Walter Russel Mead Writes About Confidence In An Unhappy Time

This essay was written by Walter Russel Mead at his blog at American Interest Online:

“According to the Real Clear Politics average, more than 61% of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction.  With unemployment at 9.6% and underemployment double that, almost one out of five Americans who want full-time jobs can’t get them.  Trillions of dollars in home equity and stock market value has disappeared since 2007, while the federal debt has skyrocketed.  China and India are growing blazingly fast; even Germany is growing faster than the United States these days.

Worse, our institutions — political, governmental, financial, educational, religious, journalistic, economic — look increasingly dysfunctional.  The housing market, one of the greatest creators of household wealth and employment since the Depression, looks set for another sharp drop.  In my own corner of the woods, liberal professors are writing books about the end of tenure; talk about the dangerous higher education bubble is moving into the mainstream.  The right and the left are both producing books about the total breakdown of our political system and its hijacking by a destructive and vicious elite.

It is not a happy time.

I don’t want to minimize the challenges that face us, and especially the suffering of those among us who’ve lost jobs and seen the value of their homes and their savings erode.  Indeed, in the months to come I will be posting about the challenges ahead of us and the costs of failure.  If anything, we are still underestimating the risks, and the upheavals ahead are in many cases even bigger and scarier than is yet generally understood.  Living up to the challenges of our time is going to take everything we have — and then some.

But even from that perspective, the current mood of pessimism and hand-wringing seems overdone.

Life in the United States of America is not and never has been easy.  During the Cold War, Americans (and everyone else) lived in fear of nuclear war.  As a ten-year-old I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, when frightened teachers taught us to hide under our desks in the event of nuclear war and television and magazines showed us how the circles of destruction and patterns of fallout would spread death across the country in the aftermath of the bombs.  People used to talk about whether it would be better die in the first strike or live through the horrific consequences, poking through the rubble of a destroyed civilization looking for ammunition and canned goods as feral mutants chased you through the ruins.

World War II killed a quarter of a million Americans in less than three years of combat.  The Depression struck this country much harder than any economic catastrophe since.  World War I and the resulting influenza scarred a whole generation.  And in the old days, American workers and farmers toiled like the inmates of Dante’s Inferno, wresting what anyone of us today would consider a bare and meager living from an unforgiving world by the sweat of their brow and the skin of their teeth. Ethnic minorities (above all African-Americans), women, and lesbians and gays faced cruel and unremitting discrimination; the torture and lynching of blacks was commonplace in the early years of this century.  The Civil War devastated huge swatches of the country and killed something like 600,000 people between April 1861 and May of 1865.  Settling the west was hard; women gave birth in isolated homesteads without medical attention; settlers cut down trees, pulled the stumps from the earth, drained swamps and plowed virgin land without benefit of machines or in many cases any muscle power but their own.

No American generation has lived in a world free of hardship, free of upheaval, free of toil and care.  What makes Americans today any different?  In the lotus-eating days of the long economic booms in the 1990s and the first decade of the current century, many people came to believe that stock markets and house prices rise effortlessly and forever, that risk and change are words without meaning, and that America is a country founded on shopping and entertainment rather than faith, toil and blood.

Well, we are out of the bubble now, but we aren’t living in some kind of surrealistic hell.  We are living in normal American times, and for centuries now Americans have been grappling with and overcoming challenges very much like those that we struggle with today.  America has had to reinvent its economy, its political system, ts self-understanding, its culture and its relationship with the rest of the world not once, but many times over.  Generation after generation of Americans has feared that the dream was coming to an end — and generation after generation of Americans found new ways to keep hope alive, reinvented the dream, and passed it on, strengthened and enhanced, for the future.

There is no guarantee that the United States will master our current challenges — but neither is there any guarantee that we will fail.  The problems may be more complex, the pace of change faster, and the world more tumultuous than it used to be — but no generation of Americans has been as free of racism, as open to the talents of women as we are today.  No generation has had the scientific and technical knowledge, the computer hardware and software, the means of education and communication that we have now.

And there’s something else.

The problems we face today are urgent and complex, but they are not the problems of failure.  We are suffering the consequences of success.

We are not like Pakistan, Egypt, Russia, or dozens of other countries who are struggling with the consequences of decades and even centuries of failures to keep up with a changing world.  America’s failures are the failures of a country on the cutting edge.

