Tag: wtf

In his State Of The Union Address, President Obama laid out specific steps to make America competitive again in a global economy. Some of these steps included investments in education, transportation, the internet and renewable energy.

These are all sensible investments any industrialized nation could make in order to maintain a role as a world leader. Sarah Palin, in her infinite wisdom, that has now graduated her to class-clown status, took to her Facebook page and referred to these proposed steps as What The F*ck, or as she put it, “WTF!”

The Republican 2008 vice presidential candidate and former Alaskan governor,  went on Fox News stating that another of the President’s themes,  ‘Winning The Future,’  was yet  “… another WTF moment.” Once again on her Facebook page she wrote, “he dubbed it a ‘Winning The Future’ speech, but the title’s acronym seemed more accurate than much of the content.”

In her ever present attack mode, Palin then dived into a tirade of criticism of President Obama for wanting America to maintain it’s competitive edge by investing in innovations for the future. She called this prospect “more government spending.” Even the president’s effort to portray America as an exceptional nation and its people as the most innovative and in the world,  was denounced by Palin. This too she said equalled  “big government”;

This seems to be the Obama administration’s version of American exceptionalism – an “exceptionally big government,” in which a centralized government declares that we shall be great and innovative and competitive, not by individual initiative, but by government decree. Where once he used words like “hope” and “change,” the President may now talk about “innovation” and “competition.”

Mrs. Palin – who quit her leadership role as governor of Alaska just two years into her first term to be a $100,000.00 per speech media queen – also had some leadership advise for the President. “Real leadership is more than just words,” she said, “it’s deeds.” I guess her deeds speak for themselves.

Palin’s rant also included the 9.4% unemployment rate, government spending and taxes, all of which she explained, exploded out of control practically on the day President Obama was sworn in. She even quotes a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that says the Federal budget deficit will reach $1.5 trillion dollars in 2011 because of the present administration’s big spending habits.

Everything  about her article was hugely exaggerated,  misleading or just plain out lies.

Yes, CBO did report the Federal deficit will reach $1.5 trillion dollars in 2011, but what Palin failed to mention in her rant was the real  cause — a $900 billion tax cut package for the rich that she herself campaigned for as the only way to bring jobs and reduce the unemployment rate.

And yes, the unemployment rate is at 9.4%, but what Sarah doesn’t again mention is the fact that when President Bush was in power, Americans were loosing jobs at the astonishing rate of 700,000 per month.  And yes, that amount continued under President Obama, but thanks to the Stimulus Package – the same one Sarah referred to as “Stimulus Package boondoggle,” — CBO states that 3.3 million jobs were created or saved in 2010 alone. That’s more jobs created in 1 year than all of President Bush’s 8 years! The CBO report also stated;

“The stimulus lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 and 1.8 percentage points during the quarter ending in June and increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million. The higher figure would come close to making good on Obama’s pledge that the act would save or create as many as 3.5 million jobs by the end of this year.”

And then there’s the tax adebate, where Palin continued her fear-mongering, telling her readers that President Obama is raising taxes to the point of “$1 trillion dollars over the next decade,” if he simplifies the tax code as he suggests. She claims that if you “cut away the rhetoric… you’ll also see that the White House’s real message on economic reform wasn’t one of substantial spending cuts, but of tax increases.”

Raised taxes are a genuine fear of the American people, and Sarah Palin knows exactly how to play into this fear. The reality however, is quite different. Under this administration, federal taxes are at their lowest point in over 60 years, according to William Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Center and director of the Retirement Security Project at the Brookings Institution. He said;

“The relation between what is said in the tax debate and what is true about tax policy is often quite tenuous. The rise of the Tea Party at a time when taxes are literally at their lowest in decades is really hard to understand.”

President Obama has a clear desire to invest in innovations that improve our roads, builds high speed rails, better education that improves America’s  academic excellence in math and science and cleaner energy that will gradually move us away from our dependence on fossil fuel like oil to wind and solar enrgy, clean coal, nuclear and natural gas. These common sense investment in the nation’s future are imperative. Other countries like China and India are making these investments in their future and they are beginning to reap the benefits.

But somehow in Sarah Palin’s America, a solemn pledge to invest in our future — to ‘Win The Future’ — is looked upon by her and others who lack the most basic of  understanding, as a WTF moment!