Obama Recyles Attack Rhetoric on GOP Budgets

It's bad enough he has no new ideas. Can't he at least come up with something new to say?

Or is his telepromter stuck?

At National Review, Yuval Levin points out that:

On February 16, at a hearing of the House Budget Committee, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was asked by committee chairman Paul Ryan to describe the administration’s plans for addressing the mounting risk of a debt crisis. His reply was: “We’re not coming before you today to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem. What we do know is we don’t like yours.”

It's not just the Treasury Secretary that is short of ideas and can only tear down GOP ideas. Here's a video comparing Obama's speech attacking the GOP budget plan of Rep. Paul Ryan (WI) in 2011 with his speech attacking Ryan's plan for 2012:

Nearly identical word for word. No new ideas. No plan. No leadership. No responsibility!
And if you think this example is a fluke, I would remind you that his State of the Union speeches are like old reruns on TV.

Elsewhere in Obama's Tuesday speech he trotted out the same Chicken Little "the sky is falling" scaremongering about what would happen if the Ryan plan were enacted. I don't need to cite examples, you have heard them all before. Of course it doesn't matter that what he said was factually false or that he deliberately misled his listeners about the Ryan plan. We expect dishonesty from a Chicago politician.

In the video clip below, Mitt Romney called out Obama on his dishonest tactics by saying that Obama "railed against arguments no one is making – and criticized policies no one is proposing. It’s one of his favorite strategies – setting up straw men to distract from his record."

Yuval Levin concluded his brilliant summation of Obama's game:

He speaks as though the problem—our unsustainable entitlement state—were the solution, and as though the solution—a budget that restrains the growth of spending, modernizes and reforms our collapsing entitlement and welfare programs to avert their collapse, and charts a path toward economic growth—were the problem. In this upside-down, inside-out world, Barack Obama accuses Paul Ryan of putting the future of America’s younger generation in danger and inviting American decline.


A psychologist might call this projection. The president’s political advisors probably call it all they’ve got. Let us hope that voters will know what to call it this fall: reckless denial and cynical dishonesty from a failed president with nothing left to offer. Or, if we are lucky, perhaps the last straw.

Obama can't talk about his record and we can only expect that these attacks will get worse we get nearer the election. But really, is this the best Obama can do?