OBAMA'S SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS

There was no mention of Benghazi, of the S & P downgrade, or the collective national debt. He did mention global warming, gay rights, and gun control.

But the most important part of his speech is the appeal to socialism.

"For we have always understood that when times change, so must we, that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges, that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action."

You didn't build that, he might have said.  Nobody built their business by themselves. The invisible hand did.

But that invisible hand sometimes needs help from the government?  (The invisible hand sometimes needs to be slapped.)

I am worried about collective action, but I am even more worried about collective inaction.  Obama's targeting of various American problems seems to neglect the major problems. The major problems I would outline as these: we have a skyrocketing public debt.  We have a monstrous social program that is going to force employers to lay off millions of people in order to not get mired in that debt.  It is called Obamacare.  We have an economic downgrade as a result of this, and as a result of Fannie and Freddie still pumping money into the nether regions as if it was a Deepwater Horizon that everyone forgot.  And finally we don't know what we're doing in the Middle East. Bush had an idea that we were spreading democracy. He got the idea from PNAC.  But Obama has different ideals. It's just that no one knows what these ideals might be.  Qaddafi was bad.  But why?  And these new guys are better?  Why?  Now we have terrorism spreading out from the newly freed states down into Mali and into Niger.  Qaddafi at least kept a cork in it, as did Mubarik.  Now there's no cork.  Obama can kill people after the fact, as he did OBL. But he doesn't understand ideological war, because his own ideology, whatever it is, isn't clear. Can he define anything in less than vague terms?  He's just kind of tolerant.  Which leads to inaction.

Benghazi is the most crystal clear example of collective inaction on the part of this administration.  We still don't know what happened there. Tomorrow Hillary is supposed to testify (she is at present spreading banana peels around and drinking Daiquiris).  Will we learn anything new?  We do know now that Ambassador Stevens sent a wire on the day of the assault.  He explained the deteriorating situation. There was no response.  Collective inaction.

In the case of collective inaction, who is responsible?  We've all heard about personal responsibility.  We know what it means. But when we discuss things like collective action, who is the leader?  Who is responsible? If Obama was "responsible" for the killing of OBL as outlined in the recent film Zero Dark Thirty, was he also responsible for the death of our ambassador Stevens?  Are they equivalent?  Is collective inaction the same as collective action?

Or should we just think about individual responsibility instead?

"It takes a village."  Does it?  Doesn't individual freedom also imply individual responsibility?  We have some curious problems afoot.  Collective action is like a millipede where every leg must move at once to move the creature forward.  But without a single brain, a guiding idea, does it get anywhere?