In the sci-fi film “2010: The Year We Make Contact,” Presidential adviser Victor Milson describes a particularly ominous presidential address: “He invoked Lincoln. Whenever a president is going to get us in trouble, they always use Lincoln.”
Comrade Obama’s speech on the deficit is the most recent illustration of that axiom.
“We believe, in the words of our first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, that through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves,” intoned Obama, confident that his invocation to Abraham the Destroyer would sanctify the collectivist harangue that followed. That phrase served as the rhetorical pivot-point in his address: Like most American collectivists, Obama began the lecture with empty flattery for “rugged individualists” and “self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government.” He then appealed to the supposed authority of the greatest mass-murderer in American history as a prelude to outlining budget priorities that assume that there is no such thing as “too much” government.
“Around two-thirds of our budget is spent on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and national security,” Obama observed. “Programs like unemployment insurance, student loans, veterans’ benefits, and tax credits for working families take up another 20%. What’s left, after interest on the debt, is just 12 percent for everything else. That’s 12 percent for all of our other national priorities like education and clean energy; medical research and transportation; food safety and keeping our air and water clean.”
Leaving aside the matter that none of what he describes (yes, including “national security” spending) is constitutional (as if that had material relevance to the actions of those who presume to rule us), it’s striking to see that this brief description of federal “priorities” takes in, quite literally, everything: The things we supposedly “can’t do well for ourselves” include (but are not limited to) eating, drinking, breathing, moving, learning, healing, and aging. Apparently, dying is about the only thing we can do competently without the coercive benevolence of our sanctified overlords. But then again, as we are taught by the example of the exalted Lincoln (let us pause for a moment of chastened reverence), “helping” large numbers of people achieve an untimely death is the signature activity of the blood-drenched Leviathan State over which Obama now presides.
1:39 pm on April 13, 2011
