Home » What did Obama mean by “that” in “you didn’t build that”?

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What did Obama mean by “that” in “you didn’t build that”? — 55 Comments

  1. Never mind the fact that conservatives NEVER say that money shoudn’t be invested in roads and bridges and such. What we object to is taking money from one person, and handing it to another. I’m all for infrastructure projects. I’m all for education. I’m all for investing in scientific research.

  2. Gringo would probably also have debated the meaning of “is” when Bill Clinton slithered around. Obama’s remarks were straight out of the Progressives playbook. Elizabeth Warren gave the same speech recently during her election campaign. There is no ambiguity, or cleverness, only the collective party line that is the centerpiece of the socialist left.

  3. Your research and analysis is valuable for its own sake, but Obama’s blither doesn’t deserve such scrupulous exegetical handling. He was off the teleprompter and, evidently, exhausted. He ripped off the mask, hardly realizing that he had betrayed himself and done himself damage. He’ll do it again, let’s hope! Maybe this was the start of the meltdown that people have been predicting.

  4. Stark:
    Gringo would probably also have debated the meaning of “is” when Bill Clinton slithered around.

    I refer you to the end of my comment:

    Whatever interpretation you give to ∅bama’s speech at Roanoke, he damned himself.

    I will not repeat myself with an explanation why.

    Thanks, Neo.

  5. mizpants,
    In other words, if I am president, it is not because I am the smartest person on earth or because I have worked so hard. I owe my position to the people who created teleprompters and to the government employees who clean up my speeches and type them into TOTUS before I open my mouth.

  6. mizpants: ah, but that’s the very reason why I think it’s important to pay attention not just to the meaning of the words “you didn’t build that,” but to a lot of the other things he said.

    My point is the same as Gringo’s: whichever interpretation you use, the words are either ignorant or deceptive or some combination of the two, and betray Obama’s desire to rely on government rather than private initiative. What’s more, I think that once you go beyond that phrase you find a lot of other stuff in the speech that shows the same impulse, and it needs to be pointed out in order to understand where Obama’s coming from.

    Whether the words were ad lib or scripted they were said by Obama and represent his thoughts, either pre-planned or off the cuff or some combination of the two.

  7. I listened to the Roanoke speech, and what struck me, beyond its content, was the BHO-audience interaction. He’d say a sentence or two, and the audience would audibly verbalize agreement (not applause, but murmured or more loudly spoken Amens or equivalent right-ons). This is exactly the quality of black preacher-black congregation back-and-forth during sermons which is standard on Sundays in black Protestant churches like Jeremiah Wright’s.

    BHO’s cadence and verbal range are not the equal of Wright, but it is clear that he was a good student of Wright’s. His learned A-A accent and speech patterns are clearly derived from his Sunday studies in Chicago.

  8. Obama better lawyer up. Oh wait, he is a lawyer. Hey, I wonder if Justice Roberts could find any way to interpret his statements to conclude his real meaning was “it takes a village.” Ziontruth, in yesterday’s blog, stated the real sin: Obama abrogates to government the praise and recognition that should go only to God. (Or the “Whole” or “It” if you’re athiest.)

    I get Gringo’s/Neo’s point which is anyway you want to smell this thing, it smells rotten. But what is a turd for Obama, is a rose for Romney:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lr49t4-2b8

  9. Philosophically, Obama’s argument is not without dispute. Let’s take away all the government, all the roads, all the people, and leave just two people in Nature. One invents a snare and traps a rabbit. The other does not. Who caught the rabbit? Who should get to eat the rabbit?

    There is a sort of reverse opportunity cost going on here. What if Steve Jobs hadn’t created Apple? What if that caveman hadn’t caught the rabbit? There would be no government and no roads.

    Hey, Mr. Obama. PU, you stink. Stinkie.

  10. Neo — Yes, I realize the contradiction! I’m lazy, and so sick of Obama that I can’t bear to focus on what he says. I admire you and the others on this forum who do the heavy lifting.
    Don Carlos: Yes, I recognize the call-and-response pattern. It’s a great vehicle for demagoguery (sp?)

  11. Neo said: He ignores the fact that most of the “help” he lists–the American system (of what: government? business?), and roads and bridges–is available to everyone equally, and everyone is not successful.

