Obama's Amused. We Are Not.

Obama's Amused. We Are Not.
Dan Kennedy
Friday, April 23, 2010

With casual derision, President Obama recently dismissed the people in the tea party movement and their little rallies as “amusing.”
It’s a shame we can’t find him amusing.

Everybody needs to remember this coming November, and again in 2012, that Obama and his cronies are sitting around the castle they think of as theirs, laughing at the powerless fools and peasants who dare to question his messianic authority.

The media have mostly given him a pass on his arrogant condescension – instead working overtime to try and connect the tea party movement to the Oklahoma City bomber and somehow paint them as domestic terrorists.

In face of facts, the media have had to abandon the insistence that tea partiers are all redneck rubes gathered in tin-roofed mobile homes making nasty signs with crayons. Now that it’s known they are, in general, educated, hard-working, responsible taxpayers; entrepreneurs and executives as well as blue-collar workers; and “mass-affluent,” nobody but the president himself and a few left-wing comedians still dismiss them all as amusing idiots. The majority of mainstream media (and some comedians, like Rachel Madow) has switched to labeling them as dangerous extremists out to incite violence, galvanized around a few crazies like Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin.

Bachman called Obama’s thugocracy a “gangster government,” and the reaction from it and its media defenders was bad. But they reserve special contempt for Americans who dare to voice opposition to spending the nation into bankruptcy and humiliation while confiscating private money and business – virtually the entire health care system, the mortgage industry, the college lending business, etc. – and acting more dictatorially than has ever been tried here. Those Americans are amusing or much worse.

The Great and Powerful Ozbama brooks no dissent. As the saying goes, he can dish it out but he can’t take it. One wonders what he’ll do when his amusement turns to alarm. I expect crack-downs on dissent, because his is a gangster government.

While the tax-n-spend protest carnival garnered most of the attention around the symbolic day of April 15, Obama pulled off a semantic move worthy of Dancing with the Stars. He turned an emphatic pledge of no new or increased taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year into the narrower promise of no new federal income taxes on those folks. Some in the media noticed, but barely gave it a wink and nod or shrug.

Of course, the big lie is that all taxes are a tax on income – what else are they paid with? But the semantic spin can’t mask the reality that Obama’s schemes will soon bury the middle income earner, Andy Stearn’s union workers, small business owners – everybody – in a volcanic eruption of taxes.

The unfunded mandates and new demands on Medicaid must send states scurrying even more than they already are to patch epic budget gaps with higher income, property and sales taxes and new taxes on everything from dog-walking to doughnuts. The health bill is very much a bill, a collection of new taxes and tax increases, such as those on medical devices (and wait until everybody sees how that definition expands), insurance benefits, even to the micro-silly, like taxing use of tanning beds. Starting in 2011, employers must report the value of health benefits on employees W-2’s. What does that predict?

Currently, the Medicare tax is limited to 2.9 percent of earned income. The new 0.9 percent bump in it is only for those rich slobs earning over $200,000, but there’s also a little mentioned 3.8 percent Unearned Income Medicare Contribution, effective 2013, if this mess isn’t repealed and replaced. This is a brand new kind of tax, on all investment income. That is, everybody’s investment income, regardless of earned income; on every penny of interest, dividends, rents, and so forth. Perhaps it’s a shock to Obama that plenty of people with incomes far below $250,000 have investments and rely on interest from responsible savings and dividends from prudent investing of money earned and already taxed – if he is that stupid, somebody ought enlighten him. His own $5-million income may have put him a bit out of touch.

Obama’s amusing himself creating new taxes and tax. You could fill a lot of pages with them. More than 2,000 pages. And we are not amused.