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’s Berlin Speech Reveals Europeans Gutless On Terror

Correspondent Major Garrett filed this report for Fox News Special Report that appeared Thursday, July 25, on Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin, Germany:

MAJOR GARRETT: The scene, unprecedented in contemporary European politics, was unlike any a U.S. presidential nominee ever had the audacity to expect, or the cultural candlepower to attract. But to the upbeat throngs estimated by Berlin police to be in excess of 200,000 Obama did not sing a sweet song of hope and change. Instead he zeroed in on the threats of terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

OBAMA SPEECH VIDEO: “This is the moment when we must renew our resolve to rout the terrorists who threaten our security in Afghanistan, and the traffickers who sell drugs on your streets. No one welcomes war. I recognize the enormous difficulties in Afghanistan. But my country and yours have a stake in seeing that NATO’s first mission beyond Europe’s borders is a success. For the people of Afghanistan, and for our shared security, the work must be done. America cannot do this alone. The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, to develop their economy, and to help them rebuild their nation. We have too much at stake to turn back now.”

MAJOR GARRETT: That means Germany and other NATO nations must throw more into the battlefield in Afghanistan, where a resurgent Taliban and its terror-plotting al Qaeda allies have recently launched increasingly lethal attacks.”

As for Iran and its headlong pursuit of nuclear weaponry, Obama said While Europe may welcome his call for direct unconditional talks, europe must back such an initiative with a heretofore missing committment to using all economic and diplomatic tools to isolate and punish Iran if it proves intractable.

OBAMA SPEECH VIDEO: “This is the moment we must help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East. My country must stand with yours and with Europe in sending a direct message to Iran that it must abandon its nuclear ambitions. We must support the Lebanese who have marched and bled for democracy, and the Israelis and Palestinians who seek a secure and lasting peace. And despite past differences, this is the moment when the world should support the millions of Iraqis who seek to rebuild their lives, even as we pass responsibility to the Iraqi government and finally bring this war to a close.”

“A change of leadership in Washington will not lift this burden. In this new century, Americans and Europeans alike will be required to do more — not less.”

MAJOR GARRETT: On a continent weary of Pres. Bush Obama spoke of a new era, but hastened to add, if he’s elected, his administration will not represent a cost-free alternative to the status-quo.

The crowd, which did not applaud that much, filed quietly away. If Obama hoped his words would galvanize the audience and his message would thereby reverberate in capitals throughout Europe, there was no evidence of it. The tepid response may stand as a silent declaration that calls for new sacrifice and anti-terror tenacity – whether spoken by the current president or the presumptive Democratic nominee – meets similar European skepticism.

Garrett noted that Obama’s speech did garner some applause lines – on the issues of global warming, a call for “just peace” between Israel and the Palestinas, and especially on the call to end the war in Iraq.

But the real story was the absence of applause on Obama’s presentation of his foreign policy.

One of the biggest delusions Democrats suffer from is the perception that if only their guy were president, the world would love us. They believe that Europeans hate President Bush because he’s a cowboy who ignored them and decided to do it all on his own.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

We saw a little bit of the real problem in Berlin on Thursday: if Barack Obama wants to stand up to terrorists and demand Iran renounce its nuclear weaponry, he better expect that he will be acting alone.

Europeans are not willing to sacrifice. They don’t want to “renew their resolve to rout the terrorists.” They don’t want to have a stake in seeing the NATO mission in Afghanistan is a success. They don’t want to send troops to Afghanistan. They don’t want to send “a direct message to Iran that it must abandon its nuclear ambitions.” They don’t want to commit to “using all economic and diplomatic tools to isolate and punish Iran.” They don’t want to “be required to do more–not less.”

Now, personally, I don’t really believe that Barack Obama wants any of this either. I think he was simply pandering to American public opinion and mouthing the slogans that Americans want to hear from a man they rightly believe is weak on foreign policy.

But don’t expect squat from Europe if you want to stand up and act in order to secure a better and safer world.

