David Harsanyi’s new book, Obama’s Four Horsemen: The Disasters Unleashed by Obama’s Reelection is out today. He posted a hefty excerpt over at Human Events, where he and I are two of the primary horsemen. Based on this, I think he wants to be Death, and I’ll be War.
He’s using the apocalyptic metaphor to describe a very serious paradigm shift covering the eight years of Obama, coupled with the rapid approach of unsustainable government disasters set in motion long before Barack Hussein Obama was born. Like most great disasters, this one is a matter of timing; it’s a one-two-punch that will shatter all the seals of Big Government Revelations at once. (The Bible calls for seven seals, but due to sequestration we can now afford only five, and they’re forged from recycled Solyndra solar panels.)
The key paragraph from David’s excerpt:
President Barack Obama didn’t invent the impending disasters America faces–not our debt problem, not our welfare state–but he did accelerate nearly every one of them. It’s not only that the president’s progressive politics have battered economic dynamism, hamstrung capitalism, and discredited the importance of meritocracy; it’s that, in the Obama era, the relationship between the average American citizen and his government has been transformed forever into something unhealthy.
That’s what will destroy us. The old relationship is what made America great. But at the very moment in which entitlement disasters programmed a century ago are poised to destroy us, the dynamic creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, and work ethic that would allow us to create effective solutions – and keep the current system chugging along until they could be implemented – have been poisoned. Obama didn’t begin that process either, but he’s clearly a soulmate of those who did, and his policies have made things vastly worse.
Not only have the ocean of regulatory thumbscrews and ObamaCare bear traps pouring out of this Administration weakened the economy directly, but they have shifted the attitudes of the American people, just as the Great Society previously destroyed the sectors of the population they were supposed to help. It’s not just that Obama is a fountain of bad ideas. An equally great danger – Famine and Conquest riding hard alongside their brother Horsemen of the Apocalypse – is that the “Overton window” of political possibility has shifted so far to the Left that the right ideas are virtually unthinkable. The people who should be championing them, Republicans, are nervously eyeballing public opinion polls and calculating how many principles they’ll surrender in order to remain electorally viable.
Where are the great champions of economic liberty and capitalism? Who’s out there demanding pro-growth tax cuts, regulatory form, and the end of the absurd nightmare known as ObamaCare – which will inflict dozens of times more bloat to the deficit than the allegedly grim “austerity” of sequestration will save, all by itself? What political leader will stand up to end this famine of ideas, put the mighty principles of capitalist freedom that built our exceptional nation on the table, and force Barack Obama to oppose them?
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