Thomas Friedman is the pundit who famously pines for America to be more like China. After all, in China, when the government wants something to happen, it just tells the people what to do. The people obey, or they end up in prison or with some similar fate. Friedman likes the system since the Chinese do not have to bother with all those messy demands from individual citizens or interest groups. Like any true liberal, Friedman thinks that the government knows best, so giving the government total power is clearly the answer to his dreams.
Friedman's arguments about the Chinese reveal the essence of his political thought: he prefers total government power over democracy and freedom. That was bad enough. Now, however, Friedman is revealing that he has lost his ability to discern reality. His mental abilities have died. No, Friedman is not in a coma in some hospital room; it is just that he has become totally delusional. Friedman is out with a column that calls for president Obama to start talking about all of his accomplishments. That's right; Friedman says Obama should stop bashing Romney and instead talk about all the wonderful things that he accomplished in his first term.
It is a great idea..........for Republicans. Just imagine Obama's speech discussing all of his great accomplishments. Hmmmmm............here it is, hot off the teleprompter:
My friends, thank you for that warm welcome. [Smile and wave.] I am here today to explain once and for all why it is that you should vote to keep me in office for another four years. I do not often speak about myself and my accomplishments. [pause for snickering to die down] Today, however, I am going to have to do that. I want you all to realize what a great country we are living in due to my efforts over these last few years.
Let me list the great things that I have done.
1) I killed Osama bin Laden. It was not an easy decision to order the Navy to go after the man who killed 3000 of our countrymen on 9-11. I struggled for days with that one. After all, on the one hand I had the chance to finally take down the head of al Qaeda, the mastermind of so many attacks against Americans. On the other hand, however, Axelrod and Plouffe told me that if the raid did not go well, my poll numbers would drop. Two days before the raid, I spent a sleepless night tossing and turning. Michelle asked me if something was wrong and I told her I had to decide if getting bin Laden was worth the risk to my job approval ratings. She smiled and told me that I was just having some crazy nightmare. Ultimately, I made the single most courageous decision ever by an American president; I said to hell with my poll numbers and I ordered the raid.
2) I got unemployment down to 8.1% last month. This was an historic accomplishment. No president since the Depression has seen unemployment as high for so long as I have. I tried many things to bring down the percentage of jobless. I borrowed money from China to send funds to states to help pay health benefits and pensions for union workers. I borrowed money from China to fund much needed research at universities across the land. This research included such essentials as learning about the sex lives of coeds at Syracuse. I borrowed money from China to fun a huge number of shovel ready projects. While, as I have said before, these shovel ready jobs were not really shovel ready, we did achieve some milestones. We built tunnels under certain roads so that salamanders could cross the highway safely. We had a few roads here and there repaved. Mostly we funded work that was already scheduled with this new source of funds.
There were many other efforts here as well. I personally saved General Motors and Chrysler rather than letting them go through bankruptcy as Governor Romney advocated. Indeed, I borrowed money from China to send over seventy billion dollars to GM and Chrysler. Of course, then both companies went through bankruptcy, but not until they spent that seventy billion dollars. Then I used my muscle as president to subvert the bankruptcy court in order to force the bondholders to release most what they were owed so that the UAW could come out of the process owning a big chunk of both companies. Then I gave much of Chrysler to Fiat. I also required GM to build an electric car, even though it did not work well. All this was such a success that we were able to take GM public again at $32 per share. It is true that GM now sells for only $22 per share, so all those investors who bought the company lost big bucks. Of course, that is completely different than when people lost money on Facebook's IPO. After all, for GM, I did it.
I also arranged for billions of dollars to go to my friends and fundraisers for "green" energy ventures. I borrowed the money from China and sent enough to my friends so that they could skim tens of millions for themselves before these firms went under. But even then, the unemployment rate stayed stubbornly high. Even for me, it was a problem to figure out what I could do next.
Finally, I realize the truth. No matter how much I borrowed from China and wasted, I could not get the economy to create jobs quickly. We were moving towards an election year with excessive unemployment. That is when I came up with perhaps my greatest idea. We would no longer look to create jobs; instead, I focused my efforts on forcing the unemployed to give up hope and drop out of the labor force. In just the last two years, I have convinced nearly three million people who once proudly held a job in America to throw in the towel. They now just sit at home without hope and wait for the next government check. What a great achievement. With this move, I got the unemployment rate down to only 8.1%. It is true that if those who have given up hope and stopped looking for work are counted, the rate would be about 11%, but we just do not count those folks.
3) My third triumph is how well I kept spending from rising. Just this past month, a new analysis was released that showed that spending during my administration rose at the slowest rate of any modern president. Now, I have to come out and counter all those lies that were told on Fox News that claimed that I had spent a lot. It is just not true. When I borrowed $800 billion from China to spend on a stimulus, that was really spending by George W. Bush. When I took the about $400 billion of TARP funds that had not been necessary to spend to prevent the big banks from failing and then spent it all in 2009, that too was spending by Bush. After all, TARP was passed during his administration. Hey, just a thought here, Social Security was passed when Roosevelt was in office. I think that makes it FDR's spending. Anyway, when I got Congress to raise spending by another $400 billion in the spring of 2009, that was also Bush's responsibility since he was president when fiscal 2009 began. Bush was the big spender, not me.
I am going to stop listing accomplishments for now, but I plan to continue this effort each week as the campaign unfolds. Next week I am going to focus on my heroic efforts following the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, my preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons, and my efforts to keep the price of energy low.
Thank you, and God bless the United States of America and me, Barack Obama
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