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:
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:
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.
Tags: airplane, competitive, competitiveness, DeMint, education, engine, Europe, green energy, hard to take the president seriously, investment, like the last two years didn't happen, missile defense, multiplier effect, Muslims, NASA, NASA funding, Obama, oil, other countries, overloaded, plane, Russians, schools, Soviets, spending, Sputnik moment, State of the Union, stimulus, teachers' unions, world
Start Thinking Right 
January 27, 2011 at 1:08 am
I had about the same thoughts when Obama’s Sputnik analogy was reported here in Sweden.
The comparison between the fifties, sixties and today is ridiculous, because the western society was totally different from today. People were prepared to work hard or face the consequences. People lived by the classical moral and family values and, as a result of that, had less complicated relations. The “Make love not war”, the “Turn on, tune in, drop out” philosophies and other stupid ideas were not yet invented or had not yet gained big impact on the society. All negative ratings such as those for drug abuse, criminality, divorces, prostitution, etc, were lower. People felt safe and secure in their neighborhood, at their jobs, at school.
Of course, there were important economical factors that boosted the economies of North America and Western Europe, but without the right human resources such factors are worthless. The right human resources are nowadays in short supply, in relation to the total population and the needs for continuous economic growth.
January 27, 2011 at 6:58 pm
In addition to all the things that you say is true, I would add something else.
Obama is presenting himself and being presented by the media at large, as some “Reagan reincarnated.”
Time Magazine just came out with a cover in which Ronald Reagan is photo-shopped to appear to be embracing Obama.
The message that the White House and the media have is that if you’re really smart, you’d realize that Obama doesn’t really have the completely opposite agenda from Reagan. They’re cut from the same cloth.
Let’s forget the fact that Obama wrote in one of his books that he wanted to become president to literally undo everything that Reagan did.
When a Democrat gets into trouble, does he go back to LBJ??? Jimmy Carter??? No. He covers himself up with Ronald Reagan. Because deep down these people know that the American people don’t want their garbage, and therefore seek to masquerade themselves in somebody and something that they have no connection to at all.