Countries like China and India are doing some amazing things, but they are playing catch-up.  They are trying to get where we are, while the United States is moving forward into unexplored terrain.  They are building industrial societies; we are seeing what comes next.  They have a clear idea of the target in mind: a country where people are as rich as Americans.  Our quest is different — harder, but perhaps also more rewarding.

We aren’t trying to recreate somebody else’s achievement or to replicate an already existing model.  We are trying to do something new and different — we are making up a new kind of society as we go along.  The challenges of America’s today are the challenges of everyone else’s tomorrow. We were the first “Fordist” society, where mass affluence was built on mass production in the factories of the twentieth century.  We are now trying to be the first successful post-Fordist society, trying to work out a way to have a prosperous country that depends on something other than mass employment in manufacturing.

It is a great error to think that the collapse of manufacturing employment in the United States is simply the result of low wage competition from abroad.  The real issue is technology: technological progress means that human labor can be employed more efficiently and therefore much more sparingly in the manufacturing process. This doesn’t just mean that IT enables the global production chains that make outsourcing possible.  It means the restructuring of the entire manufacturing process.  Car factories that used to be full of semiskilled industrial workers with high school diplomas or less are now run by robots.  America is adding as much value in manufacturing as ever — but with many fewer hands employed.  The low wage labor havens of today are going to face that problem in the future: China is not going to be able to build lasting prosperity on the basis of hundreds of millions of factory workers because China’s factories (and India’s, and Bangladesh’s) are ultimately going to be run by computers and robots as well.

We are hitting this wall now; others will hit it later.

The gathering storm in white collar employment has the same roots.  The IT revolution is transforming the worlds of management and administration even more radically than technology is reshaping manufacturing.  Government and corporate bureaucracies must adapt — often by shedding great quantities of labor — to new productivity and new possibilities.  The hurricanes of change blowing through American state and federal governments and American corporate structures today will be blowing in Beijing and Delhi one of these days — but they are blowing here now and they are blowing hard.

Ditto the problems of democracy in an age of instant communication.  As the internet flattens hierarchies, and an increasingly self-confident public rejects the tutelage and intermediation of elites and elite institutions, America faces a galloping crisis of institutional legitimacy.  Other countries are going to face this too; I very much doubt that China’s one-party system and corrupt, entrenched elites will manage this crisis as well or as quickly as we do here.

The upheavals set off by these changes are dramatic and they are wrenching.  Tens of millions of Americans have been educated and acculturated into worlds that are rapidly passing away.  Fifty-year-old auto workers and middle managers are being cut adrift.  It is not simply that their skills are obsolete.  Their ideas about how to make a living developed in a labor market that is no longer extant.  Their ideas about the social contract that binds workers, employers and the state were shaped by a mix of timeless aspirations and specific historical circumstances — and while the old expectations clearly no longer work, American society is very far from a consensus on what should replace them.  And nobody really knows what skills that fifty-year-old ex-auto worker and ex-middle manager really needs.  (My personal best guess for people facing this dilemma: get some skills related to medical technology or service delivery, preferably based in geriatrics: this market is growing; the pay is better than in many service fields; there are many different types of opportunities in it; you can gradually adapt to continuing technological change by upgrading and improving your core skills; Medicare funding and demographic change make this market a reasonable bet for the next decade plus; there are entrepreneurial opportunities as you learn the field; and age is less of a handicap when it just means you can relate more easily to the clients.)

 So let’s make some lemonade, people: let’s get an early start on solving these problems.  That’s been a source of America’s advantages for a long time now: we hit the walls first, we figure out how to climb them first, and then we are over the obstacle and sprinting ahead while others hit the walls on their own.

And the problems that are driving us so crazy, and driving so many of us to something like despair right now are, like so many problems, opportunities wearing a clever disguise.  The fact that the world can produce greater and greater quantities of better and better manufactured products while condemning fewer and fewer human beings to lifetimes of drudgery and toil in repetitive factory work that is both dangerous and dull is a good thing, not a bad thing.  The fact that fewer and fewer people will need to be timeserving bureaucrats to keep the wheels of government and corporate management going is also a good thing.

