Michelle Obama's Response Is Far Worse Than Saying Life Under Trump Is Without Hope: She Considers that Americans Are Kids in Need of a Father Figure for President

Charlie Spiering has watched Michelle Obama on the Oprah Winfrey Network and the Breitbart columnist does not seem to be much impressed:

Michelle Obama … she thinks her husband had been a calming voice for the country, comparing him to a parent calming a child that had bumped his head.

“I feel like Barack has been that for the nation, in ways that people will come to appreciate. Having a grownup in the White House who can say to you in times of crisis and turmoil, ‘Hey it’s going to be OK,’” she said.

The general response has usually been disbelief or mirth and merriment that the Apologizer-in-Chief's wife considers life under Donald Trump life without hope.

But what the former Michelle Robinson said is far worse—here are her actual words:

What do we give your kids if you can't give them hope? Y'know, our children respond to crises the way they see us respond. You know, it's like [a child] that bumps his head on the table, and they look up at you to figure out whether it hurts. And if you're, like, "oh my God, they're cryin'!", but if you're like "you know what, babe, it's okay, it's okay…"

And I feel that way about the nation, I feel that Barack has been that for the nation — in ways that people will come to appreciate. Having a grown-up in the White House who can say to you in times of crisis and turmoil, "Hey, it's going to be okay. Let's remember the good things that we have, let's look at the future, let's look at all the things that we are building." All of this is important for our kids to stay focused, and to feel like their work isn't in vain, that their lives aren't in vain… 

So the American public is not only "kids" but "our kids"; who need a father figure in the White House to stay focused and who need his benevolent intervention to prove that their work, and that their lives, are not in vain. Needless to say, this echoes her husband's contention that young Americans are "kids" until at least 26 (the age at which the "kids" can stay under their parents' health care) and quite possibly until far longer.

In fact, the wife has just said, effectively, that all citizens are children throughout their entire lives. Meaning only one thing: that, for their own good, Americans need 1) higher taxes and 2) more interventionist politicians to ride, like knights in shining armor and on white steeds, to their rescue, along with 3) more beneficent bureaucrats to intervene in their lives.

Note to both Obamas: No U.S. president is a father (or the mother) of the nation. Americans are not "kids" and Americans are not crybabies in need of a Che Guevara-like father figure to blow their noses. Americans live in a republic, founded 240 years ago by men who agreed with the Judeo-Christian assumption that all men are equal and all men are in fact grown-up adults, who, offhand, can be trusted to take care of their own lives and the vast majority of problems therein.

This is reflected in the Declaration of Independence (a message to the "you-didn't-build-that" — and won't be able to do so without our help — élites of George III), and, indeed, in every single line of the Constitution of the United States of America.

Update:

The Democrats' “political strategy relies on maintaining economic dependency and feelings of victimhood. To say you must have hope is — think about it — a euphemistic way to say you must continue to feel needy.”

Not Much Concern Among Democrats in 2008 Over Foreign Interference in Presidential Elections, When Foreign Contributions Helped Obama Amass a War Chest Twice the Size of His Opponent

Funny.

I don't remind much of a concern among Democrats in 2008 over foreign interference in a presidential election, when the donkey party removed certain safety checks to donations, and it was alleged that foreign (i.e., illegal) contributions helped propel Barack Obama's war chest to the highest in history, indeed, the double of what his opponent (John McCain) had to spend…

Then, again, the same people who had cried bloody murder in 2004 when George W Bush had 10% more to spend than his opponent (John Kerry) — "See?! That proves it!! That America is not a democracy!!" — went mum four years later when the future apologizer-in-chief, as mentioned, had 50% more to spend than his opponent.

Funny, indeed…

Leftists fail to mention that what little illegal aliens do pay in taxes is dwarfed by what they cost the taxpayer both directly and indirectly

Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser says that her city can no longer continue to support out-of-towners at the city’s homeless shelters 

writes Benny Huang at Constitution.com.

“We have an obligation to serve our residents,” said the mayor. “But we cannot serve the entire region … We’re serving everybody else’s residents. We can’t serve our own. Our own residents are standing at the back of the line.” Last month she proposed a new policy that would require homeless people to prove their residency before being admitted to homeless shelters.

