Lest We Forget: OBAMA Is America’s Sputnik Moment

Obama talked about America facing a “Sputnik moment” last night.  For the record, “Sputnik” was a Soviet successful satellite that stunned America out of its complacency.  America entered the space race with a vengeance, and won it by a knockout.  Obama exploited that moment,  pointed out that America is watching the world go past us, and says we need to be competitive by pursuing massive government spending oops I mean “investment.”

A write up from Slate:

But he did evoke a huge defense issue from a half-century ago—the signal wake-up security call that marked the years of transition from Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy, the single word that has symbolized ever since the fear of slipping behind in a dangerous world: Sputnik.

“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” Obama said. As a result, we need to fund “a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the space race.”

Well, at the heart of Obama’s State of the Union speech were many contradictions.  And I’ll get to them.  But his “Sputnik moment” thing was the worst one of all.

Allow me to cite a couple of my own articles to document just how stunningly pathetic Obama’s analogy truly is:

Space Program: Obama’s Strategy To Turn America Into Banana Republic Moving Like Clockwork

When American Greatness Is Gone, And When NASA = ‘National Aeronautics and Sharia Administration’

The first article above documents how Obama has been GUTTING the space program, and in fact RETURNING AMERICA to the pre-Sputnik vulnerability.  To the disgust and open contempt of former NASA heroes.  And the second documents how Obama has turned the now disgraced NASA into yet another tool for political correctness.

And to make sure you realize how pathetically laughable Obama’s analogy is, let’s make sure we understand that Sputnik was a Russian threat, and then let’s make sure we understand how Obama has helped undermine American interests to advance the Russians with yet another title:

Obama’s Treasonous Lies Help Russia Punk America

That one documents how Obama has undermined America’s missile defense program.  And the actual Sputnik moment was all about dealing with Russian missiles.

This guy’s talking about our Sputnik moment?  Seriously?

Conservatives had already debunked many of Obama’s lies last night before he even told them.  I’ve debunked those lies right here.

This is why Senator Jim DeMint said after Obama’s latest speech, “It’s hard to take the president seriously.”

But sadly we must take Obama seriously.  Because Obama’s real political genius comes down to one simple thing: he realized that the people who support him are stupid and ignorant, don’t know a damn thing that the incredibly biased media machine doesn’t tell them, and that he can therefore spit out anything and not get caught by much of America in his deceit.

Obama is our Sputnik moment.  By which I mean, this turd-in-chief and his policies are the reason that we are failing and falling behind while other nations around us rise up and overtake us.

One of the other major contradictions of Obama’s speech are that he is essentially acting as if the previous two years didn’t happen.  “Nothing to see over there, folks, now if you don’t mind looking this way.” Obama is saying that we need a major new “investment” (which is a tidy euphemism for yet more government pork), when in fact he has already “invested” well over a trillion dollars with absolutely nothing to show for it but more debt and more deficits than this nation has ever seen before.

Which is why DeMint said:

When asked about President Obama’s statements about government investments, DeMint said, “Now the president is promising more spending, which he calls investments, when the time is to cut spending in Washington.. The president needs to tell the American people the truth.. That its time for the federal government to do less.”

Let’s look at Obama’s trillions in “investment” and see what effect it has had on our “competitiveness”:

Why Is American Unemployment Under Obama Rising Faster Than In Other Countries?

The Dirty Secret About Our Unemployment Rate

Obama Stimulus Is Reason Why Our Unemployment So Much Higher Than Others

In other words, there is an inversely proportional comparison to Obama’s stimulus and American “competitiveness.”

And US government spending has little or nothing to such competitiveness.  Take a look at our education spending:

U.S. tops the world in school spending but not test scores

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States spends more public and private money on education than other major countries, but its performance doesn’t measure up in areas ranging from high-school graduation rates to test scores in math, reading and science, a new report shows.

That dates back to 2003.  Look before that, look after that, and the results are the same.  We spend and spend and spend while our kids get dumber and dumber and dumber.  To the extent that right now only a third of our kids are considered proficient in major subjects.

