Convention Round Up …

They came to praise Obama and they may have succeeded in burying him. But it was not the rhapsodizing of his virtues as husband, father and all around saint that fell short.

Former president, disbarred lawyer, perjurer, and sexual predator, Bill Clinton pranced and preened while delivering effusive praise for Obama.  Never mind that the great O gutted Clinton’s signature welfare reform legislation or that the two men can barely tolerate each other.

They tapped Jimmy Carter, via video, arguably the worst president in the nation’s history, to pay homage to the second worst; or maybe it’s the other way around.

The opening acts did what opening acts are intended to do. They warmed up the audience for the main attraction.

But the ‘main attraction’ was full of sound and fury (apologies to Shakespeare) signifying nothing. Charles Krauthammer characterized the president’s speech as “one of the emptiest I’ve ever heard on a national stage.”

Other than almost pleading for a second term and knocking his Republican opponents, he supplied no reason for four more years of the same policies that made this recession longer and deeper than any in our history.

The cynicism behind the choice of speakers and events was difficult to miss.  They staged a paean to Ted Kennedy of Chappaquiddick fame, the man who left a woman to drown after driving his car off a bridge and didn’t report it until he had time to consult with political operatives the next day. Perhaps Kennedy deserved to be resurrected via a 1994 campaign video attack on Romney. A zombie, according to Wikipedia, is “an animated corpse brought back to life by mystical means, such as witchcraft ” or, in this case, Democrats.

And let’s not forget Debbie Wasserman-Shultz who, when confronted with her lies about Mitt Romney, asserted, “It doesn’t matter.” Presumably, it also doesn’t matter that she attributed criticisms of Republicans to Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren that the diplomat categorically denies ever having said.

However, when it comes to telling howlers, Obama beats all comers. Rather than admitting his policies have failed, President Obama resorts to often startling prevarications about his administration’s record.

Most recently on the campaign trail, the president bragged that he saved the American auto industry. “So now,’ he said, I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.”

Heaven help the country if he does the same thing to “every industry.” According to Investor Business Daily, GM and GMAC together still owe the biggest share of the remaining $119 billion TARP debt. In fact, the special inspector general’s report monitoring the TARP bailout points out, it’s not clear that GM even repaid what it’s gotten credit for repaying. “As part of a credit agreement with Treasury, $16.4 billion in TARP funds were placed in an escrow account that GM could access only with Treasury’s permission.” GM got Treasury’s OK to “repay” more than $6.7 billion “using a portion of the escrow account that had been funded with TARP funds.” So GM is merely paying the government back with taxpayers’ money, not money earned by selling cars.

In the current issue of “Claremont Review of Books,” Charles Kesler (“The Crisis of Liberalism”) summarized Obama’s deeply flawed approach to governance.

“Even as Greece proved insolvent and many other European countries teetered on the brink, Obama’s policies on health care, taxation, and regulation pushed America further toward the European model of social democracy. In affect, his audacity made the problems of the welfare state worse and more urgent. His policies made the chronic inability of big government to ‘make payroll’ as William Voegeli dubs it, that much more acute. The advent of the true crisis of the welfare state has been accelerated, the hole into which it will plunge the economy dug deeper, and the options for dealing with chronic shortfalls made worse. The Marxists call this policy of speeding up the social and political reckoning  ‘heightening the contradictions.’ It’s possible that Obama wants to heighten the contradictions in order to bring about a crisis of the American welfare state that would be solved by engorging another 10 or 20% of the American economy: the Swedenization of America.“

Kesler points out that we don’t know Obama’s true intentions, but “the welfare state cannot continue indefinitely along the same paths*”…

So the question in November is: Do we give him another four years to find out?

*“According to the Congressional Budget Office, by 2025 Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the interest on the federal debt, will consume all – all – federal revenues, leaving defense and all other expenditures to be paid for by borrowing; and the debt will be approaching twice the annual GDP.”