    That’s the key. Given the same baseline of support, some people do better than others. Some of it is genetic, some is luck, some of it is hard work. Good government does not pick winners and losers. Equal results can only be achieved via coercion and force.

  12. Pat Sajak (yeah, that Pat Sajak) blogged the following on the Ricochet site–

    “It’s as if President Obama climbed into a tank, put on his helmet, talked about how his foray into Cambodia was seared in his memory, looked at his watch, misspelled “potato” and pardoned Richard Nixon all in the same day.”

    Classic. Sheer greatness.

  13. So many things can be said about Obama’s speech and what it shows about his beliefes and those of the progs.

    At it’s base they believe that government is the Golden Goose that lays all the golden eggs. It does not occur to them that the government has NO MONEY! They are as children, who never see their parents at work producing the money that keeps the family going. It’s all a magic trick to them. Of course they do have the Bernank and his printing press – along with Modern Monetary Theory. They can produce what seem to be Golden Eggs………..until one day no one wants their eggs anymore. If we stay on that road, as night follows day there will be a time when no one wants our dollars.

    When they see someone like Bill Gates it never occurs to them that this college drop out (Oh yes, college education is so very important!!) took an idea and created useful products to sell to willing buyers. In doing that he managed to create:
    1. Jobs for millions of people.
    2. Thousands of millionaires.
    3. Billions in tax revenue.
    Yeah, he got fillthy rich, but now he’s giving most of it away. As did many very wealthy men who preceded him. Howqever, they believe he should just give it to the government and let them do as they see best.

    Someone needs to point out to the progs that:
    1. People are sneaking into this country because they know they have a chance to better their economic situation.
    2. People are waiting patiently for immigratioon visas for the same reason.
    3. No one is boarding a boat for Cuba or Venezuela or sneaking into Mexico or anyplace else because things are so bad here.
    4. Most people who have worked hard, made good decisions, and acted responsibly have prospered in our economy.
    5. Those few who have not prospered are wealthy by the standards of most other nations.
    6. Many other nations have decent infrastructure, public schools and private property laws, but they have not prospered the way the USA has because they have not valued entrepeneurship and individual effort the way we have.
    Telling all these things to the progs is like talking to a wall because, to them it’s all just too chaotic and unfair.

    You are correct, neo. The government did not benevolently provide roads, bridges, schools, and dams that they produced from thin air. We, the people, paid for them with taxes and investments because such improvements provide a more level playing field for everyone. Government is not the answer. In the hands of Obama and his ilk, it is a problem.

  14. Obama’s assertion is irrelevant unless one is trying to justify a massive transformation.

  15. Just as an aside to a comment here, neither Obama nor Michelle is a lawyer anymore, something you never see alluded to in the MSM.

    They both mysteriously–for reasons unexplained, since the records have been sealed–surrendered their law licenses quite some time ago.

  16. First,
    Notice, in video, the COMPLETELY SCORNFUL tone of Obama’s voice. He SCORNS entrepreneurs who believe they are smart, and he SCORNS entrepreneurs who believe they work hard. He SCORNS entrepreneurs who do not bow (as Obama has repeatedly bowed) to the royal “government”. There is no doubt about Obama’s point. The scorn makes the point clear.

    Second,
    has been partially referenced:
    Obama doesn’t recognize the “government” as being constructed of the people. Here is the part which is unstated, and has not been clearly referenced: Obama sees the government as the smart progressive people who know better. Obama doesn’t see the government as “American citizens.” He sees the government as a small group of special citizens who are so virtuous that their duty is to tell the rest of the citizens how to live. This is an implication of Obama’s statement. It is tremendously offensive. Listeners sense it, but have not clearly thought through why it is so offensive.

    Third,
    I haven’t mentioned this third point, b/c this third point references a different issue. Still, for those of us who care about the issue, it is a delectable Freudian slip:

    Obama did not say “teachers”, i.e. plural. Rather, Obama’s direct quote referenced a singular teacher:

    There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.

    So, I went to public school. I had maybe 30 teachers, or more. Obama’s Freudian slip is to assume that I only had one talented teacher, i.e. that I had 29 teachers who were mediocrities. Barack Obama, Democrat and union God man, is – in a delectable Freudian slip – informing us of his own private opinion that public schools are manure; that the quality of public school teachers, overwhelmingly, by a margin of 29-1, is manure.

