Someone with the courage to say, "The Emperor has no clothes"

Today, I looked at a website for a group called "The 912 Project". I won't bore you with a diatribe on what they are about, other than it is led by Glen Beck and he is tired of the partisanship in our government. We are a nation of individuals who are being led around by the nose and Mr. Beck believes it's time to stop the playground mentality that seems so prevalent in our current administration.

Obama is not press-friendly. He is a President who prefers to know in advance the questions he will be asked, so he can have his handy dandy teleprompter there, ready with the answer. However, he was asked a question that he wasn't quite prepared for, by Ed Henry of CNN, which prompted him to give a rather snide, snippy response. Excerpted from Gerogetown University's newspaper, The Hoya, is an explanation of the event:

Obama answered questions on everything from the economic crisis and its effects on homeless children to the current violence in Mexico. However,the talk of the town since the conference has centered on a question from Ed Henry of CNN regarding AIG.

“You spoke again at the top about your anger about AIG. You’ve been saying that for days now. But why is it that it seems Andrew Cuomo seems to be in New York getting more actual action on it? And when you and Secretary Geithner first learned about this 10 days, two weeks ago, you didn’t go public immediately with that outrage — you waited a few days, and then you went public after you realized Secretary Geithner really had no legal avenue to stop it,” Henry said.

Obama responded at length regarding a second part of Henry’s question concerning the president’s new budget and the national debt.

Henry then asked a follow-up reiterating his concerns about the length of time between the AIG bonus announcement and Obama’s reaction.

“It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak, you know?” Obama said.

Laughter followed, but many reporters said after the briefing that Obama was dodging the question.

But I am digressing from my original point, which is that no one seems to have the courage to stand up to this guy for fear of incurring his wrath and being banned from ever covering the President again. (And this was when he was running for election. Imagine how maniacal this guy is now that he's the POTUS.)

With all the economic problems belaboring our country, with the Trillion dollar bailout that a HUGE majority of the country was/is against the bailouts from the beginning.

There is a quote that is often credited to Abraham Lincoln, when in fact the author was William J. H. Boetcker, a Presbyterian minister. In 1942, he wrote a tract entitled Lincoln on Limitations. It DID include a quote by Lincoln, however, the following words are pure Boetcker:

1. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
2. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
3. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.
4. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
5. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and independence.
6. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
7. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
8. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
9. You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
10 You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they will not do for themselves.

All of this being said, and I apologize for the extreme length of this post, I would now like to lead you to the title of this blog post.

This past Tuesday, in the British Parliament, an MEP named Daniel Hannan (view his blog at the Telegraph.co.uk site) stood up and chastised the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, for his policies on that country's economic recovery plan. Had i closed my eyes, had it not been for the British accent, it was a speech that is long overdue here in this country, delivered to the ears of "The Messiah" Barry. I was moved at the words Mr. Hannan spoke and I felt strongly that this needed to be discussed outside the MSM (where alarmingly little has been said about this. I guess the press here in the good ole US of A don't want Americans to hear the courage of one voice and get any ideas.)

Watch the video online and tell me we don't need more people like this inside the beltway. (As of this date, the video has received more than 1.6 million hits since last Tuesday)

I found a transcript of this speech online at U.S. News & World Reports, which surprised me, to say the least.

Prime Minister, I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of the European politician, namely the ability to say one thing in this chamber and a very different thing to your home electorate. You’ve spoken here about free trade, and amen to that. Who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase ‘British jobs for British workers’ and that you have subsidised, where you have not nationalised outright, swathes of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks? Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this house if your actions matched your words? Perhaps you would have more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not going into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country?

The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child. Now, once again today you try to spread the blame around; you spoke about an international recession, international crisis. Well, it is true that we are all sailing together into the squalls. But not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear their rigging; in other words – to pay off debt. But you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further. As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the water line under the accumulated weight of your debt We are now running a deficit that touches 10% of GDP, an almost unbelievable figure. More than Pakistan, more than Hungary; countries where the IMF have already been called in. Now, it’s not that you’re not apologising; like everyone else I have long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things. It’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening our situation, wantonly spending what little we have left. Last year - in the last twelve months – a hundred thousand private sector jobs have been lost and yet you created thirty thousand public sector jobs.

Prime Minister, you cannot carry on for ever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit. You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re ‘well-placed to weather the storm’, I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense! Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times. The IMF has said so; the European Commission has said so; the markets have said so – which is why our currency has devalued by thirty percent. And soon the voters too will get their chance to say so. They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government.

I said it at the top of this post, I'll repeat it now, placing it in greater context for clarity:

Finally, someone has had the courage to step up and say, "But the Emperor has no clothes". Now, if only someone from this side of the ocean would do the same.