Dan

Calabrese

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April 3, 2008

Barack Obama: The Man Who Will Make Our Problems Go Away

It’s always illustrative when liberals say what they really mean. And we need to hear more about what Barack Obama really means, because the whole change/hope/we’re-in-it-together thing is going to get awfully tired by November.

This past Saturday, Obama enlightened us a bit by delineating some of the things he categorizes as punishment:

Look, I've got two daughters, nine year old – nine years old and six years old. I'm going to teach them first of all about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. I don't want them punished with an STD at the age of 16. You know, so it doesn't make sense to not give them information.
 

Let’s crudely clarify. Giving Obama the benefit of the doubt that his “values and morals” preclude his daughters from having underage sex, he is going to tell them not to do so, but just in case they don’t listen, he wants them to know how to avoid “punishment” – and that can come in the form of a baby or a sexually transmitted disease. Whatever.

This goes to the whole abstinence-based sex education debate, in which conservatives want to tell kids only about abstaining, whereas liberals figure they’ll have sex anyway so they want to tell them to use condoms.

(This whole debate is ridiculous, by the way. Teenagers know about pregnancy, condoms and STDs. The problem is that they don’t listen to anything you say, especially since when they go to have sex, they are either too horny to use the condom or too drunk to care, but I digress.)

Obama messed up and accidentally told us he sees a baby as a punishment, at least when borne by underage teens, because liberalism is ultimately institutionalized narcissism. It its purest form, it is the idea that nothing should ever happen to you to place a burden or responsibility on you if you don’t want it.

Dare to dream. If only life didn’t intervene.

In life, you make choices. If you make bad choices, you might face some difficult consequences. This is life. This is how it works.

One of the fundamental tenets of liberalism is that this is unfair, and that government should shield people from the consequences of their bad decisions if it possibly can. This is why liberals are demanding that government bail people out of their sub-prime mortgage agreements, even though no one held guns to their heads when they signed the documents stipulating that interest rates could be adjusted.

Consequences teach lessons. If you have sex, you might make a baby. If you’re too young to make a baby, you’re too young to have sex. Liberals have a point when they assail abstinence-only education by saying the teens will have sex anyway. That’s because teenagers are immature and irresponsible.

But they turn around and expect the same immature kids to remember to use a condom. And when they don’t, Obama and his fellow travelers will at least console themselves by saying, “Well, we gave them the information!” Then they point the way to Planned Parenthood and declare it all good.

Obama is a typical liberal in the sense that he wants us to believe he can make all our problems go away. The proper conservative response is that our problems are part of life, and when they’re of our own making, it may be the best thing if we end up stuck with them for awhile.

That teaches us to make better decisions. I hope that Obama’s daughters listen to the “values and morals” part, and not the part when Dad wants to give them an out if they don’t. But I’m not optimistic. If you tell kids to do the right thing, then explain how to weasel out of doing the wrong thing, which part do you think they’re going to listen to?

Obama talks to you, the voters, the same way. You shouldn’t have to deal with any problems, and he’s going to make them go away. I think you’re a little more grown up than his daughters. At least some of you.

This is Column # DC164.  Request permission to publish here.