To fill that vacuum, Americans rose up in 2010 and elected new representatives to steer the nation toward fiscal sanity. Now, in the 9th inning, the same president who handed his mantle of leadership to a “fiscal commission” has responded to the call for reform by doing what he knows best – slinging arrows with a partisan, poison-tipped speech, proposing higher taxes and slashing America’s defense spending to dangerously low levels...
Read more of Mike Brownfield's superb column over at the Heritage Foundation. And then follow up with this compelling editorial from the Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt:
Did someone move the 2012 election to June 1? We ask because President Obama's extraordinary response to Paul Ryan's budget yesterday—with its blistering partisanship and multiple distortions—was the kind Presidents usually outsource to some junior lieutenant. Mr. Obama's fundamentally political document would have been unusual even for a Vice President in the fervor of a campaign.
The immediate political goal was to inoculate the White House from criticism that it is not serious about the fiscal crisis, after ignoring its own deficit commission last year and tossing off a $3.73 trillion budget in February that increased spending amid a record deficit of $1.65 trillion. Mr. Obama was chased to George Washington University yesterday because Mr. Ryan and the Republicans outflanked him on fiscal discipline and are now setting the national political agenda.
Mr. Obama did not deign to propose an alternative to rival Mr. Ryan's plan, even as he categorically rejected all its reform ideas, repeatedly vilifying them as essentially un-American...
Mr. Obama then packaged his poison in the rhetoric of bipartisanship—which "starts," he said, "by being honest about what's causing our deficit." The speech he chose to deliver was dishonest even by modern political standards...
And finally, let me quote syndicated columnist Dr. Charles Krauthammer about President Obama's speech yesterday, "I rarely have heard a speech by a president so shallow, so hyper-partisan and so intellectually dishonest, outside the last couple of weeks of a presidential election where you are allowed to call your opponent anything short of a traitor. But we're a year and a half away from Election Day and it was supposed to be a speech about policy,"