I came across an interesting article titled, “Why Europeans Doubt Colombia’s Hostage Rescue,” that sheds some light on European’s attitude.

The story presents the fact that European papers and television across the continent were presenting and believing the myth that Columbia bribed the terrorist organization FARC to release the hostages, and the rescue by the army was just a ruse. It provides details of how France, Denmark, Italy, Germany, and Spain have paid one ransom after another for hostages. And then it concludes:

European friends of the FARC are angry. How dare Colombia join the ranks of Britain, Israel, and the United States by refusing to negotiate with terrorists? How dare Colombia disprove the European mantra that all conflicts be resolved through diplomacy? How dare Colombia upstage post-heroic Europeans who, having lost the will to fight, believe anything can be bought for money?

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe summed it up well: “There are some who are bitter and who are seeking to discredit the operation. But these bitter people only know Colombia from afar. Aloof Europeans, what do they know about Colombian ingenuity? They believe that Colombian genius lies with the FARC. Someday they will know these military boys who carried out this operation.”

The fact of the matter is that Europe looks at diplomacy, negotiation, and compromise as end-all solutions. Look at what they have accomplished, they would argue: we formed our European Union on the basis of compromise. We who were former enemies united; why can’t we likewise come together with opponents such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran?

What they don’t realize is that the United States of America has a rather enormous advantage of experience in the process of “uniting,” having done so nearly two centuries before Europe got into the act; that Americans aren’t much interested in hearing moral lectures on politics from the inventors of monarchism, communism, fascism, Nazism, and socialism; that the only reason Europeans aren’t speaking first German and after that Russian is because the United States stood up and fought for their freedom; and that Europeans ought to be therefore grateful enough and generous enough to stand with the United States as we continue to fight for the freedom of other oppressed peoples.

What Europeans have conveniently forgotten is that their freedom was won for them, and not by them. What they have forgotten was that their diplomacy, negotiation, and compromise didn’t mean squat to the Nazis or the Soviets; only American power and our willingness to use it mattered to these determined enemies of human freedom.

If Barack Obama becomes president (and, I must admit, there’s a part of me – and I’m ashamed to admit this – that wants Obama to get elected so that everyone can see just how spectacularly liberalism will fail) he will be shocked to discover that Europe will be nothing but an obstacle to his every effort to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

An article titled “Why Europe Won’t Sanction Iran” provides a lot of the underlying reasons for this behavior.

The reason President Bush ultimately was forced to attack Iraq was because France and Russia did everything they could to prevent any meaningful sanctions being applied to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in a corrupted and incompetent United Nations. We had good reasons for believing that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD, and were frustrated at every turn by Europe in obtaining the tough sanctions that would have forced Saddam to open up his program to inspection. Unable to obtain a diplomatic solution, we were forced to either attack or risk a WMD-armed Iraq.

And Russia and China are doing the same thing now in protecting Iran even as it is almost certainly developing a nuclear weapons program.

We’re going to see the same demand to let diplomacy and sanctions work – even as every meaningful effort at diplomacy and sanctions is thwarted; we’re going to see the same aversion to war – even as war becomes the only option; we’re going to see the same international condemnation and isolation all over again.

Or we’re going to see a nuclear-armed Iran that will be free to carry out terrorist campaigns by proxy and even shut down the Strait of Hormuz at will with absolute impunity.

Europeans have largely degenerated into Nietzsche’s portrayal of the “Last Man,” the end result of decades of creeping cynicism and mediocrity.

Today, Europeans are frankly both pathetic and apathetic. They won’t stand up for anything; they won’t fight for anything. The people who are literally dying out due to extremely low birth rates don’t care if they are consuming benefits paid for by massive debt that will crush the next generations after them. And their most cherished desire is that the mighty United States would be as weak, as pathetic, and as insignificant as they are.

Americans would have a different view of the world – and a different view of President George Bush – if they learned that lesson. It may take the election of a liberal president, and the crisis of a nuclear Iran, to drive that reality home.