Proving residency can be quite tricky when a person does not have, um, a residence. Mayor Bowser demonstrated the absurdity of her proposal when she asked, “Do they have utilities? Do they have a lease? Do they have any way to demonstrate that they live here?” No, doofus. People who live under highway overpasses do not usually have leases or utility bills.

Bowser compounded the stupidity of her comments when she categorically refused to exclude illegal aliens. “Anybody, regardless of their immigration status, would have to demonstrate that they are a DC resident,” she said. So the city will gladly take in the poor from other countries, even those who are in the country illegally, just not people from outside the District. Yeah, that makes sense.
 
Despite the insanity of Mayor Bowser’s proposal, I can understand the bind she’s in. Budgets are, by definition, the apportionment of finite resources. She’s determined that the social services budget is overburdened and that she has to do something about it. She doesn’t want to slam the door in anyone’s face but unfortunately she must or there will be no social services for anyone.

Naturally, she isn’t willing to take the issue head on, pretending as she does that DC’s strained budget has nothing to do with the illegal aliens who have invaded the city. She’ll blame Virginians and Marylanders because they don’t have a grievance lobby to agitate on their behalf but she’ll never blame non-Americans. It doesn’t occur to her, I suppose, that people from other countries are also from out of town—really out of town.

To hear the Left tell it, the flood of immigration from the third world is a boon to the American economy. They don’t like to distinguish between the illegal and legal varieties of course, and they became incensed whenever anyone else does. Immigrants, they say, contribute to the economy and even pay taxes. They fail to mention however, that what little illegal aliens pay in taxes is dwarfed by what they cost the taxpayer both directly and indirectly.

Despite the fact that it’s illegal for them to collect welfare benefits, they do it nonetheless. They send their children to our public schools—some of whom are also illegal aliens and some of whom are anchor baby citizens. (Yes, I said anchor baby. Get over it.) They demand ESL programs. They displace other workers who then turn to public assistance for their daily bread. They commit all sorts of crime then make use of court-appointed interpreters and public defenders. Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you that enforcement is just too expensive. We’ve tried non-enforcement and it’s costing us out the butt.

My initial reaction toward Washington’s budgetary crisis is schadenfreude. Serves them right. Washington is a boastful “sanctuary city” located within a country that is for all practical purposes a sanctuary nation. Immigration enforcement is a joke and has been for quite a long time. If some big city Democrat mayor can’t make ends meet because of stupid policies that she supports then too bad for her. But of course it won’t be Muriel Bowser who suffers the most when there isn’t enough money to keep the homeless shelters open, it will be homeless Washingtonians.

I often wonder if the burdening of our social services by illegal aliens is in fact an intentional effort—a “conspiracy,” if you will—to bring the whole system down. Recall the infamous Cloward-Piven strategy, first articulated in a 1966 article in The Nation magazine. Drs. Cloward and Piven were a married couple, both professors and sociologists, who argued that there just weren’t enough people on the welfare rolls and that those who were on the welfare rolls were only accessing a fraction of the benefits they were qualified for. They advocated a mass movement to enroll more people for the purpose of collapsing the system.

Why would they want to do that? I’ll let them tell you:

“A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetrates. Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments.” 

The basic idea was to federalize all anti-poverty policy, to redistribute wealth, and to institute a minimum guaranteed income. It was a socialist’s dream.

From this 1966 article was born the so-called welfare rights movement. Activists combed the slums in search of people who weren’t receiving all of their benefits or any benefits at all. Welfare recipients marched for more handouts. A lot of time and energy that would have been better utilized looking for jobs was instead spent on organizing and making demands.

But the Cloward-Piven strategy showed a surprising lack of ambition. They were “thinking small,” confining their movement to poor Americans when in fact there was a bottomless well of impoverished people in our backyard. I’m speaking of Latin America, of course. Fifty years after the article was published it appears that the Left has overcome its provincialism. These days they’re trying to get Latin Americans here by the boatload and to care for their every need. And why stop there? There are plenty of poor people in exotic places like Somalia and Syria. Just keep importing more and more of the third world’s most desperate people until the system heaves and gives way under the strain. Then replace it with something a little more Venezuelan.

