While the GOP hopefuls are busy avoiding confrontation with Barack Obama, David Harsanyi is under no such restriction:
In Teddy Roosevelt’s era, President Barack Obama explained to the nation this week, “some people thought massive inequality and exploitation was just the price of progress. … But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can.”
And he’s right. Even today there are people who believe they should have free license to take whatever they want from whomever they can. They’re called Democrats.
Yet the president, uniter of a fractured nation, the mighty slayer of infinite straw men, claims that some Americans “rightly” suppose that the economy is rigged against their best interests in a nation awash in breathtaking greed, massive inequality and exploitation. Or I should say, he’s trying to convince us that it’s the case.
The middle-class struggle to find a decent life is the “defining issue of our time,” the president went on. And nothing says middle-class triumph like more regulation, unionism, cronyism and endless spending. Hey, Dwight Eisenhower (a Republican!) built the interstate highway system, for goodness’ sake. Ergo, we must support a bailout package for public-sector unions — you know, for the middle class.
Update: Monty goes a few steps further to criticize Obama:
It often strikes me how much Barack Obama looks, talks, behaves, and (apparently) believes like a character out of an Ayn Rand novel. Rand always wrote of statist Socialists more as caricatures than characters, but Barack Obama could have stepped whole and breathing right out of the pages of Atlas Shrugged. Which shows you the shallowness and unthinking obeisance to leftist cant the man displays — there is precious little subtlety to Barack Obama. You sometimes find hidden depths even in your ideological enemies, surprising pockets of common ground. But in Barack Obama, there is only a hollow vessel filled up with the thoughts and opinions of leftists he has associated with in his life. He speaks (and apparently thinks) only in platitudes, bromides, and cliches. Barack Obama is, in short, the end product of the grand “progressive” experiment since the early 1900’s. Ecce homo!
