Liberty Maven

Well, Obama gave an answer anyway. His response was a bit long-winded and another attempt at political misdirection that he is becoming quite famous for these days. The Washington Times reports:

“It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question,” he told reporters, who had interviewed the president aboard Air Force One on Friday.

Opening the unusual presidential call to reporters by saying that there was “just one thing I was thinking about as I was getting on the copter,” he said it wasn’t he who started the federal government’s intervention into the nation’s financial system.

“I did think it might be useful to point out that it wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks. It wasn’t on my watch. And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement -– the prescription drug plan — without a source of funding. And so I think it’s important just to note when you start hearing folks throw these words around that we’ve actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles and that some of the same folks who are throwing the word ‘socialist’ around can’t say the same.”

Wow. He contradicts himself in a paragraph. Obama has learned “free market” principles from George W. Bush because he’s doing the same thing. Yet he blames Bush for not following “free market” principles. Here he comes off like a child arguing that two wrongs make a right, or should I say two Leftist policies make a right?

It continues:

The New York Times asked, “So whose watch are we talking about here?” but Obama wouldn’t name names.

“Well, I just think it’s clear by the time we got here, there already had been an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system. And the thing I constantly try to emphasize to people if that coming in, the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me to stay out of it. I have more than enough to do without having to worry the financial system. The fact that we’ve had to take these extraordinary measures and intervene is not an indication of my ideological preference, but an indication of the degree to which lax regulation and extravagant risk taking has precipitated a crisis.”

He concluded the brief call by saying, “I think that covers it.”

In essence Obama has no free market principles if he believes “we’ve had to take these extraordinary measures and intervene.” The second you start throwing around the words “intervene” and “free market” on the same side of an argument you have already lost.

The real answer is that Obama may not be a Socialist in the purest sense, but he is certainly driving on the left side of the road. Truthfully his belief in wealth redistribution is Socialist in nature and his belief in regulatory control over the financial markets is Fascist in nature. In the end this name calling from the Right and blaming from the Left (Obama) do not matter.

What matters is getting out of this mess. Simultaneously blaming the Bush policies while expanding the reach and cost of those policies is not the way out. But apparently, Obama thinks it is. Aren’t we lucky he’s our President now? So much for change.