Here’s the problem: liberals call for more and more and more spending, but liberals make sure that all the largess goes to them, and goes to their politically connected interests.  Like the liberal teachers unions that are the REAL reason our country is falling behind in education.  And to the extent we spend more, we only feed the beast that is the REAL source of our dilemma and help build it into an even BIGGER problem as it uses its vast resources to protect the status quo.

Obama wants to spend billions on “green energy.”  What that means is that he wants to subsidize incredibly expensive and NON-Competitive energy sources while our rivals continue to run circles around us with cheap and efficient oil and coal.  And the more and the faster we spend, the more and the faster we fall behind.

The real sputnik moment, epitomized in the person of Obama himself, is this: America is spending itself into extinction.  It is not wise spending, because we are sucking money out of the efficient private sector, giving to an incredibly inefficient and wasteful federal government, and then doling it out on the basis of political patronage rather than common sense.

I’ll end with this: Obama is using a “mangled multiplier” as his basis for the need for more government spending.  On Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s distorted view, for every dollar the federal government spends, we get a $1.55 “bang for our buck.”  But it isn’t true.  Unless you really think building tunnels for turtles, bridges to nowhere and studying cow flatulence is going to make America great.  On the International Monetary Fund model, which just makes more sense in addition to being less ideologically biased, we only get back 70 cents for every dollar spent.  See this article for the documentation on that, and check out this graph:

In his SOTU speech, Obama provided an airplane metaphor that went:

“Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you’ll feel the impact.”

On Obama’s metaphor, government is the engine that flies our economy.  And if you reduce government spending, you eliminate the engine and the plane crashes.  But that simply isn’t true; it is PRIVATE spending that flies our economy.  And sucking money out of the private sector to create more government bureaucracy and more pork-barrel spending is foolhardy.  It is actually OBAMA who is actually removing the engine from our economy.

If we really want to experience a “Sputnik moment” and surge back to greatness, what we need to do is wake up and vote out Obama and the Democrat Party.

Obama Regime Has Done Everything Possible To Halt Gulf Oil Spill Cleanup

Stop and think about it for a second.  We could have burned the oil – as per the original contingency plan that had been on the books since 1994.  But the Obama regime wouldn’t allow it.  We could have used dispersants to break down the oil and make it easier to deal with.  But the Obama regime wouldn’t allow it.  We could have borrowed skimmers – and all kinds of other critical equipment and clean-up know-how – from all over the world to collect the oil.  But the Obama regime wouldn’t allow it.  We could have used hundreds of miles of boom that were literally sitting unused in warehouses.  But the Obama regime didn’t bother to obtain it.  We could have built sand berms that would have blocked the oil from reaching the most critical coastal areas.  But the Obama regime has done everything possible to stop it.

June 24, 2010
Feds halt work on LA sand berms
Jeannie DeAngelis

Sand berms are an insurance policy meant to protect the Louisiana coastline from oil spill damage.  The Louisiana sand berm venture involves moving “sand from a mile out in the Gulf of Mexico and pumping it closer in to shore to build manmade barrier islands.”

Nevertheless, lacking a more formidable idea and one week into the project the federal government decided to shut “down the dredging that was being done to create protective sand berms in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Louisiana’s Republican Governor Bobby Jindal staunchly supports protecting the coastline with a sandy barricade, which may explain why the “berm issue has created its own toxic friction between Louisiana and the Obama Administration.”

It seems that ever since Obama took over the reins of reason the government’s first-and-foremost effort is directed at implementing the illogical, obstructing progress and public wellbeing and placing the vulnerable at risk.

Thus, while the duffer- president concentrates on sand bunkers on the golf course, the environmentally alert, “Obama Administration has asked for a halt on dredging sand berms off the Chandeleur Islands … until the project can be relocated farther into the gulf.

Federal costs, environmental concerns and efficiency are likely at the center of the controversy.  As a result, the coast of Louisiana is officially the first victim whose future is at the mercy of an Obama-style “death panel.” Bureaucratic technicalities will determine the extent of damage that will ensue before federal approbation either, administers critical care, or just allows the patient to die, one or the other.

