The class warfare rhetoric is getting thick. I find this rather amusing considering the president himself is part of that oft-maligned 1%. It appears his campaign team has decided the best chance he has for reelection is to play the envy card. I’m sure, though, it will be conjoined with the race card later, as well as any other “card” they can find to exacerbate divisions within the citizenry.

Since I’m a historian, I’m always interested in the antecedents to current policies. What were the precursors that have led to fanning the flames of hatred of the rich? One cartoonist has come up with a possibility:

I’m not going to vouch for the historical accuracy of that one, but if the slash-and-burn technique becomes dominant real soon, maybe I’ll give it some credence.

Our economic mess is a combination of radical Leftist ideology and just plain incompetence. In fact, the two go together rather well:

So in case the president may be wondering, there may be good reasons why the business community is not uniformly on his side:

May enlightenment come to the majority of the electorate by November.

The best chance President Obama has of being reelected is if the nation contracts a case of collective amnesia. We will have to forget, for instance, his attitude toward the plebeians who actually do the work in this country. Those are the people he famously touted as clinging to a few things out of insecurity:

We’ll also have to forget that he’s been on the job for quite some time now, and that there is a statute of limitations on blaming the previous administration:

And then there are the promises he made, and the policies he enacted to bring them to fruition. It’s going to take a world-class case of amnesia for those:

None of this is new to the man, though. He was practically raised on class warfare:

Yes, we’re going to have to forget a whole lot for him to stay in office four more years. I won’t put it past us, but I’m praying we will regain our senses in time.

About the only thing I have in common with the “occupiers” of Wall Street is a disdain for some of the “fat cats” who think the world revolves around them. Yet that self-centeredness is not unique to Wall Street. It’s the common human malady, and in the case of the bad economy we’ve suffered the past few years, Wall Street alone is not to blame—although some people are always quick to blame someone else when things go wrong:

In fact, some people have become expert in blaming others for their woes. Yet they continue to hawk the same old remedies that aren’t remedies at all:

There’s at least one part of the economy that has shown some innovation during the Obama years:

What a success story! We should reward this administration with four more years, right?

We can’t leave? Well, to quote the man himself, “Yes, we can!”

I don’t think I’ve ever used eight cartoons in one blog. Let’s set the record today. Why so many at one time? Well, when have we ever had a president who has declared war on wealth and wealth creators as avidly as this one? His continuing adventures in socialism/financial incompetence provide excellent fodder for the cartoonists. Many consider his actions a new warfare:

Obama, naturally, doesn’t see it that way:

His concept for how to make the math add up follows a traditional approach—one that has been tried in countless countries from the old Soviet Union to the “new” Europe:

One may ask a legitimate question with respect to this approach:

Meanwhile, those who are trying to be rich are also being affected by our economic woes:

Obama’s deficit-reduction plan has some unique twists to it. He’s counting the discontinuation of the war in Afghanistan as part of it; you see, that’s money we were going to spend, but won’t in the future, so it’s part of deficit reduction. On that basis, you could throw in all kinds of possibilities for deficit reduction:

The only real barrier to genuine deficit reduction is one’s imagination, apparently. Yet programs that will remain on the books and will continue to mushroom don’t seem to find a spot in his plan:

To be fair, though, there is one segment of the population that likes what it sees:

I say it’s well past time to believe in something else.