encouraging resume at first glance, but after learning politics at the knee of Tom Pendergast, the famed Kansas political boss, Truman went on to have a distinguished career in Congress and to be selected to be vice president on the ticket with Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Then, on April 12, 1945, Roosevelt died. Truman would become the president who ended World War Two in the Pacific with two A-bombs on Japanese cities even as the emperor and his advisors were still set to resist an invasion that would have cost the lives of an estimated half million or more American fighting men. Truman then set in motion the resistance to Soviet aggression—the Cold War—and in general made a succession of very good decisions at a very critical time in U.S. history.

By contrast, Herbert Hoover had earlier made his way to the presidency by demonstrating the application of his skills as an engineer and administrator, but the onset of the Great Depression defied his efforts to reverse it, lacking as he did much background in economics. Historians agree that Roosevelt, who replaced him, was a poor student and lacked any judgment whatever in economics. This contributed greatly to his prolonging the Depression to an interminable ten years that were ended only by the onslaught of World War Two; a kind of full-employment program.

An earlier brainiac was Woodrow Wilson. He received a Ph.D. in history and political science from Johns Hopkins University in history, became president of Princeton University, and was elected Governor of New Jersey before assuming the U.S. presidency. By any academic measure, Wilson seemed ideally prepared for the job, but he was a progressive and an ideologue. His failed struggle to get the U.S. Senate to ratify membership in the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations, may have led to a stroke that disabled him, rendering his final year in office a charade.

Ronald Reagan, who was widely derided by his critics as an amiable dunce, had earned a BA degree from Eureka College, Illinois, in 1932 but never stopped educating himself, particularly regarding conservative principles of governance. His election came in the wake of the disastrous single term of Jimmy Carter, an engineer by education, a peanut farmer by occupation, and an embarrassment to the nation by embracing every dictator he ever met.

George W. Bush holds two degrees, a BA from Yale, 1968, and a Masters in Business Administration from Harvard University in 1975. He, too, was constantly portrayed in the press as a fool, often because of his syntax, in contrast to Reagan who was hailed the great communicator. Saddam Hussein underestimated Bush and his father. So did others.

I cite this history only because, during the campaign, and during his first year in office, Barack Hussein Obama was constantly hailed the most brilliant man to have ever ascended to the presidency. A graduate of Columbia University and later Harvard Law School (neither transcript of his grades is available), Americans were reassured time and again that he was the proverbial “smartest man in the room” and there is little doubt he still believes that.

Obama surrounded himself with academics in his cabinet and among the many “czars” he selected to advise him and set policy, the latter without the benefit of being vetted by Congress. Of those who had experience in the private sector, Wilson’s cabinet constituted 52%; Hoover’s 42%; Roosevelt’s 50%; Reagan’s 56%, George W. Bush, 55%, and Obama? A mere 8%! His initial advisors on the economy have already departed for their respective ivory towers, still baffled by an official unemployment rate of 9.6%.

It became noticeable early on, particularly during press conferences (which became few and far between), that Obama was unable to answer a question in anything less than several minutes of tendentious and wandering effort.

He was, we were told, an academic who had taught the U.S. Constitution at the University of Chicago, but he was no professor. He was more like an adjunct, a part-timer brought in to relieve the faculty of minor teaching chores; in his case teaching a course about the Constitution.

Despite this, Obama has demonstrated an abysmal lack of understanding of the Constitution, regarding it as being more a “charter of negative liberties.” Apparently, the Bill of Rights that restricts government from denying freedom of speech, press, religion, and the right to peacefully assemble are “negative” things in his view.

More specifically, Obama does not “get” America. He does not understand its entrepreneurial spirit. He has a low regard for the power centers of capitalism, Wall Street, the insurance industry, the giants of pharmaceutical, medical, chemical and technological innovation; those who have brought about computer and Internet-related advances.

At the time of the nation’s birth, America was blessed with some of the finest minds available for the task. They included, in addition to Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, and a certifiable genius, Benjamin Franklin. When the original Articles of Confederation didn’t work, they and others got together in Philadelphia, shut the doors, and hammered out the Constitution.

When one looks at the array of men and women in high public office today, it is hard not to conclude that most are imbeciles.

The mere thought that the nation’s security has been entrusted to Janet Napolitano or its health to Kathleen Sebelius is enough to keep one up at night, but what is most obvious is that Barack Obama is just not smart. Not street smart. Not academically smart. Not people smart. But smart enough to have gotten elected, the politician’s idea of smart.

We are left to hope the nation can survive him long enough to repair the damage he will leave in his wake.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → The Smartest Man in the Room?