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January 28, 2009
Exclusive: Common Sense or Frog’s Leg Pie?
With the new administration nearly running out of ink signing this bizarre executive order and that outside-the-mainstream executive order, I have concluded that what is missing in President Obama’s program is good, middle-American common sense.
It is not surprising that a career politician – whose professional claim to fame is “community organizer,” which is nothing more than a dressed-up label for a Left-wing activist who seeks to revolt – has an agenda that defies such sensibility. As a mom concerned about her child’s future, a wife concerned about her husband’s job and a daughter of a legal immigrant who struggled, working two jobs, to raise five children without government assistance, I have a few suggestions for the new president. None of these will guarantee me a high ranking political appointment but they might bring this man back down to earth as we know it, here in the United States.
Closing Guantanamo Bay
Mr. Obama, while I was not surprised at the swiftness with which you signed the executive order to close Guantanamo Bay, I was sickened by the very fact that it was done. The coddled terrorists, (you must have forgotten who they were) caught on the battlefield now housed at Club Gitmo, are the same Islamist terrorists who do not concern themselves with the “civil rights” of our courageous men and women serving in Iraq. They are of the same ilk who, in a terrorist video I received in March 2005, set an IED on the roadside in Iraq that killed a wonderful young man, Sgt. Rocky Payne of the 497th Transportation Company, Ft. Lewis, Washington. It was an IED that, had it gone off seconds before, would have made me a widow and left our young son without a father. These are the same Islamist radicals who cheered as that bomb exploded.
No, of course you should not close Club Gitmo. In fact, I suggest you put Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, in charge. Pink underwear will suit the “detainees” just fine. And while you are at it, insist the menu be bacon for breakfast, ham sandwiches for lunch and beans and ham for dinner. Of course, mealtime would be accompanied by a continuous playing of “Heartbeat, It’s A Love Beat” by the DeFranco Family followed by a film festival featuring the movies of Anna Nicole Smith.
Health, Education and Welfare
While I do understand that the health of the nation’s children may be a deep concern of yours, perhaps instead of printing cute little pamphlets to put on the tables of the food stamp office, some changes to that program are in order. Restrict food stamp purchases to fresh fruits and vegetables, milk, whole grain bread, eggs, fresh meat, fish and poultry, whole wheat flour – the healthy essentials. Soda, high calorie/high fat, prepared frozen convenience foods and sugary sweets should not be allowed. With each approved application, I would suggest the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook be required reading so that the recipients will know what exactly to do with the ingredients of whole wheat flour, milk and eggs. Please spare me the argument that such items may not be available for “inner cities.” As a former truck driver myself, I have hauled tens of thousands of pounds of the same to your own downtown Chicago.
Your ambitious promise of infant education is no substitute for parents raising and nurturing their own children. Coating it with fancy names and empty rhetoric such as “preparing infants to enter kindergarten” does not change what it really is – taxpayer-funded day care. In other words, I will now also pay for the care of lots of other people’s kids – when I already pay for my own.
Your new White House website is full of ways to shovel taxpayer money into the government school system, yet mentions nowhere the issue of school choice. Many parents, like you and your wife, prefer to send their children to private schools and, in my own case, to home school their kids. Since you are determined to provide “quality education” for all, perhaps you should explore ways to make the same education you are providing to your own children available for all. Of course, you would still have parents like me who would not want government intrusion into their children’s education and would continue to home school. After all, with home-schooled kids scoring higher than government-sponsored school kids on almost every test you can think of, why would I settle for anything less?
Which brings me to another concern regarding education: Under the Civil Rights section of your White House website agenda, you express overwhelming support for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender “community.” Since you wish to expand “workplace discrimination” to that group, I am concerned about the identity confusion our children might suffer attending, for instance, a math class taught by a former male teacher, transgendered to female, now wearing a dress and sporting shiny red lipstick.Exhibiting what one can only describe as a healthy dose of common sense, one of the parents in that heated debate proclaimed, “I will not allow you to put my kids in a Petri dish and hope it all comes out fine.”
Staying with “common sense,” surely we can all agree that a man wishing to flaunt his sexuality – unstable or otherwise – to underage children can not be a more protected class, worthy of government coddling, than the children themselves. Shouldn’t we protect our children from having to deconstruct differing and conflicting sexual identity images until they are much older? What one does in the privacy of his own home – which is where all sexual activity and display should remain anyway – does not constitute the need for protection when one operates only in the public domain with children who, more than he, need protection from the grown-ups…and that includes you, too, Mr. Obama.
As for taxpayer-funded abortions, most Americans do not want to pay for other people’s abortions. Government support for irresponsible couples who have children out of wedlock – many of whom afterwards sign up immediately for welfare as a means of support – does not work. Never has, never will. Abstinence for children or responsible, safe sex for adults work better; teach that instead.
Poverty
I found the section on “Tackle Concentrated Poverty” on the White House website nearly laughable. Please tell the mill worker and the truck driver here in South Arkansas, who barely earn a living wage, how fighting to get high speed Internet access will help the employment conditions here. And, by the way, this was sent to my editor via high speed internet. We already have it and we are still a poor, rural area.
You wish to raise the minimum wage to $9.10 per hour. This, of course, will put many small businesses out of business, or force them to fire workers they can no longer afford to pay. While there are those attempting to support their families on minimum wage jobs, one should be motivated enough to obtain the education and experience needed to rise up and earn more based upon that education and experience. These thoroughly American values are what you should be teaching Americans to aspire to, not how to grub more money from the government.
Once the government stops the regulation on small businesses – increasing the minimum wage, mandating expensive health insurance benefits and, according to the White House website, guaranteeing seven sick days per year among other business-destroying ideas – small businesses can thrive and jobs can be created. Just a little common sense from someone who once owned her own business.
In closing
My mother and stepfather taught me personal responsibility, and a work ethic that allowed me to become well-educated, successful and self-reliant against the odds. They taught me responsibility for my own actions.
All I see on the White House website are more ways to make Americans more reliant, and even dependent, upon government – not only for their self-esteem, but for their livelihoods. This may be the way of Saul Alinsky and Karl Marx, but it is not the way of the capitalist American system, and thus, it is as un-American frog’s leg pie.
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Renee E. Taylor is the editor/webmistress of American Truckers at War, a freelance writer, photographer, home schooling mom and publicist for Joey Holiday. Feedback: editor@familysecuritymatters.org.
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