By Allen West
I love two genres of music, classical and classic rock.
One of my favorite classic rock bands is the group Styx and one of my favorite
songs of theirs is “Grand Illusion”.
However, in the case of what we have seen
post the 2016 presidential election through the inauguration of President
Donald Trump, it appears the progressive socialist left is operating under a
grand delusion.
In 2009, the progressive left embarked upon an
ideological agenda evidencing a serious delusion and disconnection with
America.
Instead of focusing on two simple issues, economic growth and national
security, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and their acolytes engaged a
direction for America that was not rooted in sound policy, but their
interpretation of “fairness”.
The first case of delusion was to try and make the
American people believe that Keynesian economic policy, tax and spend, was
still viable.
First thing out of the gate was a massive $1 trillion stimulus
package that was centered upon what was termed “shovel ready jobs”. It was a
matter of huge embarrassment when Obama sat on a stage with his economic
council stating, “I guess shovel ready was not exactly ready”. The fact that
Obama did so with a laugh and smirk was a slap in the face of the American
taxpayer.
Obama in his eight years focused more on wealth
redistribution, you know, we all do better when we “spread the wealth around”.
Furthermore, Obama made the seminal statement which presented a window into the
mindset of the progressive left when he stated, “if you own a business, you
didn’t build that”.
There could be no more disrespectful, delusional, assertion
directed towards the hard working American and their indomitable
entrepreneurial spirit. Obama and his disciples of economic disaster failed to
grasp the concept that economic growth emanates not from Washington DC, but
rather from the policies that unleash American investment, ingenuity, and
innovation…along with production and manufacturing.
Due to his far left intransigent ideology, Obama sought
not to get Americans back to work. His design was to expand the welfare nanny
state of government dependency.
The result of this delusion was our national
debt going from $10.67T to $20T.
We have exploded our food stamp and poverty
rolls, and we have suffered the lowest workforce participation rate in some 40
years.
Second, Obama and the left sought to use effective free
market policy to improve the healthcare situation in America.
Instead, they
believed there was a mandate to do what they had always wanted, push a
government-driven healthcare system. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act a.k.a “Obamacare” was nothing more than a domestic wealth redistribution
scheme, with some twenty new taxes. It spanned to gamut from increases in
capital gains and dividends taxes to creation of an individual and employer
mandate tax along with medical device and taxes on health savings accounts.
Obama said that there would be on average $2500 of
savings and that you would be able to keep your doctor and insurance. The
latter was awarded by Politifact as the “Lie of the Year”, 2013, funny, the year
after Obama’s reelection…and he promised Vladimir Putin more flexibility.
The
American people in October 2016 did not see savings, they saw massive increases
in their health insurance premiums, the result of the delusion of
redistribution of healthcare.
Obamacare turned out to be nothing more than a
huge expansion of Medicaid.
It proved unaffordable and did not provide
protection for patients, but a segment of people got something for free.
A
rational policy approach would have meant Obama and his team focused on the
real issue, but they overreached. And as Nancy Pelosi said, “we have to pass
the bill, in order to find out what was in it”, a true example of delusion.
Third, Obama departed the White House trying to have us
buy into his delusion by stating that on his watch there had not been a
terrorist organization attack.
He left still embracing the line that Ft. Hood
was the result of “workplace violence”, and he commuted the sentence of one who
had leaked over 700,000 classified documents – where some had died as a result
of HIS nefarious actions.
Obama and the left could never articulate that the
non-state, non-uniform unlawful enemy combatants we face on the 21st-century
battlefield are Islamic terrorists and jihadists. Obama was more interested in
freeing them under the delusion that their being detained in GITMO was an
impetus of their hate and a recruiting tool.
Instances of Islamic terrorist
attacks on our soil were attributed to the lawful ownership of guns by
law-abiding Americans. And the left, aided by the complicit liberal progressive
media, tried to castigate those who understood this enemy as “islamophobes” – a
moniker created by an Islamic organization with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood
and Hamas.
I could go on about other critical issues, like a lack of
focus on our border security leading to deaths of Americans like Kate Steinle.
The overarching issue is that we are watching the
progressive left continue to wrap themselves in their own delusion.
This past
weekend there were marches focused on women’s rights. Where were those voices
when Christian and Yazidi girls were being raped and sold as sex slaves by ISIS
– that group Obama called the JV team, which was not Islamic. If this is about
misogyny, where were those voices reference Bill Clinton regularly being
welcomed as an “elder statesman” of the Democrat party?
More violence, threats, intimidation, rantings, protests,
denigrating, disparaging, and demeaning language from the left will not win
folks over to their cause. It will only further distance them from the America
that has rejected and repudiated them, the electoral losses of the past eight
years is evidence.
The delusion of the progressive left is that they are not
conducting a self-analysis or assessment.
Their way did not advance economic
growth or national security. Albert Einstein said, “The definition of insanity
is to continue to do the same thing, and expect different results”.
Einstein’s
definition certainly befits the grand delusion of the progressive left.