    I love it.

  17. This has been making the rounds: It seems that Obama has unwittingly plagiarized Ayn Rand. (I say unwittingly because I seriously doubt that he has read Atlas Shrugged.)

    (James Taggart is speaking to Cherryl Brooks)

    “He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”

    “Who?”

    “Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”

    She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”

    It’s from Part I, Chapter 9, page 262 in my edition.

  18. neo,

    You’re on the best track when you conclude,

    “I know, I know; logic isn’t really the best approach to all of this, because Obama’s statements weren’t meant to appeal to logic, . . . . They were meant to appeal to those who feel resentment of others who are successful, or those who feel guilt about their own success.”

    Game-set-match.

    Then there’s -this- rebuttal, underscoring an angle I hadn’t read yet in this context:

    Excerpted from . . .

    http://rightcoast.typepad.com/rightcoast/2012/07/what-is-seen-and-what-is-not-seentom-smith.html

    What is seen and what is not seen
    Tom Smith
    The Right Coast
    July 17, 2012

    . . . from which I am pasting in this paragraph:

    “But here’s the question to ask — how many more successful businesses, inventions, products, services, toys, tools, insights, and just plain fun would there be, if government did not in the first place make it so ridiculously difficult to start a business and keep it going? I don’t see our young president taking credit on behalf of the state for all the failures it help cause, all the ideas that never got off the ground because the regulatory hurdles were so high, or all the established companies that never had to face competition because they had managed to get their rents written into law. This is part of the seen and not seen insight of Bastiat. What you see is a successful business when it manages to survive, and then people run up, the same people who taxed and regulated it nearly to death, and say I helped! I helped! What you don’t see are all the businesses that perished or never got started because of the heavy hand of the state. And it’s a very heavy hand.”

  19. Obama is clearly expressing fascism.

    The word fascism derives from a fasces which is a bundle of sticks fastened together from which an axe protrudes. A fasces wasn’t a weapon but a symbol of strength through unity. But mere unity is not fascism. Fascism is unity for a purpose and Obama’s purpose is destruction of traditional America. Obama is a fascist.

    Ultimately, Obama’s fascism is not yet as complete as Hitler’s whose purpose of unity we all know: the destruction of Jews and the building of the Third Reich. I believe the reason so many people see Obama as Muslim, besides his name, is that they sense he needs a purpose for the unity he is attempting to establish and that unity cannot be expressed by liberalism. Liberalism defined today as multiculturalism and political correctness prohibits unity. Islam doesn’t. People sense that Islam is Obama’s true home. Obama the Caliph.

  20. When I first started to practice law, I was armed with a law degree, a set of the Nebraska statutes, a desk, an office chair and a desire to succeed and support my then pregnant wife.

    After a few years of 60 to 80 hour weeks, I had a good practice and was elected as a Prosecutor/County Attorney.

    The collective had nothing to do with it. And don’t give the “infrastructure aided me” argument. I walked to the local courthouse.

    The Messiah is a communist, pure and simple.

  21. The thing is that business paid for ALL the roads and bridges, in the end. It’s not just the taxes and tolls paid directly for trucks carrying goods to market. The taxes and tolls paid by drivers on their way to visit Grandma for Thanksgiving came from business, too, in the form of paychecks, stock dividends, profits on purchases made by business to build their factories, etc. etc. The taxes and tolls paid by public employees on their way to conferences on how to build better bridges and highways came from business, too, in the form of taxes on them and their employees and expenditures.

    I am a public employee. I wonder sometimes how many private employees it takes to cover the cost of employing me. I wonder just how profitable just how many private businesses have to be to allow me to keep on providing the services I render to the state — which are valuable and necessary in that what I do (working in the courts) helps stabilize society — but PRODUCES NO WEALTH.

  22. This misstep by Obama should be hurting him…and maybe it is, but intrade.com now has Obama with a 57+ % chance of winning the election. If you look at the chart there, that % has been rising for some time now.

    Someone is betting real money on his chances.

    That worries me. I think I have the same queasy feeling about this election that Neo has expressed several times.

    We MUST not get overconfident and we MUST work and donate to get Romney elected along with a Republican House and Senate.

  23. Excellent exegesis, Neo. This is the kind of thing I had in mind when I said in the other thread that even if we grant that he didn’t really mean that one crucial sentence in the way it’s been taken, the whole gist of his speech is erroneous and misleading.

