A high-profile surrogate for Mitt Romney's campaign said Tuesday that he wished President Obama "would learn how to be an American" and argued he doesn't understand the U.S. economy because he spent his youth "smoking something."
Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu was talking to reporters on a conference call organized by the Romney campaign when he said, "I wish this president would learn how to be an American."He made the jaw-dropping remark while criticizing Obama for arguing in Virginia on Friday that government investments in infrastructure and education have helped contribute to corporate profits, ABC News reported.
John Sununu made an interesting point, and it certainly got me to thinking. Like, you know who else should have learned "how to be an American"? Dwight Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States! Now there's somebody who didn't understand how this great nation worked.
I mean, think about. Check out this picture of Eisenhower when he was younger, "smoking something" -- probably in a foreign land...
Then Eisenhower spent several years honing his un-Americanism at the Ivy League's "Columbia boutique," where as president in the early 1950s he set the stage for the future schooling of his comrade-in-arms, Barack Hussein Obama.
He went straight from that pink-ivory tower on New York's Upper West Side to the White House, where he taxed the rich at a rate that would make today's European socialists blush -- 91 percent!
Do you know what Ike did with that money that he took from America's job creators? He built roads. Not just your old-fashioned Pony Express trails, but a massive, Soviet-style Interstate highway system. Eventually, the vast big-government ribbon of asphalt grew to an astonishing 47,182 miles. Eisenhower's lack of understanding of how America is supposed to work was staggering. Before 1956, hard-nosed entreprenuers were able to blaze their own free-market trail across God's earth with a machete, or a trusty axe. Now, you could only drive from New York to San Francisco on the precise path that Big Brother had mandated for you.
That wasn't the end of it. Two years later, after the Russkies had launched Sputnik into orbit, Eisenhower responded with his biggest Big Government power grab of all time. He rammed through the Orwellian-sounding National Defense Education Act, which called for centralized funding of better education in math, science and engineering. It would take decades for freedom-loving Americans to successfully re-direct those funds so our children could once again learn how dinosaurs and humans have shared the planet.
The fact that the American economy took off like an Apollo rocket during the 1950s, and that the era saw unprecedented expansion of a prosperous middle class, is a true tribute to the spirit and drive of everyday Americans. They found a way to succeed even as the man that political pundit Joseph Welch rightly pegged as a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy" sat in the Oval Office, attacking the rich and giving away "free stuff"... like roads.
There's one other way that Eisenhower brandished his un-Americanism in the face of America. When this great nation went to war, I understand that Ike spent most of the time over in Europe. He even spent the most important part of the war driving around France!
And you know who else drove around France during a war!
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Roads, seriously, you are going to compare the expansion of commerce across this country via the Interstate Highway system to what had been given away by the POTUS' succeeding him? The current highway system that we enjoy was inspired by what Ike had saw in Germany (not Soviet as you reported). History shows that the Germans were able to quickly deploy and were able to move goods and supplies to their newly conquered land via these highways. How better to connect the East to the West and be able to move goods between both sides. It cut the time it would take to receive such goods, goods could now be transported overnight and cut the cost involved in shipping them because now a booming trucking system would emerge, all serving to employ people.
You got yourself another fan Mr.Bunch!
but then that would be too logical a leap for your mind to make, right?
Eisenhower warned about the Military Complex and their tendency to take over our Government, suck up our Tax money and create wars. He was right.
When I was a kid, Ike was the very embodiment of plain-vanilla, fuddy-duddy conservatism -- a figure of mockery to the left. But, as the GOP has more and more been taken over by the radical right (the sort of people Ike disliked and distrusted), his reputation has plummeted on the right and boomed on the left. It's an indication of how far the center has drifted rightward that today Eisenhower is a liberal.
If the Republicans no longer have any use for this towering figure of the 20th century (the guy who kicked Hitler's butt, for heaven's sake!), I'll happily claim him as an honorary Democrat.
(By the way, now that the legacies of Ike and T. Roosevelt have been shunned by their own party, and now that even Ronald "the rich should pay their fair share" Reagan is a suspected heretic, the far right has begun their search for their true historical standard-bearer. The result is that conservative revisionists have exhumed Calvin Coolidge, of all people, and have begun rehabilitating his reputation.
What did Coolidge do? Nothing. Nothing at all. That's their point.
Besides his well know infrastructure expenditures, this 5-star WWII general also signed legislation that expanded Social Security, increased the minimum wage, created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and supported government construction of low-income housing.
While maintaining remarkably progressive tax rates, unemployment and inflation remained low. Instead of the supply-side dominated economy of today, the consumer valued dominated economy of the 50's expanded robustly while the personal income of wage earners increased by 45%.
These are the old-fashion values we should be returning to.
Ever heard of it?
And you don't think their are any deductions or loopholes? None? Not even itty bitty ones?