Bruno Behrend
Latest posts by Bruno Behrend (see all)
- Heartland Daily Podcast – Bruno Behrend: Homeschooling Blazing the Trail for Education Choice - April 14, 2016
- Heartland Daily Podcast – Bruno Behrend: Common Core - May 19, 2015
- The Insanity of Federalized Teacher Evaluations - February 21, 2012
The folks over at Powerline Blog have an insightful post on the mindset of our current president. It comes by way of Bobby Jindal’s book, “Leadership and Crisis,” where Jindal recounts an encounter with Barak Obama discussing the moratorium on deep sea drilling.
In his recently released book Leadership and Crisis, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal recounts an exchange with President Obama during the Gulf oil drilling moratorium. (Full disclosure: I [Peter Sxhweizer] co-wrote the book with Jindal.) After telling Obama that the moratorium would potentially cost tens of thousands of jobs,
“The president went on to assure me that anyone who lost their job would get a check from BP. When I explained that BP might not write them checks because it was the federal government that imposed the moratorium the president said, ‘Well, if BP won’t pay the claim, they can file for unemployment.’ I was amazed by the level of disconnect. The people of Louisiana want to work, not collect unemployment or BP checks.”
For Obama, getting an unemployment check is about the same as getting paycheck.
This is merely another exhibit (in a long line of others) that indicate that Barack Obama is fundamentally out of touch with the mindset of productive people. To the extent that the “liberal” (using the contemporary American definition) or “socialist” mindset is similar to Obamas, they too have no clue what it means to want to accomplish something.
To be sure, there are probably millions of productive liberals who “create value.” That makes the disconnect even more appalling. Stop and think about this for a minute. Leaving out the Democrat Unionists (who probably still clings to God and Guns) and the already entrenched government dependents, we can start to understand the blindness of the rich liberal soccer mom, the academic, and the increasing number of limousine liberals (formerly “country club Republicans).
These are people who can’t conceive of the difference between a a paycheck for a job or career, and a payout disgorged from a corporation, an insider government contract, or an unemployment check. Extrapolating this outwards, we can start to see the deep pathologies embedded in this strange mindset. Many of these folks probably think that paying “oil workers” not to pump oil is a societal benefit. Others can’t conceive that a person making less than $50,000 would care whether the cash in their pocket came from a well-earned job or a bureaucrat’s stimulus hand out.
I could go on for pages attempting to divine the warped world-view one must have to think like Obama. In fairness, Jindal may be leaving out a few lines, or shifting context, in the hope that he can use this vignette against Obama in some future debate. But one who follows this president doubts it. It fits with his snobbery, his Fabian “spread-the-wealth” meanderings, and virtually every aspect of the Czarist-oriented policies emanating from his administration.
In conclusion, we need to see the above story as a serous warning sign. It exposes the moral degradation that comes along with the extended immersion in socialist policies. There are clear indicators that more and more Americans think in this strange and unproductive way. An entire class of public employees have bankrupted California and Illinois. These people don’t care whether they kill states or companies (GM, Chrysler, etc.). If some one fills their pockets with cash, why should they care what effect their awful policies have on others? (Remember the woman who said “Barack Obama’s going to pay my mortgage!”)
It’s like these folks are pod-people from “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.” They look and talk like productive people, but their tendrils are sucking the very lifeblood out of us, morally and financially.
