You Lie!

Okay, how does “if you have a successful business, you didn’t do it all on your own” turn into “you didn’t do squat”? I’ve heard quite a bit about how Mitt Romney tried to turn a rather benign speech by President Obama into some kind of criticism of the capitalist system. I think the original speech was necessary, due to how many people claim they shouldn’t have to pay taxes, or at least not a higher percentage of taxes than poorer people, on money they made themselves. The problem with that way of thinking is that you couldn’t have made that money if the American system hadn’t paved the way. Far from Obama having to learn to be an American, he was talking up how the country has worked quite well for some people. Funny how the people who claim they unconditionally love the United States are often the ones who are least likely to want to give anything back to the nation. Oh, but that’s taxing success! Well, what’s wrong with that? If you’re successful, you’ve benefited more, haven’t you? That’s a typical point of contention between the Left and Right, though. What really gets me here is how anyone could possibly have heard the original speech and not think Romney is blatantly lying about it?

I think the answer here is that people who believe Romney DIDN’T listen to the original speech, or they did but are so caught up in the idea that Obama hates America that they didn’t really pay attention. Based on what the Republicans are saying, what the President actually says or even does is totally irrelevant. He has a secret agenda to destroy capitalism and apologize for American greatness, and there’s just no convincing them otherwise. Never mind that, if Obama really DOES have this agenda, he’s doing a terrible job at advancing it. Where’s all this apologizing for America that Obama is supposed to have been doing? Mind you, I think apologizing is a fine idea if we’ve done something wrong, but trying to stretch this into “apologizing for America” is a straw man argument anyway.

Not that we really know how Obama’s policies would work, since the Republicans have blocked just about all of them. It seems to me that he’s at least trying, though, while Romney’s plan appears to be just more trickle-down economics. Yeah, because that’s worked so well in the past. If you take care of the billionaires, the rest of the country is not going to take care of itself. It’s pretty ridiculous to complain about how few jobs there are when you don’t intend to help anyone find jobs. Yet there still appear to be plenty of voters whose whole method of thinking is “we don’t have good jobs under Obama, so let’s vote for the other guy, regardless of who he is.” Not that this isn’t a valid argument in some ways, but not when the other guy has pretty much made it clear he only cares about wealthy businessmen. As often as he changes his position on everything, he’s been quite consistent on that point. Obama isn’t going too far; he’s not going anywhere near far enough.

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