Or take the demographic crisis and the problems of Social Security and Medicare that have everyone (including me) wringing their hands.  First, America’s enormous and time tested power of welcoming and assimilating talented immigrants means that we can face the demographic transition with far more confidence and optimism than countries in Europe — or Asian countries like Japan and even China.  Second, that we are living longer, healthier lives and that new medical discoveries are making hundreds and thousands of new treatments available is a blessing, not a curse.  Our core problem is that we need to adjust to our new health and longevity.  That our most skilled and experienced workers now have another decade or more of productive life ahead when they hit 65 is fantastic news.  The higher productivity of older people is going to help us reform both Medicare and Social Security — we can delay the age when benefits are paid, and there will be more people paying more into the system.  Yes, we won’t all get to join the leisure class when we are 62 or even 65 — but since when has America’s goal been to quit working?  Americans historically have been people who wanted to contribute, to make a difference.  Living longer and healthier lives means that more of us will have more of a chance to do what we really want to do: to create and to share.

Yes, we have to adjust our expectations and our institutions to new realities.  But so what?  Which would you rather face: the problems of a stagnant or declining life expectancy or the problems that come from longer, healthier lifespans for you and for tens of millions of other people?  Which would you rather do — retire at 62 and die at 68 or retire at 72 and die at 85 or later?  Our piteous complaints basically revolve around the terrible truth that we have to pay for these miracles: we have to use some of the fruits of our longer lives and higher productivity to pay for the machines and the treatments that enable us to survive cancer and heart attacks, to recover from strokes and to treat the other debilitating problems of old age.

The truth of America’s problem today is this.  We are not caught up in a Malthusian crisis of mass shortage and starvation.  We are being crushed under the riches being pumped out by a cornucopia of wealth and abundance.  We don’t need to get by with less; we need to figure out how to harness the floods of abundance now inundating our landscape.  And as we achieve that, we are going to live better, grow faster and, I very much suspect, dramatically improve the quality of the environment.

The discontent and dissatisfaction now sweeping the country aren’t signs of our impending dissolution.  They are signs that Americans want better lives, and are ready to innovate, to work, to adjust, to do whatever it takes to make progress.  These are birth pangs and growth pains, not the pains of death and decay.”

Comment:   Mr. Mead’s essay would be more persuasive if the country weren’t held hostage over barrels of oil drilled in Muslimland. 

 Even that wouldn’t end the social and political chaos which  underlies the economic crunch.

The culture is in turmoil, if not decay.

Rauf Barks Trouble If His Trojan Horse Mosque Isn’t Built at Ground Zero Site

The “peace mouthing” Trojan Horse Mosque salesman, Rauf, forgot his peace part last night when he inferred, Muslim-style, a threat, that if the mosque were not to be built, it would be a danger to American security.

Have you ever heard that sentiment from  Muslim mouths before?

Paul Mirengoff at Powerline produced the following article today about Rauf’s television performance last evening on CNN.    The title …….”Rauf Resorts to Extortion.”

“In an interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien last night, Feisal Abdul Rauf claimed that U.S. national security depends on thebuilding of the Ground Zero Mosque. Here (via the Corner) is the key part of the interview:

RAUF: As I just mentioned, our national security now hinges on how we negotiate this, how we speak about it, and what we do. It is important for us now to raise the bar on our conversation-

O’BRIEN: What’s the risk? When you say “national security,” what’s the risk?

RAUF: As I mentioned, because if we move, that means the radicals have shaped the discourse. The radicals will shape the discourse on both sides. And those of us who are moderates on both sides — you see Soledad, the battle front is not between Muslims and non-Muslims. The real battle front is between moderates on all sides of all the faith traditions and the radicals on all sides. The radicals actually feed off each other. And in some kind of existential way, need each other. And the more that the radicals are able to control the discourse on one side, it strengthens the radicals on the other side and vice versa.

* * * *

If this is not handled correctly, this crisis could become much bigger than the Danish cartoon crisis, which resulted in attacks on Danish embassies in various parts of the Muslim world.

If Rauf is correct, then he has placed the security of the United States in jeopardy through his in-your-face drive to build the mosque at this location. But I doubt that Rauf’s purported concern has any substantial factual basis.

More likely, Rauf is concerned about the consequences for Rauf of backing down on the mosque. Doing so would diminish his credibility in the Arab world, particularly among its more radcial elements whose good side Rauf consistently attempts to remain (probably because he shares many of their goals). That’s a price I’d be willing to pay.

As for U.S. interests, the real threat here is the ability of anti-American, sharia supporting Muslims like Rauf to leverage their demands for concessions within the U.S. through claims of dire consequences if we do not comply.

Rauf is an old hand at this. Recall his claim that the U.S. was “an accomplice” to 9/11 by virtue of its foreign policy. This represented, in effect, a demand that the U.S. change its foreign policy or else face more deadly attacks.

Thus, we have an additional reason, if any were needed, to strive, within the limits of the law, to prevent the building of the Ground Zero Mosque.”