If Obama refuses to lift the ban on the dredging plan Plaquemines Parish President, Billy Nungesser might be the next one called in for a presidential reprimand for public insubordination.

Nungesser, “one of the most vocal advocates of the dredging plan, sent a letter to President Barack Obama, pleading for the work to continue.”  The outspoken sand-berm proponent claims, “Once again, our government resource agencies, which are intended to protect us, are now leaving us vulnerable to the destruction of our coastline and marshes by the impending oil.”

Billy Nungesser targeted Obama as the only “hope for continuing the work.” In an unforgiving dispatch Billy outlined viable options for the President to consider.  Nungesser begged, “Don’t shut us down, let us lay the pipe three miles out and then … move the dredge so we will be down less than a day and we’ll refill the hole.”

Nungesser reminded Obama of the “threat of hurricanes or tropical storms,” which would put the Gulf coast “at an increased risk for devastation … from the intrusion of oil.”

What Nungesser fails to grasp is how a hurricane or tropical storm, coupled with tornadoes of spinning oil would be tailor made for an administration that cultivates and exploits any crisis that fortuitously comes along.

You’re not supposed to notice that Obama’s death panel machine is alive and well, and just waiting to get its chance to decide who lives and who dies in your home.

This disaster of failed leadership comes right after the Obama regime stopped boats involved in vital clean-up efforts for more than a day at a time to ensure that they had fire extinguishers, life jackets, and every single other inane bureaucratic regulation they could think of.

Day 66.  And counting.  Sixty-six days of abject failure.  And even the left recognizes that Obama has been an abject failure.

Instead, we’ve had a bunch of Obama photo ops.  Instead, we’ve had Obama walking on the beach in slacks stopping and stooping to pick up a few tar balls.  Instead, we’ve had a collection of demagogic “here’s someone else you can blame instead of me” speeches.

Obama was previously calling meetings on the subject of whose ass he should kick (needing the bureaucracy of a staff meeting to figure it out).  But he never considered that his own scrawny ass needed a good hard kicking.

As we consider Obama’s failure in the Gulf, let’s not forget that:

Barack Obama took more money from BP than any politician over a twenty year period.  In spite of the fact that he had only been in national politics for less than three years.  Barack Obama’s administration approved the project and granted the permit for the doomed BP drilling site.  Barack Obama’s administration helped quash environmental problems and issued an environmental waiver to BP at said doomed site only days before the disaster.  Barack Obama failed to take the disaster seriously and delayed serious action for weeks, fiddling with fundraisers, golf outings, and vacations while the Gulf went to hell.  The Obama administration has continued to delay and waste time pursuing the dotting of the i’s and the crossing of the t’s regarding mindless bureaucratic inanities.

And what has Obama proposed as his solution?  Nothing that could cap the damn hole, but his socialist cap-and-trade which he himself said would cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket.”  In the spirit of never letting a good crisis go to waste, Obama has stoked the boilers for more Marxism.  And the more oil that pours across our coasts, the better.

What has Obama proposed?  He has proposed a ban, or moratorium, on offshore drilling.  Would this cost a permanent loss of tens of thousands of jobs (in fact, well over 100,000 jobs) as drilling platform operators relocate long-term to other countries?  Of course it would.  Would it in fact actually result in more danger to the environment, as it would entail capping and then eventually uncapping wells – the most dangerous part of the entire drilling procedure, as we should frankly all realize by now?  Of course it would.  Would it effectively amount to a ban on ALL American drilling, such that we were at the complete mercy of foreign oil who presumably have the basic intelligence to not undermine their own economies and their own security?  Of course it would.

Fortunately, a judge struck down Obama’s newest naked power grab as “overbearing,” “rash,” and “heavy handed.”  In other words, Obama acted in an incredibly Stalinist manner, didn’t he?

You’d almost think Obama was the Manchurian President, destroying America on purpose in his pursuit of the Cloward and Piven strategy for a Marxist America.  It has got to be either that, or he is so shockingly incompetent that it is utterly unreal.  Which scenario is more the frightening, I frankly don’t know.