Occasionally in this column I give Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace a hard time. If I do, it's because I believe he deserves it, mainly because I think he crossed the "fair and balanced" line or he let someone off the hook who should have been pressed harder.
Sunday, though, Wallace did a great job on an intense interview with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and if I am going to give Wallace a hard time on occasion, then at least he should hear the good side too.
(I have a very personal quirk about journalists who cover politics and the military. It comes from being a journalist and before that an active Marine serving as a helicopter machine gunner in Vietnam. I, and many, many others believe that since we won all the battles in Vietnam and at least twice pushed the communists to the brink of surrender, the communists' ultimate victory over the South Vietnamese, and their subsequent murderous rampage through much of Southeast Asia slaughtering millions who didn't agree with them is the direct responsibility of the media and politicians. Thus my insistence we keep politicians' feet to the fire and journalists do their job right!)
Geithner was on FNS supposedly to explain how the Obama Administration is working so hard, in a non-partisan, politically objective fashion to resolve its major differences with Congress over the fact that our country is rushing headlong into an abyss of fiscal insolvency.
Obama, who seems more and more like the Paris Hilton of politics, wants the government to extend his line of credit by a few more trillion. (It is easier to swallow if you don't say thousands of billions or hundreds of millions of millions.) The Republican led House of Representatives is saying no, and the Democratic led Senate is not exactly backing Obama either.
Republicans are opposed to giving him any more credit unless he agrees to cut trillions from his spending sprees which Obama doesn't agree with, so we are at an impasse with an artificially imposed deadline looming, at which time we supposedly will default as a nation. We won't, but it certainly gives an air of uncertainty and intensity to the situation.
Anyway, in his supposedly non-partisan blathering Geithner repeatedly blamed the entire fiscal mess on the GOP – again – even though it was Democrats who engineered the housing collapse which is one of the major facets of the current fiscal embarrassment – not that the GOP is squeaky clean. If that was a non-partisan appearance I'd hate to see this guy if he was put in charge of Obama's dirty campaign tricks.
What Geithner said he really wanted was to "take default off the table until after the election," in 2012. That's because virtually everyone in the Obama Administration considers the bulk of the American people to be mindless sheep who will forget all this by the next presidential election 15 months from now, if it temporarily goes away now.
Just like we'll forget waging war in Libya without Congressional approval, refusing to salute the flag, a phony birth certificate, withdrawing prematurely from Afghanistan, nationalizing the auto industry, the gross excesses of Obama Care, etc., etc., and etc. We won't, but the administration doesn't believe that.
So Obama believes that if the default option is off the table we all will go back to sleep, mindlessly vote him in again next year, and we'll wake up on Inauguration Day 2013 and suddenly realize to our dismay that we are really screwed.
Once he gets the temporary increase in his credit limit, without any restrictions on his spending spree habits, Geithner said, Obama then wants to impose "A framework of tough reforms that forces Congress to act."
Is this guy serious? Congress is acting, Tim; they are just refusing to give in on your boss' demands that he gets what he wants when he wants it without any lip – or checks and balances – from the other branches of government.
Wallace pressed Geithner and pressed him hard on these points – maybe Fox has it on podcast somewhere so you can see it. But Geithner just went on about completely revamping the US government's fiscal controls, which means giving all power to the executive branch and making the Congress a rubber-stamp body with no control even over a spending addict. (Can you imagine Obama and Hilton out shopping together?)
This is seriously dangerous territory folks. I even heard a "pundit" on Fox Business early in the afternoon segment today saying essentially the same thing. This is seriously, seriously dangerous territory.
The reason we have an impasse at the moment is because our system of government that has been in existence since 1789, is working! Our founding fathers knew what happened when one person - say a dictator or a king - was in control of everything and everyone, that's why they fought the American Revolution.
And when they finally enacted the Constitution, which is the one we still exist under, they deliberately wrote in a series of checks and balances so we wouldn't wake up one morning under control of a dictator. Yet that is exactly what I heard from Timothy Geithner yesterday; the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury laying the groundwork for the destruction of our form of government, in favor of a dictatorial format.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm not buying into this nonsense. I think there are enough Democrats in Congress who are not far-left ideologues to stand up for our Constitution and get a better figurehead for their party than this closet communist who has delusions of grandeur.
Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. What a joke. His job should be retitled as Minister of Obama Propaganda.
Monday, July 25, 2011
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