    Also lol at that Pat Sejak quote.

    And gcotharn’s comment above is right on: “Obama sees the government as the smart progressive people who know better. Obama doesn’t see the government as “American citizens.” He sees the government as a small group of special citizens who are so virtuous that their duty is to tell the rest of the citizens how to live.” Not only Obama, of course, but the whole progressive cohort. They profess to love the common man but only in his capacity as victim and beneficiary.

  24. Or is it race or gender? Is this the “American system” Obama really means–racial or gender discrimination? And if so, then why isn’t the “help” of affirmative action that’s been going on for decades causing minorities and women now to be the most successful of all?

    they would say the patriarchy, or not enough money, or any one of lots of things and combinations. but mostly, to them, its that white men are still pulling the levers (excepting themselves of course).

    or maybe its IQ distribution and personal natures… you can pronounce anything you want, but ultimately what rises as a group are the smarter and world adaptable. and despite being impinged, they still end up doing ok – showing the decline in US in terms of competitiveness, and abilities.

    but dont worry, they have just promised women tons of candy, and more on the way if they vote for the more authoritarian state (as implied by Time magazine).

    White House expands Title IX support to science, tech
    http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/06/20/usa-whitehouse-titleix-idINL1E8HKJNC20120620

    Celebrating 40 Years of Title IX
    http://www.democrats.org/news/blog/title_ix
    check out the exciting announcements made at the event designed to expand and enforce Title IX for women across the country.

    Executive Order — Instituting a National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security
    http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/12/19/executive-order-instituting-national-action-plan-women-peace-and-securit

    ESTABLISHING A WHITE HOUSE COUNCIL ON WOMEN AND GIRLS Executive order 13506
    http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-creating-white-house-council-women-and-girls

    President Obama, Student Loans, and Women’s Issues
    http://www.nwlc.org/our-blog/president-obama-student-loans-and-women%E2%80%99s-issues

    and don’t forget, that by far, welfare payments go to women, so the change to welfare work requirements was also in the same ball park.

    Obama signs in his first law: equal pay rights in workplace
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/30/obama-lilly-ledbetter-equal-pay

    to save space i deleted the larger list..
    its what votes cost

    its also part of that critical demographic stuff in that population control paper, and others one can read from the UN, the government and so forth…just go to agenda 21 wiki and it lists the current administration as agreeing with it… not like its a hidden secret.

    before election i wouldnt be surprised if other stuff shows up or they point it out how much they have done

  25. Oh, and funny thing… BBS boards came before the internet was known publicly, and they were closer to what we knew and know now as the net.

    technically the internet was born in the late 60s. later was the networks that linked up colleges that students could use. but technically what brought the internet to the public were bbs boards as new small microcomputers were connecting over slow phone lines.

    they are kind of a unsung part of the net people don’t really talk about. the net academics results were the ways to switch information and share lines… the BBS boards had to have dedicated lines and so forth.

    it was the kids playing with that that ended up in the college computer courses that started springing up that then used the networks and ended up bringing a lot of what was on the earliest bbs boards forward.

    Bulletin board system
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

    A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users, either through electronic mail, public message boards, and sometimes via direct chatting. Many BBSes also offer on-line games, in which users can compete with each other, and BBSes with multiple phone lines often provide chat rooms, allowing users to interact with each other.

    people liked connecting to these things. AOL originally was a service that was trying to become a comercial exploitation of what we “sysops” were doing with our own custom software and hacked systems.

    During their heyday from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, most BBSes were run as a hobby free of charge by the system operator (or “SysOp”), while other BBSes charged their users a subscription fee for access, or were operated by a business as a means of supporting their customers. Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web, social network services and other aspects of the Internet.

    there is way too much to even mention, so follow the link if your curious. its a bit of forgotten history i occasionally think back to.

    after all, no one mentions much how the internet got from the labs and schools to the public. back then large computer time was paid by the cycle.

