As The Mainstream Begins To Froth

Finally, Americans are waking up.

President Obama's poll numbers are sliding. Now, for the first time since his inauguration, a majority of Americans (55%) believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.

Hello! What took so long, people?

Give the President credit: he told us what he wanted to do, and he has been busy doing it. Barack Obama is as far left as you can go without falling off the edge of California. He is a true believer. He has been a committed leftist his entire political life, and he was upfront about his radical philosophy all through the election campaign.

That's why we bitter backwoods conservatives, clinging to our guns and Bibles, kept sounding the alarm last year about the dangers posed to liberty and prosperity by electing a socialist president.

This year, I was proud to join hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country who rallied in "Tea Party" protests. Shouldn't the fact that senior citizens (and middle-aged geezers like me) are resorting to street protests for the first time in our lives demonstrate how alarmed mainstream Americans are by the Obama socialist steamroller?

The administration's cries of "crisis, crisis" are getting old. We are still sifting through the droppings of the Cap & Trade fiasco that the House Democrats excreted a few weeks ago, and already the President is rushing through a plan for the federal takeover of health care.

A good leader states his positions clearly, proposes his legislation openly, and then persuades the electorate to embrace his plan. Ronald Reagan was masterful in explaining his agenda. But all we get from the Obama administration is one huge pile of "crisis legislation" after another, that no one has time to understand or debate. How can we respect and follow a leader who repeatedly denies us sufficient time to examine and discuss the plans he is proposing?

Memo to members of Congress: I hate to nitpick, but is it too much to ask of you to READ the thing BEFORE you vote for it? The devil is in the details, and there is boundless room for mischief in a thousand pages of legalese.

Call me crazy, but I am inclined to be distrustful of politicians (a useful instinct that I encourage everyone to cultivate) so I hope I will be forgiven for suggesting the possibility that our elected representatives may try to slide something by us in all of this hullabaloo.

It is a shame that the election of our first black president is destined to become such a disappointment. President Obama could have accomplished great things. He is an extraordinarily gifted politician, with great oratorical skills. He even strikes me, on a personal level, as a nice guy. I'd be happy to sit down sometime with him and Sean Hannity and toss back some suds. I'm not mad at him for being a socialist. I believe he is sincere. I just believe he is sincerely wrong.

If only he had moved to govern more from the political center (as most presidents tend to do) instead of scaring the bejeebers out of the whole country with his obsessive compulsive desire to nationalize every sector of our economy, there might be room for compromise. Had he kept his campaign promises to be bipartisan and transparent, he might have persuaded more of us on the right to give him a chance.

But now, the damage is done. Who in their right mind will ever trust President Obama and his cronies in Congress after witnessing these past six months of government thugocracy? Legislation drafted in the middle of the night, rushed to a vote without being read, relentlessly driving the country deeper into debt, and always - ALWAYS - chiseling away at our personal liberties in the process: all done with a smile and the assurance that Big Brother is just trying to take care of us.

Voters are beginning to smell the coffee. People are realizing that a one-party government with a promiscuous lust for power is not the kind of change they had hoped for.

Despite the political dumbing-down of the population by our educational system (another public entity that makes the case for private enterprise) there are still plenty of voters left who understand that the strength of this country is rooted in individual liberty and personal responsibility.

President Obama is getting ready to discover that, deep down, we Americans really do cherish our freedoms.

And not a moment too soon.