This is one that should be on TV from now till election day…..that is, until (NMP) Obama says something else off script that exposes exactly who he is (via Instapundit)
James Taranto explains Obama’s resentment in an article worth the read, and also notes
Meanwhile, @BarackObama tweets a quote attributed to somebody identified only as “Jacob, Michigan”: “Â ‘President Obama had the courage to step up and save General Motors, and because of it, I have a job today.’Â ” William C. Durant didn’t build GM, but Barack Obama saved it.
That begs a good question: if Obama is saying…
If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, ‘Well, it must be ’cause I was just so smart.’ There are a lot of smart people out there. ‘It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.’ Let me tell you something: If you’ve got a business, that–you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
…then that means that he cannot take credit for any of the things that he’s campaigning on, because someone else made that happen. When Obama is out there taking credit for rescuing the economy, for “responsibly” ending the war in Iraq (he followed the Bush plan), creating saving (insert number of the day here) jobs, for rescuing GM, for health care reform, for banking reform, Lilly Ledbetter,etc and so on, well, someone else made that happen. So, what can he run on? Closing Gitmo? Oops. As Mitt Romney stated
My own view is that if you attack success, you’ll continue to see what we have seen over the past three and a half years, which is less success. America is a nation which is defined by people coming to achieve, to fulfill their dreams.
It’s the typical Democrat idea: they do not want to build everyone up, they want to tear people down. That way they get the vote of the moocher class. Interestingly, Dems never have a problem with their own wealth and success, just with other people’s, and always refuse to voluntarily give up their own wealth to match their rhetoric.
Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.
Great points Teach. Use the words against him. If he is not responsible for his “success” then what can he claim success on?
All I’ve managed to hear from his kool-aide drinkers is “he managed to keep the economy from crashing”.
BWWWHAHAHAHHAHHAHHAWHAHHAHAH
You know, my momma always told me, a bandaid can be good to heal a cut, but eventually it has to come off. If you leave it on there, the damaged area could actually get worse. And, if you keep piling bandaids on, pretty soon, you’re covering up the disease, dirt and the wound to where no one can get at it to heal it.
Here is the actual quote: (asterisks addws to make it easy for repubs to read)
“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help…Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. **Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.** The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.â€
Obvious to anyone with even an IQ of 60 (so no tea-baggers), the president is referring to the American infrastructure, not someone’s business. If this were said outside the context of a campaign, it probably would hold up in court as slander.
This statement has been parsed to death. It turns on whether you accept whether the President uses the term “that” to refer to something in another sentence, or “that” to refer to the structurally closer “business.”
If one accepts the former, they are disregarding accepted English usage. Yet even that is not the point.
The point is that Obama believes that the people that are successful have more of a duty to “repay” (read: pay higher taxes) than others. This means that Obama wants to penalize those are successful. This is the same meme Elizabeth Warren floated and got killed for.
The problem is, of course, that Obama attacks those who make the most of their opportunities and believes they have a duty to support those who wasted their opportunities. There is very little reason for people who work hard not to have reasonable success in this country. Most of the reasons fall back on the choices those people make.
But instead of trying to argue your position, you decided to take a cheap, unfounded shot at Tea Party members insulting their intelligence.
You then proved how smart you are by saying Obama’s statement could be seen as slander.
It appears not only do you have an intellectual issue with understanding what others say, apparently you cannot understand the meaning of your own writings.
Hello Jaime. Thanks for commenting.
However, for those who took Obama’s comment to mean he was attacking business owners for growing their business on their own initiatives, we took him in complete context based on who we know him to be, his previous positions on capitalism and free-market, and his recent actions to allow his administration to penalize and hamper private businesses.
However, even if you want to take that he was referring to bridges and roads, that business owners did not build them. Well…. yes they did. This context is just as deadly for him. It assumes that business owners don’t pay for their government services. It once again tries to separate people from each other into classes. Those that have a business and are gaming the system somehow and those that have to rely upon the government and its largess and are told they are entitled to it.
Either way, this president’s Socialist ideology is really too far left even for today’s centrists. And he is extremely to the left of left compared to how our country was founded.
Most businesses took massive risks over many years, sometimes generations, in order to make their business grow and succeed. They had a dream, an idea, that they thought could make them some money doing what they enjoyed.
