‘You Didn’t Build That’: Obama’s Political Epitaph

Google “you didn’t build that.” The search engine’s “crawlers” have produced about 684,000,000 search results. Google is frequently accused of a left-leaning bias. If Google’s ranking equations are weighted in favor of Barack Obama, they have failed, this time, to overcome the raging indictments of the president. These have percolated to the top of the search, drowning-out anemic exculpation.

From Fox News to The Fix (authored by The Washington Post), “he was taken out of context” summed-up the case for Obama—even as the awful earful was played-back in full, and at length.

As for the indictment. Here is Obama in “context” and unplugged:

“There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back,” intoned the president. “They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)”

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. … Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

Not once but four times did Obama repeat the gist of his clinching line, “You didn’t build that.” With each iteration, his voice dripped contempt for individual achievement.

“…you didn’t get there on your own.

You didn’t get there on your own.

If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.
Somebody else made that happen.”

“You didn’t build it” will be Barack Obama’s political epitaph.

Obama’s collectivism, and vertiginous ignorance, called for a one-two punch. A knockout. Patrick J. Buchanan was the only rightist—I hesitate to libel Mr. Buchanan as a Republican—who delivered the blow.

“Barack Obama, with due respect, does not understand America — at least that part of America that produces and creates,” roared Buchanan on Fox News. “Obama spent his whole life in tax-exempt, tax-subsidized and tax-supported institutions. Does he not understand what creates the wealth in America?”

“For the first 175 years of our existence as a people, there was no federal government. Who does he think created that country of 3 million who defeated the greatest empire in the world, other than the individuals who built the farms and little factories; who clothed and fed and housed themselves and created one of the greatest societies on earth, again, before the federal government was created?”

Indeed, America is the culmination of the individual principle of voluntary cooperation.

In his syndicated column, Buchanan, surely one of the great patriots of our time, served-up history in fine style.

“From Jamestown in 1607 to Yorktown in 1781, there was no federal government. There was no United States. Yet generations of colonists had built forts, cleared lands, created farms, established workshops. Americans fed, clothed and housed themselves, creating one of the highest standards of living on earth for 3 million people.

How could the U.S. government have built the roads and bridges if the U.S. government did not exist before 1789? There were no public schools until the 19th century. Colleges were the creations of religious denominations. The Pell grant had not yet been invented.

Was government indispensable to Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, Robert Fulton’s invention of the steam boat, Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone, Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of the radio and Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb, and just about everything else? Did Wilbur and Orville Wright learn how to build bicycles in a CETA program? Were the feds responsible for the flight at Kitty Hawk?”

Few on the right possess the lexical and historical virtuosity to articulate these immutable facts about the origins of American greatness.

Obama’s remarks at Roanoke, Va., on July 13, 2012, were more than a faux pas.

With these remarks, Obama has come out of the closet as a most odious collectivist, who believes religiously that government predation is a condition for production. Or, put simply, that the parasite created the host.

With his near-religious repetition of the “you didn’t build that” dogma, the president of the United States demonstrated his irrational faith in the statist principle of compulsory cooperation.

The place name “Roanoke” made this writer think of another great patriot of early America: John Randolph of Roanoke.

This brilliant Southern agrarian was a radical opponent of the central government … back in the early 1800s. “As facile with words as he was handy with a pistol,” John Randolph would have driven the parasitic Obama off the commonwealth—with force, if need be.