    Before commercial Internet access became common, these networks of BBSes provided regional and international e-mail and message bases. Some even provided gateways, such as UFGATE, by which members could send/receive e-mail to/from the Internet via UUCP, and many FidoNet discussion groups were shared via Usenet. Elaborate schemes allowed users to download binary files, search gopherspace, and interact with distant programs, all using plain text e-mail.

    that was the real birth of the net. when all us bbs boards started connecting each other to different open college networks, and so could link up through the different networks. so you could log on to a bbs, then the bbs would allow you to telnet into different networks, and so on…

    eventually dialing in to connect to everyone else dominated so much, that was the reason everyone called and a reason to charge them was for more routers and so on.

    to think that this early days thing has been mostly forgotten… people marvel what it was like to live the miracle of the industrial revolution, and basically see what my grandparents and great grandparents saw… but while saying this, they are sitting in the middle of an even greater advanced age they completely take for granted. the information age, and the age of integration.

  26. Let’s take away all the government, all the roads, all the people, and leave just two people in Nature.

    The ironic aspect is that that is the State of Nature so glorified by Rousseau, one of the ultimate progenitors of all leftist thought. Rousseau (and Marx and Bakunin after him) considered government/ society to be the source of all mankind’s evils, and that with a different or no government/ society mankind would live in a state of unalloyed bliss.

    Does Barry appreciate the philosophical tension between this statement and his Marxist Lite sentiments?

    It’s a rhetorical question.

  27. Re, what was referenced earlier by gcotharn, the Freudian slip, I never saw this mentioned before. In an interview a week or so ago, the zero made some mention of his “first term”, and then quickly corrected himself by saying “during my first three years”. I think he either knows, or thinks that it is a foregone conclusion that he’ll have a second term. Sorry that I can’t provide the link. Maybe someone more skilled than I can. Whether he knows or thinks this, either way, it’s scary. It’s like referring to your “first” marriage when you’ve never divorced, or your first child when you only have one. Kinda weird.

  28. If there is one trait that all the numnuts share is that they are better at destroying than creating. Creating takes time, patience, intelligience, energy, and other resources.

    What is government in the minds of numnuts? Access to our creation. Why is it always the losers like Obama and Marx and Lenin and Hitler end up as the wranglers of hooligans or perhaps better the pied pipers to our hooligan nature? Maybe that is from where the person of Satan was constructed? The archtype of the disaffected hating wanna be.

  29. texexec:
    The Intrade number is very very scary.

    The times feel like 1932-33 in Germany to me (by history, not recollection!). Most of the GOP leadership are gutless compromisers who simply are unable to see the horror that awaits us all, despite the horrors already experienced, if the Intrade bettors are right.

  30. I remember BBS, plain text e-mail, and Usenet back in the mid-90s.

    Now I use the Mac OS “Mail” program, but I have my preferences set to plain text using the Courier font. Just because.

  31. Kalneva,
    It’s an indication we are in the matrix!

    Neo,
    I’m very intrigued by Obama’s choice of words and your post is good stuff. As I said the other day it was almost as of he was baiting Romney. Because none of it by itself was truly radical and the left could say to critics that they are off their rocker and retort that “that isn’t what he said”.

    So what did the eloquent president say? Nothing! Yet everything ! He appealed to collectivists. He had the crowd gasping and crowing and agreeing. They loved his words and their reaction is as much of the interpretation to me.

    What is the mindset? I’ve been trying to put my finger on it and it seems like DISDAIN!

    But why? Where did his disdain come from? He certainly didn’t “do it on his own” . It’s disdain for himself? It’s psychotic.. He loves himself so much.

  32. Obama said, “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.”

    The key word is “allowed”. Obama thinks the people can only do what they are allowed to do. What is not permitted is forbidden. Regardless of whether the word “that” refers to the successful business or the roads and bridges, Obama thinks the government should have the power of life, death, failure, and success over the ruled.

  33. >>>> You knew what Dubya meant.

    That’s because GWB wasn’t a proponent of PostModernism, in which the entire idea is to make it all incomprehensible.

  34. Well now, if we can’t give all the credit to the entrepreneur because others built the roads and bridges, then, equally, we can’t give all the guilt to the drug dealers, child molesters and killers who also use them. Once again, Society’s fault!

  35. Can a reporter ask Obama what his motive was for lifting the work requirements for welfare?

    What is so hard about asking a question Charlie Rose? Idiot.

  36. baklava, which way you bowing? forwards or backwards? either way, your exposed… 🙂

  37. Years ago I saw a ditty on television. The announcer said that I was about to see a scene wherein I would understand every word said and have no understanding of the subject.

