###For the Record
Historian Victor Davis Hanson: “[H]ad President Obama himself just listened to earlier guidance from Barack Obama, his opponents might have had no cause for either a government shutdown or another debt-ceiling crisis. In 2006, Obama rightly called for an end to the Bush administration’s intemperate deficit spending that had resulted in an annual deficit of $250 billion that year. Accordingly, Sen. Obama voted to shut down the government rather than automatically to extend the debt ceiling. ... The next year, Obama voted ‘present’ rather than to approve another $160 billion in annual borrowing that would add to the debt. ... In 2008, candidate Obama returned to the issue of profligate spending again. For most of 2008, candidate Obama also called for a kinder and gentler Washington politics. ... Through a series of metaphors, similes and allusions [during the recent shutdown], Obama reduced his opposition to little more than ransom takers, house burners, defaulters, global economy crashers, nuclear bomb users, extremists, threateners, extortionists, hostage takers, plant burners and equipment breakers -- who are apparently also untrustworthy and irresponsible.”
