M2RB: Kylie Minogue, live from Londonistan
Leave you, move on
To a perfect stranger
You talk I walk
Wanna feel the danger
See me with him and it's turnin' you on
Got me saying getting me back it'd be another song
Get outta my way
Got no more to say
He's takin' your place
Get outta my way
Way outta my way
Got no more to say
To a perfect stranger
You talk I walk
Wanna feel the danger
See me with him and it's turnin' you on
Got me saying getting me back it'd be another song
Get outta my way
Got no more to say
He's takin' your place
Get outta my way
Way outta my way
Got no more to say
Instead
of roads and bridges, Obama-sized government funds stasis and
sclerosis: The Hoover Dam of regulatory obstruction, the Golden Gateway
to dependency.
Indeed. What Obama actually said was:
"If you've got a business, you, you didn't build that. [Interjection
by fawning supporters: "Yeeaaaaah!"] "Somebody else made that happen."
Since the president is widely agreed to be "the smartest guy ever to
become president" (Michael Beschloss, presidential historian), the
problem can't be "what he said" but that you dummies aren't smart enough
to get the point he was trying to make. According to Slate's David
Weigel, the "you didn't build that" bit referred back to something he'd
said earlier in the speech – "somebody invested in roads and bridges."
You didn't build those, did you? Or maybe he was referring back to "this
unbelievable American system we have that allowed you to thrive." You
didn't build the system, did you? Or maybe he was referring to the
teleprompter. You didn't build that, did you? Well, unless you're Rajiv
or Suresh from the teleprompter factory in Bangalore, you didn't. Maybe
he was referring back to something he said in a totally different speech
– the Berlin Wall one, perhaps. You didn't build that, did you? Who are
we to say which of these highly nuanced interpretations of the
presidential text is correct.
If this is the best all the King's horses and all the King's men can
do to put Humpty Dumpty's silver-tongued oratory together again, they
might as well cut to the chase and argue that accurately quoting
President Obama is racist. The obvious interpretation sticks because it
fits with the reality of the last three-and-a-half years – that
America's chief executive is a man entirely ignorant of business who
presides over an administration profoundly hostile to it.
But, just for the record, I did "invest in roads and bridges," and so
did you. In fact, every dime in those roads and bridges comes from
taxpayers, because government doesn't have any money except for what it
takes from the citizenry. And the more successful you are, the more you
pay for those roads and bridges.
So here's a breaking-news alert for President Nuance: We
small-government guys are in favor of roads. Hard as it may be to
credit, roads predated Big Government. Which came first, the chicken
crossing the road or the Egg Regulatory Agency? That's an easy one:
Halfway through the first millennium B.C., the nomadic Yuezhi of Central
Asia had well-traveled trading routes for getting nephrite jade from
the Tarim Basin to their customers at the Chinese court, more than 2,500
miles away. On the other hand, the Yuezhi did not have a federal
contraceptive mandate or a Bloombergian enforcement regime for
carbonated beverages at concession stands at the rest area two days out
of Khotan, so that probably explains why they're not in the G7 today.
In Obama's world, businessmen build nothing, whereas government are
the hardest hard-hats on the planet. So, in his "You didn't build that"
speech, he invoked, yet again, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate
Bridge. "When we invested in the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge,
or the Internet, sending a man to the moon – all those things benefited
everybody. And so that's the vision that I want to carry forward."
He certainly carries it forward from one dam speech to another. He
was doing his Hoover Dam shtick only last month, and I pointed out that
there seemed to be a certain inconsistency between his enthusiasm for
federal dam-building and the definitive administration pronouncement on
the subject, by Deanna Archuleta, his Deputy Assistant Secretary of the
Interior, in a speech to Democratic environmentalists in Nevada:
"You will never see another federal dam."
Ever. So the president can carry forward his "vision," but it
apparently has no more real-world application than the visions he
enjoyed as a member of his high school "choom gang" back in Hawaii.
Incidentally, I was interested to learn from David Maraniss'
enlightening new biography that, during car-chooming sessions, young
Barry insisted all the windows be rolled up so that no marijuana smoke
would escape. If you can seriously envision President Obama opening a
21st century Hoover Dam, you need to lower the windows on your Chevy
Volt.