Is this the 21^st Century version of the Cloward-Piven strategy? In recent years I’ve asked myself that question with increasing frequency. Illegal immigration has swelled, states have granted drivers’ licenses and in-state tuition to people who shouldn’t even be here in the first place, and “sanctuary cities” (lawless zones) are now commonplace. The center cannot hold—and that may be the point.

It’s schemes like this that remind me of just how dumb it is for anyone to vote Democrat, even poor people. Especially poor people. I’m sure this will be a tough sell but I believe that it serves the best interests of America’s poor to show the jackass party to the door. Why? Because the welfare system as we know is it unsustainable, burdened a little more everyday with illegal aliens, the children of illegal aliens, and people who are just trying to get over on the system. For people who really need those services the prospect of collapse ought to be frightening. They should be telling their elected officials to stop importing wards of the state but they never do. Perhaps they believe, as many poor people do, that there’s some rich guy out there who can and should be squeezed a little harder. But there isn’t a rich guy in the whole world who could keep our social services afloat in the long run even if the government seized every penny he owns. The answer isn’t more taxes it’s less spending.

But don’t Republicans want to slash social services? Not really. For as long as I’ve been observing politics, Republicans have generally favored the status quo, opposing Democrats’ attempt to expand social services while doing little or nothing to undo what’s already been done. … 

For people who really need those benefits it makes no sense to continue to vote for a party, the Democrats, that is wittingly or unwittingly crashing the system. The first victims of the coming implosion are those Americans who actually need the benefits that government will no longer be able to provide.

It used to be that we poked fun at the Chicken Littles; In the era of the drama queen, every "The sky is falling!" is taken as holy writ

Referring to the fact that The president-elect’s EPA head may not believe in climate change, a Trump Appointments article in The Economist is entitled A fox for the henhouse.

I respond as follows:

Not only do you assume that leftists alone take a "serious view of the environment", you have adopted the disparaging "denier" expression for their opponents as well ("A fox for the henhouse", December 10th).

There are those among us who have not failed to notice that, over the decades, the "coming ice age" of the 1970s morphed into "global warming" before such inconvenient phenomenons as freezing winters led — conveniently — to the coinage of a one-size-fits-all "climate change".

Like cartoonists around the world, your Kal has drawn GOP elephants mocking activists' fears even as they are forced to climb onto the rooftop of such buildings as the US Congress (soon to include the White House) because of the rising waters.

Think of Los Angeles and New York, of Aberdeen and Brighton, of Capetown and Sydney: Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true that in the past five weeks, the past five months, the past five years, and the past 50 years (even the past 500 years?), the oceans do not seem to have risen by as much as a single inch?

Thousands of The Economist readers are howling in outrage as they read this letter and as I go on to ask: So who are truly the irrational people here? Isn't science supposed to require the challengers of the status quo to prove their contention?

It used to be that we poked fun at the Chicken Littles and the other boys who cried wolf. In the era of the drama queen, every "The sky is falling!" is taken as holy writ, used to clobber clueless citizens (aka "racists", "deplorables", etc, not least… "deniers"), even as taxes are raised ever higher to increase the size of the administrative state so that politicians and bureaucrats alike can rush to our "rescue".

Hasn't it occurred to you that this snooty (not to mention self-serving) attitude is precisely what, over the past year, skeptical citizens have started to vote against?
Related: Disastrous Claims About Rising Sea Levels Run Into One (Un?)fortunate Fact

Related: Editorial Cartoons: Are They Humor or Are They Propaganda?

Related: Devotees of Science Versus Followers of Religion —
Are Only the Latter to Be Taken to Task for Their Alleged Superstitions?
(dispassionate in-depth chapter-length article
which examines the subject from all perspectives)

Related: Artists Unite: In this era of integrated information, we
are witnessing the most concerted attack on freedom in world history

Bloggers Feast at French Bistro Deep in the Heart o' Texas

Wonderful dinner with Instapundit's Ed Driscoll at Christina’s Bistro. Enjoyed the Southern/Texan hospitality to the utmost…

The U.S. must care more about whether it commands international respect than whether it is loved by international elites

Incredibly, the New York Times, or at least its international version, has given the left column of its front page to one Mark Moyar. The opinion piece penned by the director of the Center for Military and Diplomatic History at the Foreign Policy Initiative is entitled: The World Fears Trump’s America. That’s a Good Thing.

