I know Obama is a deep socialist in the Alinski mold. I know that this makes him utterly unqualified to be president of the United States. I know that if the facts about his beliefs were actually understood he could not possibly win the coming election. I know that Obama does everything he can to hide his actual beliefs in every way he can. And I know he occasionally lets slip what his true beliefs actually are.
His “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” is one of those occasions. It is so revealing that as much as it has been talked about across the net on sites like this, it has barely crossed the divide into the ancestral media. But even so, it has shown a persistence that is quite remarkable. It has not yet fallen away into a memory hole that both the president and his media admirers would like.
James Taranto at the WSJ is, for example, on the case noting just how politically critical understanding this statement of the president’s is:
There’s a website called didntbuildthat.com with a variety of hilarious treatments of the Obama philosophy. Of course, whoever’s running the site didn’t build that. As he acknowledges, Al Gore did. And hey, remember Julia, Barack Obama’s composite girlfriend? At 42, she starts a Web business. Under President Obama, she didn’t build that.
Obama may be God’s gift to comedy, but Romney is right that the philosophical stakes here are serious. The president’s remark was a direct attack on the principle of individual responsibility, the foundation of American freedom. If ‘you didn’t build that,’ then you have no moral claim to it, and those with political power are morally justified in taking it away and using it to buy more political power. ‘I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody,’ Obama said in another candid moment, in 2008.
And then there’s Rush Limbaugh.
That sound bite that I just played for you is 49 seconds.
It’s filled with ‘people ought to be ashamed of their success,’ in tone. It’s filled with, ‘You didn’t do anything on your own. You had help! Nobody does anything on their own!’ Everybody knows what this is all about. Obama is basically attempting to buttress life’s losers and say, ‘Hey, stick with me, ’cause I’m with you. You would be successful if it weren’t for these people stealing your labor and not paying you fairly and stealing your business and stealing whatever.’
He’s setting it up so when he finally comes to confiscate all the money that he can from the successful, he’ll have support of people who he’s told that this is moral. It’s only fair because these people didn’t earn anything. They didn’t work hard. Everybody else paved the way, the road for them.
Zombie at PJ Media also looks into the implications of what Obama said:
President Obama’s instantly infamous ‘You didn’t build that’ speech is a major turning point of the 2012 election not because it was a gaffe but because it was an accurate and concise summary of core progressive fiscal dogma. It was also a political blunder of epic proportions because in his speech Obama unintentionally proved the conservatives’ case for limited government.
And the comedian Adam Carolla also had a go picked up by Jim Treacher:
Later, the comedian called the philosophy Obama espoused ‘anti-American’. . . .
‘It is an anti-American — and again I don’t mean that in a terrorist sort kind of way, but this country is sort of built on pull yourself up, start your shit, stake your claim, do your thing, innovation,’ he said. ‘The folks that made it, so-called made, and again I don’t know why we’re obsessed with success, but the folks that have made it had help along the way — not necessarily true in many instances. Yes, you can count being delivered at a hospital that running water, electricity and you can count roads that worked.’
Ultimately, Carolla said, the president is simply attempting to pit the haves against the have-nots.
Even MSNBC includes a mention. It’s only part of the story, its impact effect is not great and they do try to wash away its meaning through an explanation but at least it’s there:
Romney also hammered the president — for a second-straight day — over the president’s comments Friday in which the president said (in part of a larger argument about the importance of education and infrastructure to the success of business): ‘If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.’
‘Barack Obama’s attempt to denigrate and diminish the achievement of the individual, diminishes us all,’ Romney said. ‘We all, of course, recognize the power of all of us working together. We’re a united nation. He divides us. He tries to divide America, tear America apart. He tries to diminish those who have been successful in one walk of life or another. It’s simply wrong.’
Most people are not political philosophers. Most people perhaps cannot hear this sentence for what it reveals. But it tells you something about the president who said it and it tells you something about a media that will not report it. These are dangerous times and the stakes are high.
Romney is going to lose, and it will be a significant loss. Too many people today are beguiled by self-labelled ‘progressives’, or amoral secular socialists.
Uber
19 Jul 12 at 8:53 am
What’s the bet that Gillard will start saying similar things as the line from Obama? I bet she is looking at how it is received by the welfare demographic and trying to come up with her own (clumsy) lines.
It’s the rise of division politics and the more it works the more it will be done.
trax
19 Jul 12 at 9:55 am
As the Obama Admin acts to fire up his base, he is firing up the Republican base more.
Dick Morris has been blitzing the media with this little gem:
Token
19 Jul 12 at 10:11 am
Stop! ‘bama Time.
Yo, I told you…You didn’t build this
Why you standing there, man? …. You didn’t build this
Yo, sound the bell, school is in, sucka…..You didn’t build this
The Old and Unimproved Dave
19 Jul 12 at 10:13 am
I think it unlikely. The increase in aspirational voters in Australia (the so-called “Howard’s Battlers” ) means that this line of rhetoric appeals only to the rusted on core Gillard voters that’s giving her her current 44% 2PP. It would further cement the divide rather than claw back the centre that she needs for any hope of electoral recovery.
Cold-Hands
19 Jul 12 at 10:13 am
Gillard has already given this line of class warfare a try, when she sledged Abbott for his nanny voucher system for child care. She kept at it right up to the point where she adopted it as part of her own policy. She has form, she will try again.
Keith
19 Jul 12 at 10:46 am
Obama to Hank Reardon: “You didn’t invent Reardon metal!” Obama to John Galt: “You didn’t build that thigamajig doohickey that sucks electricity out of thin air!!” Obama to Dagny Taggart: “Your father didn’t build that railroad!!”
cuckoo
19 Jul 12 at 10:51 am
Bligh thought she was harnessing the class envy vote when she smeared Newman prior to and during the election. Didn’t work out so well. Witnessing an abject failure up close won’t stop Gillard. She has a special facility of not learning from failures.
She saw how Rudd’s plasma stimulus cheques were spent, and she still rolled out the school kids and carbon compensation. Got the same result through the pokie revenue. Whodathunkit repeat the same action and get the same result. Gillard is terminally stupid.
Keith
19 Jul 12 at 10:56 am
There is real investigative journalism going on about the crony capitalism under Obama.
Not from the MSM who get approval for their stories from the White House, rather news reporters ejected from those traditional agencies for not meeting the ideological standards.
The Washington Free Beacon is one news agency recently set up which is building a business by working methodically through the truck load of material from the Obama Whitehouse / Democrat Congress:
This is how crassly arrogant the people profiting from Obama were:
Token
19 Jul 12 at 11:06 am
Romney camp says it won’t treat Obama as “nice guy” anymore.
C.L.
19 Jul 12 at 11:07 am
The core strategy Bummer is trying to explain here is the protection racket.
coz
19 Jul 12 at 11:10 am
As insane as it seems, the US media allowed themselves to get into the practice of being muzzled by the White House
The original NY Times piece where they fess up to the practice they have been doing for the life of the Obama administration, and then pathetically try to extend to Romney (notice how small the list of people involved in the Romney campaing are):
Independent watchdog?
Token
19 Jul 12 at 11:15 am
I have just invented Rococo’s law: ie anyone who makes refernces to Ayn Rand novels as if they were real immediately loses the argument.
Rococo Liberal
19 Jul 12 at 11:19 am
I have just invented Dot’s law: tax lawyers who tell people to “grow up” when they whinge about double taxation are to be treated as unproductive public servants on this blog.
.
19 Jul 12 at 11:21 am