Below, Guy posts the particularly distasteful footage of an Obama supporter extolling the glories of her "Obamaphone." What she obviously doesn't understand is that it isn't an "Obama-phone" -- Obama didn't buy it for her. You and I did. It's a "Taxpayer-Phone."
The President has been expert at using taxpayer money to buy support, pay off supporters, or for overall self-glorification. The examples are legion. Here is the site for the now famous "Obamaphone" . . . with the handy, self-promoting web address of www.ObamaPhone.net (note the program began in '08, but it wasn't called the "Bush phone"). Stimulus money -- funded by you and me -- was spent on ad revenue for Obamaphiles at MSNBC (a really nice, publicly-financed "thank you" gift). Other stimulus money funded the delightfully-named "Barack Obama Parkway."
Slightly more subtle -- but no less distasteful -- is the widespread crediting of the "stimulus." Sometimes, the crediting is designed to get people to feel that their money went for something worthwhile, despite the facts to the contrary. Case in point: The prominent propagandizing signs promising that the stimulus -- the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" -- was hard at work on your roads, "putting people to work" (see sample picture above). Sometimes, the credit is simplpy designed to buy votes. Here's a letter promising welfare recipients in New York that they would get $200 per child thanks to the stimulus for "back to school" costs for their children. If the money was truly intended to help defray "back to school" costs, it failed miserably. But if it was simply designed to purchase the allegiance of recipients -- many of whom spent it on iflat screen TV's, iPods and video gaming systems -- it was a glorious success.
Here's the point: No one objects (or should object) to helping responsible people who are truly in need. The objection is to the way that the President tries to buy or solidify political support for himself, using our tax dollars -- even as he seems to have no problem fostering a mentality of dependence and a sense of entitlement.
UPDATE: Don't forget the famous "Obama money" clip, where the recipient says, "That's why we love [Obama]. That's why we voted for him" -- deplored today in this handwringing piece from The Atlantic.
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