Speechifying, Speech Defining

A common observation of conservative analysts towards Obama’s second inauguration speech has been that it was far from being conciliatory, healing, or a unity building speech. Our observation is that Obama’s speech writers made extensive use of code phrases and concepts the left has been pushing for years in order to undermine or marginalize the Constitution.

Obama’s speech was replete with standard leftist lip service to American ideals while corrupting them in service to the glory of big government, the exactly opposite of what the ideals were meant to foster.   And of course his key actual policies are reflective not of limitations on government, the core of the Constitution, but of doctrinaire leftist thought expanding the reach of government, creating dependence on government, and removal of cultural norms.

What astute conservative commentatotrs are saying about the underside of Obama’s second inaugural speech, (perhaps more than you really want to know):

From Donald Lambro writing at Townhall 

 Empty, Clueless Rhetoric: Obama saw his inaugural event as less of a time for bipartisanship than for demanding action on his political agenda, as if he were still on the campaign stump, running through his wish list. Even his die-hard supporters in the news media expressed profound disappointment.

What followed was less an inaugural address for the ages than a leftover campaign speech combined with an early draft of the State of the Union address,” writes the Post’s liberal-in-residence Dana Milbank.

From Susan Brown writing at Townhall  –

Obama’s Definition of Liberty:  And herein lies the complexity of a community organizer turned president: his ideology contradicts the constitution he is sworn to uphold.

If the ultimate goal is to shake up, tear down, and fundamentally transform America into the collectivist society Obama’s honey-filled words dripped of, he will do so without the support of half the country. As the rest of us find ourselves scratching our heads trying to figure out where the constitutional authority exists to achieve this transformation, Obama moves forward, motivated by a ludicrous notion that the Constitution must change because times have.

From Ben Shapiro also writing at Townhall

Obama’s Orwellian Inaugural Address: It is simply a lie to state that our founders did not have a singular definition of liberty. They did. It is expressed in the Declaration itself. Liberty, says the Declaration, is freedom from government “abuses and usurpations.” It is not government guarantees of healthcare, pensions and food stamps. The Constitution was ratified in order to preserve the founders’ vision of liberty and to prevent a “good government” from usurping power in order to achieve the social engineering the left adores.

Obama knows this just as his progressive predecessors knew this. That’s why Woodrow Wilson despised the Constitution. So does Obama. But unlike Wilson, Obama realizes that the American people still like the Constitution. And so he must somehow read his anti-Constitutionalism into founding philosophy itself.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell quoted in The Hill:

Obama’s hard left agenda would sink the country :   . . . an unabashedly left-wing appeal for more bureaucratic control and centralized power in Washington . . .

. . . if he insists on spending the next four years pushing a polarizing, hard-left agenda instead, I assure him he’ll meet a determined opposition not only from Republicans in Washington, but from the very people he seems to believe are squarely on his side in the push to remake government in his image . . .

Failing to reform the entitlement programs of the last century now is the best way to guarantee they no longer exist in their current form. I mean, you could practically hear the ring of the cash register with every new promise the president made  . . .  At a time when we can all see the failure of such policies by simply turning on the news, he seemed blissfully unaware of the fact that from Athens to Madrid, the sad, slow death of the left’s big government dream is on display for all to see . . .

Joy Tiz writing in Canada Free Press

Obama Cites Neville Chamberlain: Curiously absent was any serious mention of foreign policy other than to tell us, yet again, that al qaeda is no longer a problem, thanks to him, a notion that requires a serious bending of reality since it was made against a backdrop of the horrors of Algeria in which seven Americans were slaughtered in an al qaeda attack and the yet unresolved Benghazi slaughters.

He left out the part about how al qaeda’s profile is rapidly rising in Africa following the Algeria attack.

Amy Payne writing at The Foundry, a Heritage Foundation blog

Members of Congress—who are about to debate raising the debt ceiling tomorrow—should have paid attention yesterday. The President was very clear that he sees no urgency about reducing the debt and cutting the deficit. In fact, in his second inaugural address, President Barack Obama was honest about his intentions to grow government in order to remake our country along his progressive vision.

To sell his agenda, the President borrowed imagery and terminology from America’s first principles. But he twisted the American founding idea of “We the people” into the liberal “It takes a village.”

His rhetoric on the issues only thinly disguised his true meaning.  Which she goes on to thoroughly identify for us here. Obama’s Second Inaugural Address Translated

Barry Rubin at PJ Media writes:

Obamas inaugural speech presents his new strategy and blueprint for changing America  but will anyone notice  . . .   So here is Obama saying that the essential basis of American democracy is the Constitution, American exceptionalism, and the Declaration of Independence’s claim of unalienable rights granted to the citizen.

