President Kingfish

The photo to the left is of Huey Long performing his Richard Nixon impersonation and sieg heiling Marxist doctrine. 

The National Review summed up the O-buma regime early on as a progressive redistributionist scheme.  The NRO article, “Obama, the Other Huey Long,” reveals resemblances between the President and the pettifogging Depression era demagogue from Louisiana, Huey “Kingfish” Long and his bid to redistribute the income and wealth of the nation’s top wage earners.

Long’s Share the Wealth plan was a scheme to confiscate the assets of more affluent people, to tax their incomes at confiscatory rates, and to trade the loot to constituents in return for votes.  Long felt that government should insure that everyone owned a home; that the state should cap personal wealth; that maximum income limits should be enforced; he even had his own early version of the Earned Income Credit.

In “Congress Reminds Obama He's President, Not King,” George Will observes that the White House’s current occupant's vanity and naiveté — a dangerous amalgam — are causing the modern presidency to buckle beneath the weight of its pretenses.  The One decreed last weekend that the debt-ceiling impasse must end before Asian markets opened Sunday evening Eastern Time, lest the heavens fall. 

The deadline passed without the sky falling.  Little Timmy Geithner invented that arbitrary deadline.  It was a cheap sales tactic, demanding an immediate answer before the deal was no longer available.  Fortunately for the nation, Speaker of the House John Boehner recognized the ploy and countered it by announcing that the "Congress will forge a responsible path forward."

The President can only propose a budget, and only Congress can allocate funds and authorize its spending.  O-buma claims to want the power of doing things on my own.  This claim is blatantly false.  When Republicans offered him the authority to raise the debt ceiling $2.5 trillion over the next year, he refused.  He is allergic to personal accountability.  Recall that he once boasted (June 3, 2008) that he could influence the oceans' rise. 

O-buma is too arrogant to accept the doctrine of coequal branches of government.  This doctrine impedes the progressives' goal of unleashing untrammeled government.  It has also prevented Theftocrats from diverting attention away from the onrushing debt tsunami.  They are desperate to sweep it under the carpet until after the 2012 presidential campaign.  Hence, we have Democrats’ reluctance to offer a written budget proposal.

George Will reminds us that House Republicans said yes to "cut, cap and balance." Senate Democrats, who have not produced a budget in more than 800 days, vowed to work all weekend debating this.  Unfortunately, all they did was to table the proposal, thereby weaseling out of a straightforward vote on the only debt-reduction plan on paper, the only plan debated, the only plan to receive Democratic votes.

It may be worthy of note that the Senate rejected O-buma’s last budget proposal by a vote of 97-0.

It is also worth noting that Obama's money gusher has driven federal spending from under 20% of GDP to almost 25%. Theftocrats feel that if they can just get past the inconvenient matter of funding their vote buying apparatus, the theft-welfare state, over a year before the presidential election, they can keep the White House.  George is right.  O-buma is a caricature of an earlier buffoon: he is Huey Long with a better tailor.

May your gods be with you.