A scary bedtime fairy tale for your grandchildren

Once upon a time, long, long ago in a land far away, a Democrat candidate for President was honest. He announced early in the campaign, "I will raise your taxes." For those who have forgotten about those olden days, or were born since, the candidate was a man named Walter Mondale. Who?

Most people have forgotten about Walter Mondale, but he was Vice President under President Jimmy Carter, perhaps the most forgettable President of recent history, so a memory lapse is understandable.

Mondale also suffered the indignity of running against a Republican nominee who was not only wise but also had a terrific sense of humor and a great gift of comedic timing, Ronald Reagan. And Reagan was wise enough to recognize an error when he heard Mondale's tax-hike promise and countered with a promise of his own that he would not raise taxes if elected.

In the first televised debate, Mondale put in an unexpectedly strong performance, questioning Reagan's age and capacity to endure the grueling demands of the presidency (Reagan was the oldest person to serve as president — 73 at the time — while Mondale was 56). However, in the next debate on October 21, 1984, Reagan effectively deflected the issue by quipping, "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."

In the election, Mondale was defeated in a landslide, winning only the District of Columbia (which has never been won by a Republican candidate) and his home state of Minnesota (and even there his margin of victory was less than 3,800 votes^[4]), thus securing only 13 electoral votes to Reagan's 525. The result was the worst electoral defeat for any Democratic Party candidate in history, and the worst for any major-party candidate since Alf Landon's loss to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.

So the joke was on Mondale, the Democrat who told the truth about his plan to raise taxes. But enough of fairy tales. Wait, let me tell one more. Once upon a time there was a Democrat candidate for President who promised again and again that he would not raise taxes. The people believed him and he got elected. Now some 120 days since, reality has begun to set in.

Obama's true colors not Democrat blue but Socialist red

Famed stock-market analyst Barack Hussein Obama offered us bitter, backwoods clingers to God and guns some sage financial advice yesterday: "Buy low, sell high."

What's coming next? A penny saved is a penny earned? Better make that a billion saved is a billion earned. Or maybe "A few billion here, a few billion there, after a while it adds up to some real money." He's already used "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Presidential plagiarism.

Tony Blankley has coined a phrase for our times that rings true: Obama Lied, the Economy Died.

I am trying to capture the spirit of bipartisanship as practiced by the Democratic Party over the past eight years. Thus, I have chosen as my lead this proposition: Obama lied; the economy died. Obviously, I am borrowing this from the Democratic theme of 2003-08: "Bush lied, people died." There are, of course, two differences between the slogans.

Most importantly, I chose to separate the two clauses with a semicolon rather than a comma because the rule of grammar is that a semicolon (rather than a comma) should be used between closely related independent clauses not conjoined with a coordinating conjunction. In the age of Obama, there is little more important than maintaining the integrity of our language against the onslaught of Orwellian language abuse that is already a babbling brook and soon will be a cataract of verbal deception.

The other difference is that Bush didn't lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He merely was mistaken. Whereas Obama told a whopper when he claimed that he is not for bigger government. As he said last week: "As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by Presidents Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets, not because I believe in bigger government -- I don't."

Michael Gerson calls this The Week of Revelation as Obama reveals his true colors, not Democrat blue but red, not as in Republican red, but as in Socialist red with a capital S.

Obama chose a time of recession to propose a massive increase in progressivity -- a 10-year, trillion-dollar haul from the rich, already being punished by the stock market collapse and the housing market decline. This does not just involve undoing the Bush tax reductions but capping tax deductions to collect about $30 billion a year. Despite all the rhetoric of "responsibility" and shared sacrifice, the message of the Obama budget is clear: The wealthy are responsible for the economic mess and they will bear the entire sacrifice so that government can "invest" in the people.

But governments do not "invest," they spend. Such spending can be justified or unjustified. It is wealthy individuals, however, who actually invest their capital in job creation. Most have much less capital than they used to. Under the Obama budget, they would have less still. This does not seem to matter in the economic worldview of the Obama budget. Equality is the goal instead of opportunity or economic mobility. And government, in this approach, is more capable of investing national wealth than America's discredited plutocrats -- meaning successful two-income families, entrepreneurs and professionals.

Even Maureen Dowd, the red-head at the Noo Yawk Times, joins in the chorus of nay-sayers on Obama. She's either off her meds again or she forgot to drink her Kool-Aid yesterday.

In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.

He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He was slated to make a speech on “wasteful spending” on Wednesday.

“You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation,” he said recently about the “hard choices” we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget.

He reckons he’ll need Congress for more ambitious projects, like health care, and when he goes back to wheedle more bailout billions, given that A.I.G. and G.M. and our other corporate protectorates are burning through our money faster than we can print it and borrow it from the ever-more-alarmed Chinese.

Team Obama sounds hollow, chanting that “the status quo is not acceptable,” even while conceding that the president is accepting the status quo by signing a budget festooned with pork.

Obama spinners insist it was “a leftover budget.” But Iraq was leftover, too, and the president’s trying to end that. This is the first pork-filled budget from a new president who promised to go through the budget “line by line” and cut pork.

On “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, dismissed the bill as “last year’s business,” because most of it was written last year.

But given how angry Americans are, watching their future go up in smoke, the bloated bill counts as this year’s business.

It includes $38.4 million of earmarks sponsored or co-sponsored by President Obama’s labor secretary, Hilda Solis; $109 million Hillary Clinton signed on to; and $31.2 million in earmarks sought by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood with colleagues.

(Even Barack Obama was listed as one of the co-sponsors of a $7.7 million pet project for Tribally Controlled Postsecondary Vocational Institutions until he got his name taken off last week.)

And then there are the 16 earmarks worth $8.5 million that Emanuel put into the bill when he was a congressman, including money for streets in Chicago suburbs and a Chicago planetarium.

Blame it on the stars, Rahm, or on old business. But as Shakespeare wrote in “Lear”: “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeits of our own behavior — we make guilty of our own disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars.”

As Scooby Do sez, "Ruh Roh!"

Slippery Slope 3.0: How Low Does Obama's Tax-Hike Plan Go?

RNC scrambles to keep up with Obama's ever-lower tax-hike promises. The rich get poorer.