When Does Barack Obama Ever Intend to Cut Debt ?

When Mr Barack Obama became president in January 2009, the total federal debt stood at $10.6 trillion. This week it hit $16.7 trillion -- an increase of 57% !  In the same time frame under President George Bush, total federal debt rose 38%. Under President Bill Clinton it rose 32% . But the debt is still sure to go up, not down, for now as the Republicans offer an olive branch to the recalcitrant Obama.

House Republicans leaders said on Friday they will offer a temporary increase in the federal debt ceiling in exchange for negotiations with the President on longer-term ''pressing problems,'' but they stopped short of agreeing to end a government shutdown now in its 12th day. In a news briefing following a closed-door meeting of House Republicans to present a plan to raise the debt limit for six weeks, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said, ''What we want to do is offer the president today the ability to move a temporary increase in the debt ceiling.'' He described the offer as a ''good-faith effort on our part to move halfway to what he's demanding in order to have these conversations begin and a step toward a fiscal truce.''

Of course, the mainstream media has decided who its villain is. Media Research Center, a conservative media-watchdog group, found that in 19 stories in the two weeks leading to the shutdown, CBS, ABC, and NBC blamed Republicans 21 times for failing to reach a budget agreement, both parties four times, and didn't once blame the spend-thrift Democrats. In the 14 other instances, the reports blamed nobody. So it's not surprising that the overwhelming tendency of the leftist media to blame the Republicans alone.

In fact, I remind you that there are two sides to this dispute as any rational person would expect. You see, the reality is that both parties are responsible for getting to this political impasse. Remember, Americans chose a divided government in 2010 and again in 2012, electing House Republicans as a check on the Democrats whose undiluted liberalism (read...socialism) alarmed millions of voters when they ran the entire government in 2009-2010 and spent like ''drunken sailors.'' GOP Senator Ted Cruz was criticized for his strategy to make defunding ObamaCare a requirement of funding the rest of the government. He and his allies know that Mr Obama can never agree to that, and even millions of Americans who oppose ObamaCare don't agree with his shutdown ultimatum.

Senator Ted Cruz  ----  & --- Rep John Boehner

Yet it takes two to tangle, and Mr Obama is as much to blame for the partisan pileup as Mr Cruz. He refuses to negotiate at all over an increase in the federal debt limit, claiming this has never happened. Like so much that comes out of his mouth.....he knows this is false. Clinton had a similar problem with the Republicans in 1995-96 with a threat of a shutdown and being the diplomat that he is, he massaged the congressmen's egos and resolved the crisis. Not so with this self-centered, aloof president who has never had a urge to get into backslapping and genuinely meeting with the opposition.

Mr Obama also refuses to bend on any part of that abortion called ObamaCare -- except when he unilaterally announces bending in his own political interest. He decided on his own, and contrary to the plain text of the law, to delay for a year the business mandate to provide insurance for employees. Yet now he'd rather see the government shut down than accept the ObamaCare compromises that  House Republicans have put in their government funding bill. He refuses to delay the law for a year though his own actions reveal it is not ready for prime time. Retired paediatric neurosurgeon Dr Benjamin Carson unleashed his strongest attack yet on ObamaCare yesterday, saying that Obama's Affordable Health Care policy was ''the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery. It is slavey, in a way, because it is making us all subservient to the government!''

One remarkable aspect of the shutdown/debt limit battle is the irresponsibility (on the part of the Obama administration) and incompetence (on the part of the news media) concerning the claim that the federal government will default on its debt obligations if Congress fails to raise the debt limit. It's all BullShit! There is no threat of default. Constitutionally, as Obama, with a law degree in Constitutional Law would know, the federal government must pay its debts. The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 4 -- is universally understood to mean that the federal government must pay its debt obligations, both principal and interest, even if that means prioritizing debt service over the government's spending. So the question is, if Congress does not raise the current debt ceiling, will the federal government run out of money needed to pay its existing debts? The answer is clearly NO!


Over the past week we have witnessed the impressive ''shutdown theater'' engineered by a spiteful Obama administration. By shutdown theatre I am referring to the closing or barricading of such landmarks as the WWII memorial, Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Iwo Jima Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. Many National Parks were closed and even the Statue of Liberty was off-limits! The stupidity of shutting down Mount Rushmore ( photo right ) had the National Park Service (NPS) barricading off scenic overlooks with witches-hats so people couldn't pull over to view the monument. In Nevada the NPS ordered an elderly couple (aged 77 and 80) out of their owned-home which sits on federal land citing the government shutdown.

The Way I See It....President Obama has made a fool out of himself by going to absurd lengths to dramatize the supposed consequences of the 17% shutdown. Here, as in many other instances, the government has taken measures that save zero dollars, and actually cost money, solely to try to inconvenience the public (half of them being the idiots who voted for him). This is a scandal that the press has tried unsuccessfully, to cover up. The nationwide shutdowns has exposed just how over-mighty the government - Obama's government, that is -- really is. He is utterly confident in the cover that the lamestream media will provide for him.

Tactics are one thing, but substance is another. It's the Democrats who have mocked the very notion of settled law. It's the Democrats who voted down the reopening of substantial parts of the government. It's the Democrats who gave life to a spontaneous, authentic, small-government opposition --a.k.a. the tea party -- with their unilateral imposition of a transformational agenda during the brief interval when they held a monopoly of power. So in actuality, ObamaCare was never about healthcare....it was about control.