    It was an excerpt from a Salem Witch trial. It was so. I understood every word said and had absolutely no idea what the people were talking about.

    The President has managed to duplicate that feat.

  38. Every time there is a mass shooting in the United States, the establishment uses it to demonize its political adversaries.

    The most recent example was the Jared Lee Loughner case. After Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, the media instantly launched a smear campaign insinuating that Loughner’s political beliefs were shared by conservatives and libertarians. In reality, Loughner turned out to be a pot smoking left-winger who had dabbled in the occult.

    ABC is already saying he may be tea party, where others have found he is a registered democrat.

    maybe, just maybe, there is a tiny percentage of the population that takes revolution as serious as charles manson did (which makes him ahead of his time thanks to current politics), and like ayers goes out there and does something.

    ie. 20 years from now, he may have a professorship and this is his revolutionary creds

  39. Actually, aren’t most new roads and bridges built by private contractors who have invested into equipment built by private companies and who employ workers willing to move from one construction site to another as projects are completed? This is a far cry from the 9 to 5 workers employed by government in Obama’s ideal world.

    OMT, how successful was the Won in getting the asbestos removed from Altgeld Gardens? And how successful was Jarrett in managing her housing projects? I don’t have a problem with governments acting a facilitators for infrastructure projects. But I do have a problem when the governments beome a resting place for people who failed to do their jobs.

  40. Yes: this, from Ricochet:

    ~Paules : Obama’s Gaffes Explained
    by ~Paules
    I have ten years experience as a high school teacher. During that time I’ve engaged in thousands of conversations with my students. I got very good at listening to kids trying to explain a concept or idea. Conversational teaching requires a great deal of patience on the part of the instructor because it’s a process. Ideas take time to develop in a mind not previously exposed to the subject matter. In truth, I spent a lot of time listening to students thinking out loud. And that’s fine as a classroom technique when you’re dealing with juveniles. The next step was to assign an essay for reasons I will explain below.

    Much has been made of Mr. Obama’s inability to speak without the assistance of a teleprompter. He makes all sorts of gaffes when he attempts to speak extemporaneously. The explanation is rather quite simple. The ability to articulate a position well is dependent on having thought about beforehand. When Mr. Obama blurted out his attitude toward private industry (“You didn’t build that.”), the sentiment was certainly sincere, but the delivery was clumsy because he was thinking out loud. The truth is that Mr. Obama has never been a deep thinker. We shouldn’t be surprised because “liberalism” itself is just an incoherent grab bag of half-baked ideas.

    Now, contrast liberal “thinking” with conservative principles. I can define our philosophy in one pithy sentence: Conservatism is a belief in personal liberty based on limited government leavened by personal responsibility. We could expand on this quite a bit, but there’s not a conservative in the country who would disagree with the basic premise. Why is that? Because we’ve read about it at length, thought about in depth, and discussed it in detail. You might remember Rush Limbaugh delivering a speech before CPAC without the benefit of note cards. It’s easy when you know what you think. His program for twenty-five years has been a dialogue about the nature of conservatism.

    Let’s get back to the president for a moment. He was president of the Harvard Law Review without ever having published an article. To quote Rob Long: “How do you know what you think until you write it down?” Spot on. I always assigned my students a final essay on every important concept discussed in class. Writing brings clarity to our thoughts. We have nothing in this regard from our president because he has never thought about anything in depth or questioned the basis for his ideas. His is a juvenile mind full of semi-coherent nonsense.

    I hope Mitt Romney challenges the theory of liberalism itself (such as it is) during the presidential debates. Mr. Obama is a lightweight with no coherent philosophy to back up his policies. He never was the smartest man in the room. He’s just a salesman with ad hoc solutions for the problems of the moment. Mr. Romney needs to force the president off message. If Mr. Obama starts thinking out loud again, the gaffes will follow. He’s no philosopher king. It’s time he was exposed for the muddled thinker he is.

    Paules’ only fanciful idea .. is his suggestion that Mr. Romney challenge the theory of liberalism in the debates. Reasoned philosophy of governing .. is not Mr. Romney’s strong suit, and that is just the way it is. Mr. Romney may get better in this area, but probably not during this election.

