In the past few days, we’ve seen a contrast in budget proposals. Paul Ryan, on the Republican side, has come up with a plan that will repeal Obamacare—which insurance companies are informing us will lead to a possible doubling of premiums by next year—and put the country on the path to a balanced budget in ten years. The Senate Democrats have an entirely different plan, one that comports with President Obama’s vision. John Hinderaker, at the Power Line blog, explains,

After four years, Congressional Democrats have finally produced a budget. The process has proved revealing: the Democrats’ budget never balances, increases spending by 62% over ten years, and adds $7 trillion to the national debt despite raising taxes by $1.5 trillion. So Senate Democrats must agree with President Obama that the nation does not face a debt crisis. . . .

We know from the budgets he has submitted for the last four years that Obama doesn’t care about the debt, immediately or otherwise, and has no intention of addressing it, ever. His budgets contemplate nothing but huge deficits as far as the eye can see, and would add trillions to the national debt through ever-increasing spending.

House Republicans have tried repeatedly to send bills to the Senate that would help solve our financial crisis. Each time, the Senate has refused even to allow a vote—all at the behest of the White House.

As the nation slides inexorably into a massive debt that might never be stopped, the president and the Democrat leaders in the Senate are ideologically blind to the disaster that looms:

For those who choose to believe Obama’s rosy picture of financial stability, there is a surprise coming:

A pleasant surprise, it is not.

While I was gone, the sequester went into effect. It was supposed to be the end of the world. Somehow, I don’t think we’re quite at the end yet, and when we do get there, it won’t be because we cut back our planned increased spending by a little over 2%. There’s nothing drastic about this, yet you wouldn’t know it from all the dire warnings emanating from the White House. But it seems to me we’ve heard this rhetoric before. For those with short memories, here’s a reminder:

Screaming “crisis” over something that is not a crisis has become standard operating procedure for this administration. There was even a proposed bill that would have given President Obama the discretion to cut back on things that were not going to affect the public directly. He didn’t support it. Why not?

The plain truth is that he wants these cuts to hurt. He wants to target those things that will annoy the public and make his subjects American citizens demand restoration of the funds. I experienced this directly when we were disembarking from our cruise ship. An announcement came over the loudspeaker saying they were just informed that the government had cut back on the number of customs agents in the terminal, so we would have to wait longer to get off the ship. A minor inconvenience, to be sure, but just enough of an annoyance to make people upset. The administration hopes they will blame the Republicans.

The most visible signal of this policy was the cancellation of White House tours. Even though the salary of the man who takes care of the president’s dog is greater than the cost of those tours, our leader chose to cut the tours instead. Sending a message and seeking political advantage seem to be behind most of his decisions. Cartoonists have picked up on the ludicrousness of this tactic:

So no school tours, but, as I noted before my cruise vacation, anyone who ponies up $500,000 can be put on a presidential advisory board. Given a choice between allowing school children to see the “People’s House” or rolling out the red carpet for donors, the president clearly has his priorities:

The cynicism of it all is rather nauseating:

Bill Clinton using the White House as a bed and breakfast for donors was tacky enough. This raises tackiness to new heights.

Back in the mid-1960s, NBC aired a satirical program called That Was the Week That Was. It was a look back over the events of the previous week, with political lampooning as its specialty. I don’t know why I was reminded of the program, but it did provide the idea for today’s post. In a similar vein, I now present the highlights of the past week in politics.

Item #1. Shall we begin with an event that was not supposed to be political—the Academy Awards? Of course, saying Hollywood is not political is kind of farcical on the face of it, but this annual self-congratulatory exercise was intended to stress the artistic, not the political. Yet who showed up as a surprise announcer of the winner of Best Picture but Michelle Obama. What might this mean for next year’s ceremony?

Actually, given the composition of the audience at the Academy Awards, the winners may be the same ones who grab the artistic awards.

Item #2. Are you aware that Obama has an official arm of the Democratic Party called Organizing for Action, dedicated to grassroots agitation for his agenda? Its newest tactic, which was targeted this week by a liberal, former senator Russ Feingold, is to promise anyone who donates $500,000 access to Obama via a spot on a national advisory board. This is not a conservative conspiracy theory; it has even been reported by the New York Times, which can hardly be accused of being a conservative organ of the press.

Yes, this is a different kind of presidency, but not in the way he promised.

Item #3. New Secretary of State John Kerry, as related in this blog a couple of days ago, decided to go to Berlin and give Germans a lesson on the open society by praising America’s willingness to let even neo-Nazis have complete freedom of speech. Everyone has the right to be stupid in America, he claimed. How true.

Item #4. Of course the big news of the week was the onrushing Armageddon of the Sequester Monster—or so it would seem from the president’s rhetoric:

But even he had to back off somewhat when his doomsday scenario received a ton of criticism. Hard facts began to prevail:

In Obamaworld, spending cuts are not healthy for the nation. Yet what if the opposite really is true?