Comment:  The Rauf mosque MUST NOT BE BUILT…..PERIOD!    Has America become a pasture for shivering-scared women?   Does the nation’s sovereignty mean so little  that we will hand it over to these fanatics in cotton dress to crow the death of the great satan?

When will the country wake up to these Shariah seeders and confront those who spread this disease?

George Will on Modern Politics in South Carolina: (it’s a good read!)

Nearly anything by George Will is a good read…..even when he is really disagreeable.

“The libretto of this operatic election season, understandably promoted by Democrats and unsurprisingly sung by many in the media, is that Republicans have sown the seeds of November disappointments by nominating candidates other than those the party’s supposedly wiser establishment prefers. This theory is inconvenienced by two facts: South Carolina’s Nikki Haley and Tim Scott.

“I am a policy girl,” Haley, 38, says demurely. But she is a savvy politician who in 2004 won a state legislature seat by defeating the longest-serving incumbent. Although the state’s Republican establishment opposed her nomination for governor, she won because for two years she has been traveling around the state asking this question: Does anyone think it odd that in 2007 only 8 percent of the decisions by the state House, and only 1 percent of the state Senate’s decisions, were made by recorded votes?

The political class and its parasitic lobbyists preferred government conducted in private. Haley, whose early campaign strategy was exuberantly indiscriminate (“go anywhere and talk to anybody”) won the gubernatorial nomination by defeating the state’s lieutenant governor, its attorney general and a congressman.

She and her state have come a long way since, at about age 5, in her home town of Bamberg, she and her sister entered the Little Miss Bamberg pageant. It usually crowned a white and a black queen. The flummoxed judges disqualified both Randhawa girls.

If elected, Haley will be the second Indian American Republican governor in Dixie, joining Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal. She, unlike him, does not look like someone from the subcontinent; her faintly olive complexion could be Mediterranean. Tunku Varadarajan of Stanford’s Hoover Institution and New York University’s Stern School of Business suggests why they have risen in the Republican Party while no Indian American has comparably risen in the Democratic Party:

“Could it be that because Democrats put more of an emphasis on identity politics, an Indian American Democrat would have to contend with other ethnic constituencies that might think that it’s ‘their turn’ first? And once you go down the ‘identity’ route, your success as a politician tends to rest more on the weight of numbers — the size of your ethnic constituency, or your racial voting bloc — than on the weight of your ideas.”

Because of his ideas, Tim Scott, 44, an African American Republican, will be elected the new congressman from the heavily Republican — and 72.8 percent white — 1st District. It includes Charleston, the cradle of secession, in whose harbor sits Fort Sumter. Scott won the nomination by handily defeating (68 percent to 32 percent) Paul Thurmond — son of Strom, the former governor, Dixiecrat presidential candidate in 1948 and eight-term U.S. senator.

Scott aspired to a football career until a religious experience changed his direction. At a 1983 meeting of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, he had an epiphany. He had already come under the guidance of a white owner of a local Chick-fil-A franchise. Scott acquired many of his ideas by reading Thomas Sowell and other conservatives.

In 1995, he became the first black Republican elected to any South Carolina office (Charleston County Council) since Reconstruction, and in 2008 he became the first black Republican since Reconstruction elected to the state House of Representatives. His Web site stresses economics: “Tim has never voted for a tax increase” and “Tim was heavily involved in bringing Boeing to the Charleston area.”

This state, like most, practices “entrepreneurial federalism,” offering incentives — tax exemptions, low-interest loans, etc. — to lure investment. So a gigantic $750 million assembly plant is rising where Boeing will create 3,800 new jobs to build its 787. Unlike in Everett, Wash., where most Boeing aircraft have been built, the South Carolina workforce will be non-union.

When the Democrats’ 2004 presidential nomination contest reached this state, the eventual winner, John Kerry, was excoriating “Benedict Arnold CEOs” — those who locate some operations overseas. This must have seemed quaint and parochial in a state that is benefiting from the German, Japanese and French CEOs who gave South Carolina BMW, Fujifilm and Michelin plants.

Scott’s and Haley’s candidacies, both focusing on economic issues, are pebbles in an avalanche of evidence that the identity politics of race and ethnicity has become a crashing bore. That, in turn, is evidence of this:

If the question is which state has changed most in the last half-century, the answer might be California. But if the question is which state has changed most for the better, the answer might be South Carolina.”

