Pun Salad

Once again this week: no changes to our Phony Campaign participants, nor to their relative positions.

• Our guest speaker today is former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin:

  Clip via the Gateway Pundit who also provides the slightly cleaned up transcript, emphasis provided by GP:

  He talks about fairness. You know that he doesn't actually mean it. Especially when he can't walk the walk. He tries to talk the talk but his actions certainly don't match what his speeches are all about. He talked about fairness and yet fairness would be everybody pitching in and at least paying a bit for some of the services that are provided by our government. And yet 50% of Americans don't even pay an income tax and so in that respect they're not participating. But he doesn't consider that. He's heading off for a multi-day vacation in luxurious Hawaii while the rest of America is looking on making sacrifices in order to make ends meet. Again, just example after example of his words not matching his actions. He's a phony, Sean. Barack Obama is a phony. And, America, I believe again, we're waking up to that and we're not going to put up with that.

  Here's hopin'. But note the tree and the fire behind Sarah: a little too perfect?

• The subject of Palin's ire, President Obama, made a speech in lovely Osawatomie, Kansas this week. He also deployed the p-word:

  This country should not be known for bad debt and phony profits.

  … said the guy who made "Solyndra" a household word.

• Amusingly, the crack reporter for the Osawatomie Graphic misheard this bit as

  This country should not be known for bad debt and phony products.

  That would have made it even more applicable to Solyndra. Maybe that's what the reporter assumed Obama was talking about.

• David Harsanyi was equally unimpressed with Obama's speech:

  In Teddy Roosevelt's era, President Barack Obama explained to the nation this week, "some people thought massive inequality and exploitation was just the price of progress....But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can."

  And he's right. Even today there are people who believe they should have free license to take whatever they want from whomever they can. They're called Democrats.

  This matches what I've (in all modesty) previously called "The Official Progressive Politician's Guiding Philosophy on Tax Fairness and Equity":
  1. You got the money.
  2. We want the money.
  3. So gimme the money.

  If anyone can find any guiding principles beyond that in "additional revenue" proposals from the President and his party, please call me David Harsanyi.

• Can President Obama keep insulting everyone's intelligence by deeming taxes something people are "asked" to pay? Why, Yes he can!:

  And so we've also paid for these investments by asking everybody to do their fair share.

  Not once, but twice:

  Now, so far, most of my Republican friends in Washington have refused under any circumstance to ask the wealthiest Americans to go to the same tax rate they were paying when Bill Clinton was president.

  Politicians who talk this way deserve nothing but your contempt and (if you're feeling generous) ridicule. They know they're lying, but also know that more honest language wouldn't go down as smoothly; they're simply assuming that their audience is too stupid to realize it.

• So the President's Osawatomie speech was phony in many different ways. And, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. But Krauthammer has one more: Even though it's been "President Obama" for (as I type) 1055 days, and his party owned large majorities in the legislature for two years of that time…

  It seems that he and his policies have nothing to do with the current state of things. Sure, presidents are ordinarily held accountable for economic growth, unemployment, national indebtedness (see Obama, above). But not this time. Responsibility, you see, lies with the rich.

  Obama's cheap populist demagoguery is see-through: you're in bad shape because of Them.

  You're poor because they're rich.