But, small businesses and self-employed have some of the highest taxes and largest hurdles to overcome just to keep the doors open. Now Obama wants to impose a mandated tax\penalty upon them for hiring workers.
If I want to work for a company that does not provide insurance or work as a contract labor for a company, why is that the government’s business and why is it the Fed’s business to FORCE, through penalty of law and tax code, that they offer something that neither the company or I agreed upon?
I’d rather the company have the funds to pay me more, or hire more people to do the job that needs to get done than pay for a mandated tax\penalty.
If you listen to the entire session, not just that one paragraph, it was in the overall context of “what does the government do for us”. He was making the point that taxes paid (both by business and individuals) do sometimes produce tangible results that are beneficial to the business. If the repubs want to play semantics and claim, that by virtue of paying taxes, business “built” road, bridges, and other infrastructure, then they should not have jumped on Al Gore for saying he help create the Internet, because in that sense (as one of the lead legislators pushing the initiative) he did.
As to the comment about grammar usage and to what the word “that” was referring. In the sentence in question, the “if you’ve got a business” is a parenthetical phrase qualifying the previous comments about American infrastructure and the following about the Internet. One needs to look the whole paragraph, not just one sentence out of context.
Besides, if it is the overall theme that is so much more damning, why did Romney choose to edit the quote?
Funny how we had 8 (or more) years of lowering taxes and loosening regulations on business from the late 90’s and to 2008 and we still had a massive collapse of the housing market and the economy in general. Yet, people now want to return to the same path to “fix†things.
Ok, now you are really stretching. So, according to your take, Obama was praising businesses for paying taxes so that roads could be built before that business go there and thus it became successful since the road was there?
If that is the case, then why do most small businesses fail?
Romney in his followup did play nearly the whole script of Obama and the confirmed what we have here, Obama just does not like the American way of Free Market and Capitalism and individuality.
If he were truly about fairness, he should have been griping at the people standing there. He should have stated that those not paying taxes and taking in federal welfare should understand they didn’t get the help on their own. It was on the backs of those who came before.. the businesses and workers who pay taxes. To be fair, everyone should pay taxes, not just 50% of workers.
Your comment on lowering taxes and regulations on businesses has nothing at all to do with the housing collapse. That had everything to do with federal corruption in the Federal Housing authorities. Bush tried to change the way they operated so that people were not allowed to get loans who could not pay them back, but he the bill was shot down by the Democrats.
And please explain how lowering taxes that people have to pay can cause economic collapse and unemployment?
It is amazing how Jaime talks how it is Republicans are playing semantics and then goes and does just that with the passage.
As we have said, Jaime, even assuming you are correct, you miss the overwhelming theme of Obama’s message that he puts forth daily – that people who are successful need to pay more taxes because of that success. It is not a stretch to say that Obama believes in penalizing success.
You are incorrect on Al Gore. It is true that Gore helped open some doors, but those doors to facilitate the growth of the internet were closed by government regulations to begin with. Many of the communication protocols and interfaces on the internet were not invented by the government, (or Gore) but by private companies. In essence, you are saying the government invented the car because it allowed for the drilling of oil.
Funny how we had 8 (or more) years of lowering taxes and loosening regulations on business from the late 90’s and to 2008 and we still had a massive collapse of the housing market and the economy in general.
Yes, we had a lowering of taxes and some deregulation. In 2003, the income for taxes was higher as a percentage of GDP and as overall income than in the history of the country. Then what happened? You had the government step back in and start to spend like drunken sailors. Regulations on the housing market led to its collapse – not deregulation. The Republicans threw out their representatives in 2006 who believed that more spending and a reduction of freedoms was the best path for this country. The Democrats decided to keep their representatives who did the same thing.
Which party is truer to the American ideal? Which party believes that you shouldn’t be penalized for success? Which party believes that if you aren’t hurting anyone, you should be left alone?
It isn’t your party Jaime. It doesn’t even seem to be your belief system.
You agree with Obama that people who are successful “owe” more back into the system on the basis of that success. That’s wrong. Flat out wrong. You also believe that people should pay their “fair share” of taxes without ever defining what “fair” is or saying why you should define what is “fair.”
In short, the economy collapsed because of overspending and over-regulation. We all know that path doesn’t work.
Conservatives want to cut spending and let people – all people – keep more money in their pocket. Obama is against that and you support him.
The question then becomes, “why is Obama, and by extension you, against the very thing that made this country great?”