(from today’s Washington Post)

Cordoba House: The Trojan Horse of Peace Speaking Muslim Terrorists

The following are the soft and gentle words of the ambassadors of Muslim terrorism.  They are conniving to excrete  their scent at the heart of American and New York suffering and memory of horror, the World Trade Center, the victims of Muslim fanaticism.    They pretend peace and plot peril.  

America’s Leftwing cannot tell the difference.   They, too, pretend peace and plot peril,  despite well recorded  history of Marxist slaughtering  tens of millions to force folks to think and worship the same………..They, too,  have a long history of talking soft and gentle words until the day arrives when they, like the Muslim story of slaughter to conquer, are ready to finish the kill.

It is time for adult and concerned Americans to stand up and say NO NOW and NO EVER  to Muslim imperialism’s temple at the World Trade Center…….unless, of course, America builds  a “Liberty” house or two right in the heart of  Mecca!  Maybe then.

Rauf writes:

“AS my flight approached America last weekend, my mind circled back to the furor that has broken out over plans to build Cordoba House, a community center in Lower Manhattan.I have been away from home for two months, speaking abroad about cooperation among people from different religions. Every day, including the past two weeks spent representing my country on a State Department tour in the Middle East, I have been struck by how the controversy has riveted the attention of Americans, as well as nearly everyone I met in my travels.

We have all been awed by how inflamed and emotional the issue of the proposed community center has become. The level of attention reflects the degree to which people care about the very American values under debate: recognition of the rights of others, tolerance and freedom of worship.

Many people wondered why I did not speak out more, and sooner, about this project. I felt that it would not be right to comment from abroad. It would be better if I addressed these issues once I returned home to America, and after I could confer with leaders of other faiths who have been deliberating with us over this project. My life’s work has been focused on building bridges between religious groups and never has that been as important as it is now.

We are proceeding with the community center, Cordoba House. More important, we are doing so with the support of the downtown community, government at all levels and leaders from across the religious spectrum, who will be our partners. I am convinced that it is the right thing to do for many reasons.

Above all, the project will amplify the multifaith approach that the Cordoba Initiative has deployed in concrete ways for years. Our name, Cordoba, was inspired by the city in Spain where Muslims, Christians and Jews co-existed in the Middle Ages during a period of great cultural enrichment created by Muslims. Our initiative is intended to cultivate understanding among all religions and cultures.

Our broader mission — to strengthen relations between the Western and Muslim worlds and to help counter radical ideology — lies not in skirting the margins of issues that have polarized relations within the Muslim world and between non-Muslims and Muslims. It lies in confronting them as a joint multifaith, multinational effort.

From the political conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians to the building of a community center in Lower Manhattan, Muslims and members of all faiths must work together if we are ever going to succeed in fostering understanding and peace.

At Cordoba House, we envision shared space for community activities, like a swimming pool, classrooms and a play space for children. There will be separate prayer spaces for Muslims, Christians, Jews and men and women of other faiths. The center will also include a multifaith memorial dedicated to victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.

I am very sensitive to the feelings of the families of victims of 9/11, as are my fellow leaders of many faiths. We will accordingly seek the support of those families, and the support of our vibrant neighborhood, as we consider the ultimate plans for the community center. Our objective has always been to make this a center for unification and healing.

Cordoba House will be built on the two fundamental commandments common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam: to love the Lord our creator with all of our hearts, minds, souls and strength; and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. We want to foster a culture of worship authentic to each religious tradition, and also a culture of forging personal bonds across religious traditions.

I do not underestimate the challenges that will be involved in bringing our work to completion. (Construction has not even begun yet.) I know there will be interest in our financing, and so we will clearly identify all of our financial backers.

Lost amid the commotion is the good that has come out of the recent discussion. I want to draw attention, specifically, to the open, law-based and tolerant actions that have taken place, and that are particularly striking for Muslims.

President Obama and Mayor Michael Bloomberg both spoke out in support of our project. As I traveled overseas, I saw firsthand how their words and actions made a tremendous impact on the Muslim street and on Muslim leaders. It was striking: a Christian president and a Jewish mayor of New York supporting the rights of Muslims. Their statements sent a powerful message about what America stands for, and will be remembered as a milestone in improving American-Muslim relations.

The wonderful outpouring of support for our right to build this community center from across the social, religious and political spectrum seriously undermines the ability of anti-American radicals to recruit young, impressionable Muslims by falsely claiming that America persecutes Muslims for their faith. These efforts by radicals at distortion endanger our national security and the personal security of Americans worldwide. This is why Americans must not back away from completion of this project. If we do, we cede the discourse and, essentially, our future to radicals on both sides. The paradigm of a clash between the West and the Muslim world will continue, as it has in recent decades at terrible cost. It is a paradigm we must shift.