According to him, the Constitution is flawed for providing only “native liberties” and there is no such thing as American exceptionalism. Also, on several occasions he couldn’t even get the quotation from the Declaration right.

Now he is smarter. He doesn’t say these things are outdated or wrong, but rather that he is going to implement them properly. This is a bold act of misdirection to soothe criticism and to place on himself the mantle of America’s founding documents, pulling the rug from under his critics and appropriating for himself their arguments and symbols.

Next, Obama presents a new worldview intended to justify what he wants: statism, an imperial presidency, social and economic hegemony for the federal government (and within it, the executive branch), more regulation, and more spending.

James Delingpole,  columnist for London’s The Telegraph comments that Obama’s reference in the speech to the need to not “betray our children”  over the (alleged) dangers and man’s impact on global warming declares war on reality  :

Barack Obama has used his second inaugural address to declare war on an even more nebulous threat to the security of the world: reality, itself . . .

Concerted global action so far to deal with the threat of climate change has resulted in: higher energy prices; more deaths from fuel poverty; more intrusive regulation; the destruction of rainforests and the squandering of agricultural land on biofuels; higher food prices; famine and food riots – as a result partly of the drive for biofuels; the entrenchment of corporatism and rent-seeking to the detriment of free markets; the ravaging of the countryside with ugly solar farms and even uglier wind turbines; the deaths of millions of birds and bats; the great recession. How any of this has in any way benefited either our children (who are going to find it far harder to find a job) or future generations is a complete mystery.

Jennifer Rubin a conservative contributor to the Washington Post asks; Really, that’s it, Mr. President?

If there had been any doubt, the president’s second inaugural address did confirm he is a dogged collectivist with little appreciation for the dangers we face in the world. . . .

The threats from terrorism and from a nuclear-armed Iran do not figure in his vision. It was the most glaring demonstration of the president’s disregard for his role as commander in chief. . . .

To oppose him is to be against the common man. (“We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky or happiness for the few.”) To question him is to be against progress. (“Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time – but it does require us to act in our time.”) The absence of any desire for political unity or cooperation was noteworthy . . .

The speech was essentially a call to arms for the left.  . . . It frankly sounded like a recycled convention speech. Its redeeming feature was its brevity; but he had little to say other than his undying faith in the government to do things for us . . . .

Charles C. W. Cooke writes in National Review, exposing Obama’s deviant rhetoric: American Liberty, But  . . . Freedom requires restrictions, timeless constants need changing, up is down . . .

In practicing this nasty little maneuver, a distant cousin of the false dilemma, speakers drape themselves in the politically desirable cloak of moderation. And faux moderation is better than none at all. Even in the Britain of 2013, one can’t come straight out and say, “I think people should be imprisoned for saying things that I consider unacceptable.” Instead, one must display at least cosmetic fealty to the principles of liberty before one promises to undermine them entirely in practice. . . .

Apparently, The Trick has now found its way across the Atlantic. Witness yesterday’s inaugural speech, in which President Obama regularly lionized the Republic’s axiological philosophical principles just moments before articulating his own, antithetical, ideology.

John O’ Sullivan, also in National Review, ridicules the uninspired (but doctrinaire) nature of the Obama speech and its implications:

Write Your Own Inaugural  —  You, too, can sell a rocking chair as if it were an exercise bicycle: Taxes! Spending! No pain!

Someone . . . should produce a parlor game called “Write your own Inaugural Speech.” By shuffling a series of oratorical flourishes, the player would be able to craft a suitable Inaugural for a president of any party or ideological tendency.  . . .

the president stoutly denies in his final argument when he says that entitlement programs do not sap our initiative but instead encourage risk-taking. Really? It was just about possible to believe such things before the big entitlement programs were actually in place. But the existence of an underclass in every welfare state, the spiraling costs of all entitlement programs, and the fierce fight that their beneficiaries mount against any attempt to restrict social benefits all destroy this belief. And, while on the topic, how many entrepreneurs emerge from the social groups most dependent on welfare spending? . . .

Wrong though it is in every particular, however, this passage is valuable as a clear theoretical outline of what Obama believes — And as commentators have already pointed out, the president went on to defend every single existing social program and to promise the introduction of various new programs (such as global-warming remedies, a.k.a. higher energy costs). . . .

and so it was . . .   R Mall

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