Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

A deaf ear?

Months ago (just after the inauguration) I visited the White House web site and used their comment form to voice my objections to several of the agenda items and other statements that were published there. Today I have finally received a response.

Dear Perri Nelson:

Thank you for your recent note, and for sharing your thoughts with me. Your kind words echo the messages of millions of Americans who have welcomed me and my family to the White House with an outpouring of goodwill.

On January 20th, Americans spoke with one voice, choosing hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. Our Nation faces serious challenges, but we will overcome them if our imagination is joined to common purpose.

Now is our time to work together, reaffirm our enduring spirit, and choose our better history. With your help, we will renew our Nation's promise to carry forth the great gift of freedom to future generations, as our forebears have delivered it to us.

Sincerely,
Barack Obama

To be a part of our agenda for change, join us at www.WhiteHouse.gov

There are a few problems I have with this response. First of all, it’s obviously a “form-letter” type of response. For an administration that’s supposed to be so “technically savvy” that they managed to find a way for the President to keep his Blackberry, you’d think that they could deliver a canned response like this in a more timely fashion.

Second, you’d hope that somehow they’d get their facts straight in their reply. My words weren’t exactly kind. They were respectful, but not kind. Americans didn’t vote on January 20th, it was back in November, and we certainly did not speak with one voice. While over fifty million Americans did vote for Barack Obama, very nearly fifty million Americans voted against Barack Obama.

Third, the agenda that the President is implementing and that our largely liberal Congress is carrying forth is not an agenda of freedom. We are spending trillions of dollars on a socialist takeover of our nations major private enterprises. Banking firms have been strong-armed into giving up ownership shares in exchange for unwanted taxpayer dollars. Insurance companies have been effectively taken over.

Congress tries to avoid taking responsibility for the gaffes and blunders they made while ramming through their unconstitutional bailouts of businesses, deflecting attention away from the hundreds of billions of dollars they are throwing away by acting outraged and vindictive over bonuses that are a thousand times, or in some cases a million times smaller.

Our federal deficit has swelled to outrageous proportions, more than doubling in a single year, and doubling again since then. Our President pledges to cut the deficit in half, but it will still be twice what it was a year and a half ago after that. But that won’t be for several years yet.

We’re told that the stimulus package will have “done its job” within a year. If that’s the case you’d think that since the bulk of it isn’t set to be spent until after three years have passed we could eliminate the bulk of it. It’s not going to happen, because such cuts in government programs would be considered “draconian”¹ even if the programs haven’t yet been implemented.

Saddling future generations with so much debt that they won’t be able to ever pay it off isn’t the way to carry forth the great gift of freedom to them. No, it’s a sure way to enslave them to a government grown beyond sense.

The White House’s letter was correct in at least one respect. Millions of people did vote for hope and change in November. Sadly it was a false hope, and the only change we’ve seen is for the worse. The plain fact is, they’re not listening to what we have to say. A canned response that reads more like a campaign statement than anything else isn’t worth the recycled electrons it took to issue it.  At least they didn’t kill a tree to send it to me.

¹What's wrong with dragon's anyway?