From those who recognize our rights, from grassroots organizers to heads of state, I sense a global desire to build on this positive momentum and to be part of a global movement to heal relations and bring peace. This is an opportunity we must grasp.

I therefore call upon all Americans to rise to this challenge. Let us commemorate the anniversary of 9/11 by pausing to reflect and meditate and tone down the vitriol and rhetoric that serves only to strengthen the radicals and weaken our friends’ belief in our values.

The very word “islam” comes from a word cognate to shalom, which means peace in Hebrew. The Koran declares in its 36th chapter, regarded by the Prophet Muhammad as the heart of the Koran, in a verse deemed the heart of this chapter, “Peace is a word spoken from a merciful Lord.”

How better to commemorate 9/11 than to urge our fellow Muslims, fellow Christians and fellow Jews to follow the fundamental common impulse of our great faith traditions?”

Feisal Abdul Rauf is the chairman of the Cordoba Initiative and the imam of the Farah mosque in Lower Manhattan.

 

Medicare Collapse Forcasted by Specialists at Briefing

On Wednesday, former Comptroller General David M. Walker, National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) Senior Fellow Thomas R. Saving, and NCPA President and Kellye Wright Fellow John C. Goodman held a briefing in Washington, D.C.  At the briefing, the NCPA presented a new analysis that concludes finding accessible and quality care for the elderly and disabled will become increasingly difficult in the coming years under the new health care law because of draconian cuts in payments to doctors and hospitals:

• Medicare payment rates will fall below the rates paid by Medicaid (for low-income families) by the end of this decade and will fall even further behind all other payers in succeeding decades.
• Whereas Medicaid pays about 80 percent of what private insurance pays today, the payment rates will fall to two-thirds of private payment by the end of this decade and one-half of private payment by midcentury.
• Just as Medicaid patients must often seek care at community health centers and safety net hospitals today, seniors could face similar access problems in the near future.

In terms of dollars spent:

• The annual reduction in spending will reach $2,300 per beneficiary by 2020 and $3,844 by 2030.
• By the time today’s teenagers reach the retirement age, one-third of Medicare will effectively be gone.
• If seniors are allowed to make up for the cuts in Medicare spending with out-of-pocket payments — something not allowed under current law — they will need to spend 10 percent of the average Social Security check by 2017.
• Fifty years from now, seniors will need to spend half of their Social Security income to offset the decline in Medicare spending.

Unless the law is changed by future Congresses, Medicare beneficiaries will be pushed into a separate health care system and not have the same access to care as the rest of the population, according to the report.

 Source:  The Natinal Center for Policy Analysis

An Honest and Authentic Leader, Chris Christie, In Action!!

It was written over a century ago that India was the Jewell in the Crown of the British Empire.

We, in America, are more humble and have had few jewells in our crownless past.  Worse yet, today, we have Barack Hussein Obama pounding our ears with cliches, racist and class-war rhetoric, and sugared words to cover his failures to dictate his Marxism into the American future.

An antiObama may be on the horizon, possessing all that Obama IS NOT……..Hulky, honest, direct, clear, with a mind directly aimed at the jugular of solving problems, a devoted American……Governor Chris Christie. 

This priceless vignette of fresh air must be made as public as possible.  There is HOPE FOR AMERICA!

“My Central Jersey: Marie Corfield, a teacher at Robert Hunter Elementary School, said she wondered how Christie’s reforms would help teachers when she said his budget forced so many of them to be laid off.

“We have some of the best schools in the country,” Corfield said. “And you have done nothing but lambaste us.”

Christie began to respond when Corfield rolled her eyes and head back and made waving gestures with her arms and body that seemed to mock his answer’s sincerity.

“If you want to put on a show then just sit down,” Christie scolded. “But if you want to have a respectful discussion then let me answer your question.”

As the crowd’s cheering faded, Christie said that his only criticism was when he said that the state teachers’ union refused to share the state’s budget burdens.

“The overwhelming number of teachers pay nothing toward full family, full coverage health benefits, not just for the years of their employment, but for life,” Christie said. “I asked them to”……….. Please click to continue:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/09/08/gov_christie_responds_to_teacher_claiming_he_lambastes_education.html

The video and description were found at realclearpolitics.