Among global elites, Donald J. Trump’s recent phone call with Taiwan’s president has induced fear on a scale seldom matched since Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech. The Sydney Morning Herald warned that the phone call “risks provoking a cold war between the United States and China with potentially catastrophic economic and security implications.” The fright appears to confirm the narrative formed earlier this year by headlines like “Donald Trump Terrifies World Leaders.”

The fear is real. Mr. Trump has indeed terrified foreign leaders with his “America first” mantra, his promises to enlarge the American military and his tough talk on everything from the Islamic State to Air Force One. The good news is that his administration can turn this fear to the benefit of the United States.

During the last eight years, President Obama showed what happens when the world’s greatest power tries strenuously to avoid giving fright. He began his presidency with lofty vows to conciliate adversaries, defer to the opinions of other countries and reduce America’s military commitments. Consequently, he received rapturous applause in European capitals and a Nobel Peace Prize. In the real world of geopolitics, however, the results have been catastrophic.

Mr. Obama’s passivity in the face of provocations and his failure to enforce the “red line” in Syria led Russia, China and other adversaries to seek new gains at America’s expense. His promises to “end the wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan satisfied the cosmopolitan chatterers of Stockholm, Paris and New York, but they deflated American allies in Baghdad and Kabul, and emboldened adversaries in Iran and Pakistan. So severe was the damage that he had to send troops back to Iraq in 2014, and had to abort his plans to withdraw all American forces from Afghanistan before leaving office.

The Obama presidency is but the latest chapter in a post-1945 saga that has been dominated by international fear of the United States, or lack thereof. In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea because Harry S. Truman’s exclusion of South Korea from America’s “defense perimeter” removed fears of intervention. By contrast, Dwight D. Eisenhower employed rhetorical threats and high military spending to fill the Communist powers with fear of nuclear Armageddon, an approach that kept the Communists from launching further invasions.

Lyndon B. Johnson tried to avert a major war in Vietnam by showing restraint, in expectation of North Vietnamese reciprocation. Hanoi responded by pouring troops into South Vietnam. Richard M. Nixon revived fears of the United States with his “madman theory,” whereby he took seemingly reckless actions to convince America’s enemies that he just might be crazy enough to do it. Those fears, and the caution they instilled in the Communist powers, dissipated when the Watergate Congress kicked the legs out from under South Vietnam. The world continued to live without fear of a strong America under Jimmy Carter, whose timidity caused nations to fall to Communism and the United States Embassy in Iran to fall to anti-American extremists.

In 1980, as in 2016, Americans elected someone who made clear his intent to put fear back in the nation’s enemies. Nowadays, even liberal Democrats applaud Reagan for bringing the Soviet Union to its knees. Back in 1980, however, Reagan’s tough, nationalist stances on foreign policy aroused the same condemnation of “fearmongering” currently emanating from the world’s enlightened critics of Mr. Trump.

The trembling of the rest of the world does not ensure that American foreign policy will be successful. Like any other strategic advantage, it works only when properly exploited through sound strategic decisions. Tough talk must be used judiciously. As the Syrian red line debacle demonstrated, the White House should issue specific threats only when it is prepared to follow through on them.

In its diplomacy, the new administration must seek the proper balance between fear and more positive motivations like respect and admiration. Under Mr. Obama, and his like-minded predecessors, American foreign policy created plenty of fear among some of America’s allies — fear that the United States would let them down. The Trump administration will need to reverse those expectations, so that fear of the United States is once again stronger among enemies than friends.

At times, nevertheless, even allies ought to have cause to worry about White House decisions. They must know that the world’s most powerful nation is prepared to practice tough love if they take actions inconsistent with the strength of the United States or the stability of the international system. Without such worries, they are liable to keep doing as they have often done in recent years — skimping on military spending and international commitments in expectation that the Americans will reflexively pick up the slack.

As the world’s most powerful country, and the only one whose leadership can safeguard the world order, the United States must care more about whether it commands international respect than whether it is loved by international elites. The incoming administration appears poised to return the United States to this precept after an eight-year drought. Americans and America’s allies should be relieved. America’s enemies are right to be afraid.