Obama and The Great Divide by Ben Crystal

The following was written by Ben Crystal and was forwarded to me by a friend. It appeared May 15, 2015 on personalliberty.com. (http://personalliberty.com/obama-and-the-great-divide/)

After 50 years and northward of $22 trillion spent on America’s “war on poverty,” we have identified the root cause of poverty in America. President Barack Obama made the official announcement at a Tuesday confab his handlers billed as a “Poverty Summit.” According to the man who has presided over the largest expansion of poverty and government welfare rolls in history, the root causes of American poverty are Fox News and rich people. Quoth Obama: “I think that the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, don’t want to work, are lazy, are undeserving, got traction. And look, it’s still being propagated. I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant venue.”

[adsanity id=15905 align=alignleft /]Say what you want about Fox News, but I can find no record of any of its personnel referring to poor Americans as sponges, leeches or any other household cleaning tool or segmented annelid. I’m pretty sure they’re not pro-poverty. Poor people don’t buy the stuff Fox advertisers hawk during Fox programming. But hey, maybe Obama’s right, and poverty is a consequence of a basic cable channel’s infrequent mentions of a government-backed plan to give people cellphones. In that case, maybe he should consider not giving people free phones. Or perhaps he could simply sign an executive order forbidding reporters from asking Obama campaign volunteers where they got their phones. Or perhaps he should just ban Fox News. He could claim that it’s “inciting” some of the “religion of peace’s” adherents to shoot up Marvel Comics headquarters and that shutting them down is vital to the blockbuster summer sequel industry.

Obama managed to spare some blame for the people who sign all the private sector paychecks, referring to the wealthy as “society’s lottery winners.” While a few Americans were born chewing on sterling flatware, most of us aren’t Kennedys. Personally, I can’t imagine a bigger winner of life’s lottery than a nobody who managed to get from Chicago’s south side — or Hawaii, or wherever — to the Oval Office without leaving behind so much as a college transcript. But if we assume that Obama’s right and that Jay-Z, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton are, in fact, just supremely lucky, that still in no way mitigates the fact that poor people are poor; and Obama has done nothing to improve their lot.

Obama’s plan to end poverty centers on homogenizing society. In his considered opinion, we’re all too comfortable reclining amid our filthy lucre. “Those who are doing better and better … are withdrawing … kids start going to private schools; kids start working out at private clubs instead of the public parks.” I wonder if that occurred to him while he teed off at any one of the magnificently manicured private golf courses he’s subjected to Secret Service lockdowns. Perhaps he should pull his two daughters out of the nearly $40,000-per-year Sidwell Friends School and send them to one of Washington’s fabulous public schools, lest they become too accustomed to the trappings of privilege, follow in his purported footsteps to Columbia and end up joining John Kerry’s yacht club. For that matter, if Obama is so concerned about a supposed growing divide between “society’s lottery winners” and the saps who keep buying losing tickets, maybe he should personally bridge the gap by planning his next family vacation in East St. Louis instead of Martha’s Vineyard or Majorca.

[adsanity id=8405 align=alignleft /]While the president worked the wealth-envy angle, his wife attacked on the cultural front. First lady Michelle Obama recently took to the proverbial dais to complain about the lack of minority access to cultural attractions like museums. “(T)here are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me.” I can’t wait for Mrs. Obama to whine about the lack of minority access to winter sports in between runs down the mountain in Aspen. Meanwhile, her message about some inherent museum-on-black racism rang especially hollow. On one hand, I doubt the Smithsonian would be well-advised to start abducting inner-city tots and dragging them to see the Gemini capsule. On the other, Obama delivered her complaint while standing in the Whitney Museum. Mrs. Obama, who is far from the most graceful first lady, is proving to be one of the least grateful. When she’s not spinning fantastic tales of racism in the Target laundry aisle, she’s complaining about how hard it is to be — um — first lady.

There are more poor people in Obama’s America than there ever were before. He and his wife live like pharaohs and/or rock stars, and then they tell the people who have been consigned to poverty by decades of unrelenting Democratic policy failures that their lot is rich white people’s fault. His approach to ending the plague of poverty is to blame, divide and inflame. He claims that “you didn’t build that” and that successful people are “society’s lottery winners.” In a sense, he’s right. When he and his lovely wife bill their next five-star vacation, they should remember the following:

Barry, you didn’t build that. Michelle, congrats on your victory in society’s lottery. Now, go pick up your kids from their private school and enjoy your visit to the museum.[adsanity id=11817 align=alignleft /]