The Golden Gate Bridge? As Reason's Matt Welch pointed out, the
Golden Gate cost at the time $35 million – or about $530 million today.
So, for the cost of Obama's 2009 stimulus bill alone, we could have had
1,567 Golden Gate Bridges. Where are they? Where are, say, the first
dozen? If you laid 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges end to end, you'd have
enough for one Golden Choom Bridge stretching from Obama's Punahou High
School in Honolulu over the Pacific all the way to his Occidental
College in Los Angeles, so that his car-chooming chums can commute from
one to the other without having to worry about TSA patdowns.
A stimulus bill equivalent to 1,567 Golden Gate bridges. A 2011
federal budget equivalent to 6,788 Golden Gate bridges. And yet we don't
have a single one.
Because that's not what Big Government does: Money-no-object
government spends more and more money for less and less objects. For all
the American economy has to show for it, President Bob the Builder took
just shy of a trillion dollars in stimulus, stuck it in his
wheelbarrow, pushed it halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge, and tossed
it into the Pacific.
Instead of roads and bridges, Obama-sized government funds stasis and
sclerosis: The Hoover Dam of regulatory obstruction, the Golden Gateway
to dependency. Last month, 80,000 Americans signed on to new jobs, but
85,000 Americans signed on for Social Security disability checks. Most
of these people are not "disabled" as that term is generally understood.
Rather, it's the U.S. economy that's disabled, and thus Obama
incentivizes dependency. What Big Government is doing to those 85,000
"disabled" is profoundly wicked. Let me quote a guy called Mark Steyn,
from his last book:
"The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of
people. Tony Blair's ministry discovered it was politically helpful to
reclassify a chunk of the unemployed as 'disabled.' A fit, able-bodied
40-year-old who has been on disability allowance for a decade
understands somewhere at the back of his mind that he is living a lie,
and that not just the government but his family and his friends are
colluding in that lie."
Millions of Americans have looked at the road ahead, and figured it
goes nowhere. Best to pull off into the Social Security parking lot.
Don't worry, it's not your fault. As the president would say, you didn't
build the express check-in to the Disability Office. Government built
it, and, because they built it, you came. In Obama's "visions," he
builds roads and bridges. In reality, the President of Dependistan has
put nothing but roadblocks in the path to opportunity and growth.
That he can build. That's all he can build.
©MARK STEYN
"Get Outta My Way" - Kylie Minogue
What's the worst thing that could happen to you?
Take a chance tonight and try something new.
You're getting boring.
You're all so boring, and I don't recognize the zombie you're turning 'to.
Don't worry cause tonight I got you.
You can take a seat, do what you normally do.
I'm about to let you see.
This is what'll happen if you ain't giving your girl what she needs.
Leave you, move on
To a perfect stranger
You talk I walk
Wanna feel the danger
See me with him and it's turnin' you on
Got me saying getting me back it'd be another song
Get outta my way
Got no more to say
He's takin' your place
Get outta my way
Way outta my way
Got no more to say
He's takin' your place
Get outta my way
Now I got a taste I wanna explore.
Ain't going to waste, no not anymore.
You're going hard now, to win my heart but.
So many times now, you've been comin' up short.
Don't worry cause tonight I got you.
You can take a seat do what you normally do.
I'm about to let you see.
This is what'll happen if you ain't giving your girl what she needs.
[Chorus]
Leave you, move on
To a perfect stranger
You talk I walk
Wanna feel the danger
See me with him and it's turnin' you on
Got me saying getting me back it'd be another song
Get outta my way
Got no more to say
He's takin' your place
Get outta my way
Way outta my way
Got no more to say
He's takin' your place
Get outta my way
No I ain't going home cause I wanna stay, but I won't be alone no how no way.
Now I've showed you what I'm made of.
This is what'll happen if you ain't giving your girl what she needs.
[Chorus]
Leave you, move on
To a perfect stranger
You talk I walk
Wanna feel the danger
See me with him and it's turnin' you on
Got me saying getting me back it'd be another song
Get outta my way
Got no more to say
He's takin' your place
Get outta my way
Way outta my way
Got no more to say
He's takin' your place
Get outta my way
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