  41. “I am sorry you feel that this policy is unacceptable and disturbing to you. As a company we have adopted this policy. I know that much consideration from the home office policy makers was taken in adopting such a policy. We are family oriented and just the same as you are offended that you can’t carry your firearm, there are many patrons that would be concerned (in a family environment) that you are carrying. We do have off duty police officers very visible in our building who carry to ensure as safe as an environment for all as possible. You could go to Cinemark.Com and voice your concerns to corporate if you wish.
    Sincerely Ms. Truhn General Manager Century 16 – Cinemark Theaters

  42. Obama is basically a fabian, a progressive…
    and if people took the time to pay attention to them and what they write, and who they are, they would then see funky coincidences that are not coincidences. they would also see associations that make for a more intertwined reality than they are used to perceiving.

    Margaret Sanger eugenicist…
    had an affair with HG Wells – FABIAN founder
    To avoid prison she fled to england as Bertha Watson…

    while there, she was introduced to the communist feminists, and Havlock Ellis, who helped her justify eugenics as women’s liberation

    which if you pay attention to obama and such, was the justification for complete intrusion of the state into all aspects of private life (health finishes that off)

    if you want to respond to recent reports of womens sexualization of children starting as early as six years old, you can thank Havlock, and Meade, and Sanger, and the progressive sex focused free lovers… etc.

    [if you think gay soldiers marching in the gay parade in uniform is neat. the “Bronies” are going to really make you laugh. ie. Marines who love my little pony!!!!]

    Havelock Ellis would go on to be a regular contributor to Sanger’s “Birth Control Review”
    [but don’t forget harmons Lucifer bringer of light later changed to American eugenicist!]

    Stuart Chase, the man who coined the term “new deal” was also a Fabian/progressive

    Walter Lippmann, was also a Fabian member
    [he drafted one of Woodrow Wilsons famous speeches]

    John Dewey, the father of modern education, who took kids out of the old school system and forced them to attend this current dumbed down sexualization factory – was also a Fabian.

    he was active in New York Teachers Guild, the League for Industrial Democracy

    Guild and league being two words at the time indicating communism… replaced when used up, by united, peoples, liberation, etc… so the league of nations working for one world government became the united nations working for one world government.

    Aldous Huxley brother was a key player in that creation…

    The League for Industrial Democracy(LID) was the forerunner to SDS

    Sidney Webb, the author of industrial democracy, was a Fabian

    He likened the relationship between the LID and the Fabian Society to that between the ADA and the Harvard Liberal Union. – Harvard Crimson

    The forerunner to League for Industrial Democracy which was the forerunner to SDS, was Intercollegiate Socialist Society….

    cofounded by Harry W Laidler a Fabian (he bevame the League for Industrial Democracy executive director, and had this to say

    The League for Industrial Democracy is the closest equivalent to the British Fabian Society in the history of American socialism.

    anyone here care to point out the relationship between SDS and the new party that Obama is a member of?

    the idea that he is a Manchurian candidate is a bit off, he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing…
    [edited for length by n-n]

  43. Under the name of Prestonia Mann Martin she gained international fame from her sociologal thesis, “Prohibiting Poverty,” which proposed a remedy for periodical depressions by a division of labor and a distribution of the necessities of life under government regulation. Her proposal brought comment and a large measure of approval from leaders of thought all over the world. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt gave the book favorable comment in her public statements. Prestonia Mann was editor of The American Fabian – April 6th, 1945 obit

    A communist is a communist for the things they believe and the actions that they take first and foremost, secondary in who they associate with. After that, that they never officially “held the card” becomes a forgettable side note. The same applies for a Fabian.

    you dont have to carry a card to know what you are, and doing so makes it easier to put a label on you that is hard to amorally lie and deny

  44. I don’t have time to read all of the comments, so this point might have already been made. Both interpretations come to the same result! One is worded just slightly less harshly. He’s still saying, “Businesses, you didn’t build the roads and bridges (that enabled your success). Someone else (made that infrastructure possible.)” Nevermind that it was probably a private contractor who built the bridge paid for by taxes raised from the private sector, it still means the same thing. In any context, Obama was setting the government up as the means to success; it is the difference-maker. It is the entity which does not leave success up to chance, as does the scary private sector. In his world, government is not a necessary evil; the private sector is. After all, unfortunately, we need someone to pay for the good stuff that government does. The veil slipped.

