The Color of Money

Week Beginning 10/27/08:

Many in the media are proclaiming that the election is over. Mrs. Twain and I don't buy it for a second. I believe it could be a landslide for McCain, with Obama winning only 13 states. The mainstream media, of course, wants to try and influence the undecided lemmings and publishes that Obama has a double-digit lead in some polls and that all that is left is to plan the inauguration. In fact, stories have been printed that describe the victory rallies that are being planned. "It's money in the bank," they say. The question I pose, however, "What is the new color of money?"

In my view, the answer is red. This is because the money we're seeing in this election is being promised to be taken from one group and is to be handed ("handout") over to another, and what should ordinarily be prosecuted as larceny becomes re-characterized as "fairness". This "spreading of the wealth" via someone else's pocketbook sure does not pass the smell test (a "red tide"). Now some have raised an issue (a "red herring?") that if you criticize Mr. Obama, then you are really racist and just can't deal with voting for a person of color. What color is Barack Obama? Again, like money, it's red!

Obama has run on a message of change, one where he claims to present new ideas for fixing the problems in Washington. He has done a marvelous job, along with a schoolgirl exuberant and complacent mainstream media, of perpetrating this myth. I submit that everything he has presented is a re-hash of very old ideas, ones that we saw from FDR, LBJ, WJC, the French Revolution and KHM (Karl Heinrich Marx). How "new" is it for BHO (Barack H. Obama) to tell the middle class (nee proletariat) that they have been taken advantage of by greedy capitalists. That it's not fair that they don't have a better life, and that it's government's job, in fact, its government's responsibility to help give the people a leg up! He even trumpets wanting to grow the economy "from the bottom up, not from the top down." Can he point to a national economy that has prospered in this way? The idea in this country that has fueled our economic engine as the envy of the world is the dream and the desire to become rich, to make it to the top. People on the bottom can make it to the top if their ambition is not quashed by a system of over-regulation and taxation, and when bureaucrats believe they create jobs and are needed to control the show.

This, my dear readers, is not, in my view the role of government. It seems to me that government's social role should help those truly in need and not able to help themselves. It should not be in the business of trying to create a bigger class of needy! Yet that is the step-progression in a socialist society: segregation, confiscation, re-distribution and then, elimination of opposition (The Fairness Doctrine). The message from Obama embraces these tenants. His writings, associations and now, through recently released audio tapes of interviews given when he was an adjunct law professor (2001), proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he is not the centrist reformer he claims to be.

Color BHO a very scarlet red! A Democratic executive branch, coupled with a super majority in the Senate and control of the House would bring a whirlwind of new spending and social engineering (listen to Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi). Obama has said that "the Constitution is fundamentally flawed" as it relates to issues of race discrimination. His litmus test for the Federal judiciary and Supreme Court nominees will be a dozy!

All of this "red-or-ic" also changes the color of money. This has been a record-breaking campaign haul and media spend. The ability to buy advertising time and present uninterrupted infomercial-style collectivism propaganda by BHO is part of this political "obamination." Donors give in order to get. The more they get from someone else's W-2, the more we slip into the self-perpetuation of dependent constituencies. Witness the almost universally accepted belief that "progressive" taxes are "fair!" "They can afford to pay more" is the mantra. That's why liberals prefer to call themselves progressives!