The Patriot Post® · 'Where, Oh Where, Is Barry Goldwater?'

I realize that the late Sen. Goldwater is anathema to liberals, even to those who only know him as the unfortunate victim of a famous TV spot in which a little girl picking a flower appears to be vaporized by a nuclear bomb. The vile message in 1964 was that Goldwater was a nutburger who was anxious to get us involved in a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union. Because most voters 50 years ago were just as dumb as they are today, 61% of them voted for LBJ, who took that as a signal to sink us even deeper into the quagmire of Vietnam.

What more people should remember about Goldwater is based on fact, not a slander perpetuated by a cynical political operative; namely, that he was the man, the Republican senator, who went to Richard Nixon and told him to his face that it was time to resign, that he was an embarrassment not only to the nation, but to the political party to which they both belonged.

Isn’t it a shame that there is no Democrat of equal stature who will go to Obama and point out that what he is doing by ignoring the Constitutional limits on the executive branch, by racking up one scandal after another and by unleashing the dogs at the IRS and the EPA on innocent Americans, is not only bad for the nation, but will be a disaster for every Democrat seeking election this coming November?

Instead, such influential senators as Reid, Durbin, Schumer, Boxer, Sanders and Levin, like parents who choose to subsidize their son’s heroin addiction, clap Obama on the back and tell him he’s doing a swell job.

To better judge just how great a job Obama is doing, the son of a friend of mine drew up a comparison between 2008 and today. Six years ago, we had 118 million fulltime workers, today there are a million fewer. Because we now have more people, that means that workplace participation back then was 65%; today it’s down to 62.8%. Home ownership has dipped from 67.5% to 65%. Median income has gone from $53,644 to $51,017. The poverty level has risen from 13.2% to 15%. Obama has increased the number of people receiving food stamps from 28.2 million to a ridiculous 47.6 million. And, finally, and perhaps most disastrous of all, the debt to GDP ratio has soared from 64.8% to 101.6%.

With the midterm elections now less than four months away, it bears my repeating myself that a vote for any Democrat is a vote for more of the same from Obama and his acolytes. And if you happen to have been one of those Republican brats who stayed home in 2012 because Rick Santorum, Ron Paul or Newt Gingrich, wasn’t the nominee, or because Romney was a Mormon, you have no right to blame a biased media or voter fraud for saddling us with four additional years of the worst president, and the most corrupt administration in American history. The fault is entirely yours. We had enough registered voters to win, but far too many of you ignoramuses were at home, sulking.

In defending his loony foreign policy as it pertained to Iraq, Obama said, “Just because something was stable two years or four years ago doesn’t mean it’s stable today.” True. After all, even America was pretty stable as recently as five years ago.

The one statement that annoys me nearly as much as the lie about Islam being a religion of peace is the one that insists Saudi Arabia is an ally. Everyone knows that Saudi royals subsidize Islamic terrorists as a way of paying protection money in the hope that they’ll be the last item on the alligator’s menu.

Another thing that irks me no end is when our politicians carry on about how they overcame the poverty they were born into or when Hillary Clinton wipes away the tears when she looks back 14 years and $150 million ago to the sad day when she and Bill had to temporarily borrow millions from their pal Terry McAuliffe in order to buy a couple of mansions, while waiting for her bank to clear the $8 million check from her publisher.

Of course it’s not just Democrats who play up the born-in-a-log-cabin saga. I seem to recall Rick Santorum referring to his own underprivileged background. My question is why we should care how poor someone’s folks happened to be. It seems to me that unless you worked in the private sector the way Mitt Romney did, the only way that people like Joe Biden, John Edwards, Harry Reid, John Kerry or Dianne Feinstein, ever get to be kazillionaires is by being ambulance-chasing shysters, taking graft or marrying rich people. It’s certainly not, as they invariably insist, the result of good, honest, labor.

For a while, I couldn’t even imagine anyone being more obnoxiously arrogant than Barack Obama, but that’s only because I had never laid eyes on IRS Commissioner John Kiskinen. After watching him testify before Congress and turn his icy gaze on Paul Ryan for daring to doubt his veracity, I fully expected Rep. Ryan to be turned into a block of salt. In fact, I would warn anyone who even considered shaking Kiskinen’s hand that he stood a good chance of losing one or more fingers in the process, either through theft or frostbite.

Speaking of the IRS, any Democrat who dares spring to its defense needs to be reminded that when she was called to testify before a congressional committee, former IRS Commissioner Lois Lerner decided to plead the 5th Amendment. That was her right. But inasmuch as the whole purpose of the 5th is to protect oneself against self-incrimination, and thus face possible criminal charges, nobody can be blamed for assuming the worst, whether the person is a Mafia don or a federal bureaucrat.

It recently came to light that not only was this administration not caught by surprise when tens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American kids showed up at our southern border, but they had advertised back in January for contractors who would be willing to transport 65,000 of them to other parts of the country.

Naturally, Obama hasn’t seen fit to comment on this exploding humanitarian crisis. But, then, as you may have noticed, whenever the going gets tough, Obama goes golfing.