    As Charles Krauthammer wrote today (or maybe yesterday), you also have to look at the statement not only in the context of the text, but in the context of the man’s life. He meant what he said in the way it’s being interpreted. Own it.

  45. “My friends, if you would see men again the beasts of prey they seemed in the nineteenth century, all you have to do is to restore the old social and industrial system, which taught them to view their natural prey in their fellow men, and to find their gain in the loss of others.”

    Equality Colony
    The Equality Colony, later to be known as the Brotherhood of the Co-operative Commonwealth, was a United States socialist colony founded in Skagit County, Washington, in the year 1897. It was meant to serve as a model which would convert the rest of Washington and later the entire United States to socialism.

    The colony’s origins lay in ideas of New England reformers in the mid-1890s.

    Henry Demarest Lloyd advocating the plan and suggesting that the socialist colonists would be able to initiate the collective ownership of the means of production in the state by voting in a socialist government. Lermond envisioned an organization of many local unions (“L.U.s”) that would provide the colonists with financial, material, and moral support, coordinated by a national “center or union” controlled by seven trustees. His immediate model was the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which colonized Kansas with abolitionists prior to the U.S. Civil War in order to make the territory a free state. Lloyd gave the plan modest financial backing

    ANYONE know this stuff but me?

    Brook Farm
    Brook Farm, also called the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Educationor the Brook Farm Association for Industry and Education, was a utopian experiment in communal living in the United States in the 1840s. It was founded by former Unitarian minister George Ripley and his wife Sophia Ripley at the Ellis Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1841 and was inspired in part by the ideals of Transcendentalism, a religious and cultural philosophy based in New England. Founded as a joint stock company, it promised its participants a portion of the profits from the farm in exchange for performing an equal share of the work. Brook Farmers believed that by sharing the workload, ample time would be available for leisure activities and intellectual pursuits.

    Despite the experimental commune’s failure, many Brook Farmers looked back on their experience positively. Critics of the commune included Charles Lane, founder of another utopian community called Fruitlands. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a founding member of Brook Farm, though he was not a strong adherent of the community’s ideals. He later fictionalized his experience in his novel The Blithedale Romance (1852). After its failure, most of the buildings at Brook Farm eventually burned down and today much of the land is a cemetery.

    and those who love the moonbattery sight would get the irony that one of the early communes of the progressives… was

    Fruitlands
    Fruitlands was a Utopian agrarian commune established in Harvard, Massachusetts by Amos Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane in the 1840s, based on Transcendentalist principles. An account of its less-than-successful activities can be found in Alcott’s daughter Louisa May Alcott’s Transcendental Wild Oats.

    so so much more… and just this tiny bit is way too big for moderns

  46. Artfldgr,
    You forgot to mention the socialist utopia of New Harmony, Indianna.

    New Harmony had a couple of little problems. It attracted needy people who wanted someone to take care of them and people with talent and ability shuned the place. New Harmony collapsed when the founder ran out of money. That’s the problem with socialism, you run out of other people’s money.

    The government is always backing the wrong horse like OSI. The government declared ADA was the official government programing language. Anybody out there program in ADA today?

  47. Tragically I doubt if this little faux pas by Dear Leader cost him a vote. Nor will the economy collapsing, nor the Middle East falling to terrorist ideologues. My guess is that Obama will win the electoral vote although he is almost certain to lose the popular vote. And this may be a good thing because the memory of the damage his ideology in his second term will cause should prevent another Obama for a generation.

    On the other hand he may try and behave himself in the hope of running Michelle for President, just like his mentor, Juan Peron. As a matter of fact she is coming to my wife’s town this weekend so I asked my Argentine wife to infiltrate the crowd and start shouting “Evita” when she starts to speak.

  48. neo, you (and gringo) got this right. BO *may* have intended to refer only to roads and bridges when he said “you didn’t build that”. But in the first place he was sloppy with his speech; he should have said “you didn’t build those” if that is what he meant. In the second place of course businesses *do* contribute to the taxes that pay for the roads and bridges. Most of all, regardless of his intent with those particular words his glowering contempt for business and free enterprise is overwhelmingly evident in this speech. Make him own it.

  49. Yes, but what was the point of mentioning the roads and bridges? It.was not brought up in a rhetorical vacuum.

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