What a week it was.

Graphs and charts can be very informative. Sometimes, if done right, they can clarify rather complex issues. Take budgets and spending, for instance. Now, this isn’t a typical graph, but I think it makes the point quite well:

Talk about a pie chart. I hope you caught the crumbs next to the larger pie—that’s the dreaded sequestration amount. How will we ever survive?

Yet President Obama seems to have difficulty with the proposition that spending needs to be cut:

He has what he calls a “more balanced” approach. Let’s allow him to clarify this one:

Nothing, in fact, seems to bother him as much as the possibility of cutting back on the amount the government takes from us or curtailing government borrowing:

Finally, for those who have a particularly difficult time understanding Democrat-speak, I offer the following translation:

I hope this exercise in clarity has been helpful.

Chuck Hagel was confirmed as the new Secretary of Defense yesterday. Forty-one Republicans voted against the appointment; four joined with all the Democrats to put the vote well over the top. Republicans who earlier voted for cloture and broke the filibuster are, in my mind, just as much to blame for this successful nomination as those who openly supported Hagel.

This is the same man who fell on his face verbally in his confirmation hearings, stumbling badly before sharp questioning. This is the man who has said the Iranian regime is a legitimately elected regime despite all the evidence of corruption and intimidation of opponents. This is the man who can’t understand why the Iranians shouldn’t have nuclear capability. And this is also the man who has made rather strong statements against our only ally in the region—Israel.

In fact, the radical anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, is now praising Hagel. He’s pleased that Hagel stands up to the “Jewish Lobby.” Who, in their right minds, would want Louis Farrakhan saying nice things about them? Somehow Hagel has accomplished that. But keep in mind that Hagel will not be making policy; he’ll simply be carrying out the policies of his boss, President Obama, another politician who has little good to say about Israel, and who feels far more comfortable in the Islamist world.

This “team” is rounded out by the new Secretary of State, John Kerry. He’s now on his first overseas assignment, visiting supposedly key allies, but curiously omitting some of the staunchest—no Israel or Poland on the itinerary. Kerry didn’t get off on the right foot when he stopped in the country of Kyrgyzstan; he invented a new name for the country—Kyrzakhstan. Shouldn’t the Secretary of State know how to pronounce the names of allies?

On top of that embarrassment, Kerry went to Germany to speak to students there. What did he decide to focus on? He told them that in America, even neo-Nazis have the right of free speech, and that is a good thing. Whatever one thinks of the limits of free speech, upholding Nazi free-speech rights in Germany is at least odd, probably stupid. Germany has banned the Nazi Party, and for good reasons. Germany is not America, and the history of Nazi Germany is anathema to modern Germans.  Jonah Goldberg of National Review responded to Kerry’s choice of subject rather superbly, I think, when he said,

I am all in favor of democracy promotion and singing the praises of free expression. But getting the Germans to be more tolerant of Nazi propagandizing is low on my list of priorities. Really, really, really low. Let’s see if he’s willing to give a similar talk about religious freedom and tolerance in Saudi Arabia. My hunch is that he’d be much quicker to respect the cultural distinctiveness of Saudi attitudes.

These are our political leaders. Pray that we survive their leadership.

The big word that’s scaring people these days is sequestration. All those automatic spending cuts are supposed to go into effect later this week if Congress can’t come up with a better solution. President Obama was behind this tactic from the start; now he’s acting like he never was. In other words, he’s doing what he always does—speaking out of both sides of his mouth.

And the other part of his plan has already been set in motion also:

This is really getting old. The truth is, though, except for some concerns about how this might affect national defense, these so-called drastic cuts are anything but drastic. A number of cartoonists have caught on to that fact:

Somehow I think we’ll survive this emergency. What we’ll find more difficult surviving is Obama’s agenda for more spending. As we approach the $17 trillion mark for the national debt, we’re going to have to get serious about real spending cuts.

I asked one of my classes yesterday if they thought the average American voter was well informed enough to make intelligent decisions in elections. I found they pretty much mirrored my own views that most voters were woefully uninformed, and that they made their decisions on the flimsiest of reasons at times. Rarely does anyone think in terms of principles when casting a vote. All too often, they are more interested in what they believe the candidate is going to give to them.

What else can explain why Barack Obama could win reelection despite the awful economy? A significant number of voters must not be aware of his failures. Of course, he often seems to be unaware of his failures as well:

Then there are the truly serious issues that get swept under the media rug by a fawning assembly of reporters, thereby limiting the public’s knowledge of their importance:

All one needs to do is read the litany of silly statements that have emanated from this administration to understand the incompetence and ideological blindness that keep us from reversing our misfortunes:

Don’t pass by that cartoon because it seems too full of words. Read those statements carefully and realize how much of a fantasy world has been foisted upon us. And we’ll never break its iron grip upon us if we don’t stand strong against Obama’s strategy for continued victory:

It’s time to stop being so gullible. God gave us brains. We should use them.