The Truth is Out There

Mark Landsbaum, a columnist at the Orange County Register, has some truths to tell about President Obama, the first of which answers the Obama campaign's accusation that the "you didn't build that" remark was taken out of context:

"Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that," he said.

Since uttering those words at a Virginia campaign stop, there has been much backtracking and excuse-making by Obama supporters, scrambling to explain that the president really didn't mean what you heard, that he meant something sort of like that, but different.

They complain that critics took his words out of context. The president supposedly didn't mean that business owners didn't build their businesses. He allegedly meant business owners didn't build bridges and roads. But for that to be true, the golden tongued Harvard Law Review president had to have trampled English grammar and mangled sentence construction.

As the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto noted, "that" necessarily referred to "a business," not to "roads and bridges."

"...[N]ot only because 'business' is more proximate to the pronoun 'that' and therefore its more likely antecedent. The [Obama] Truth Team's interpretation is ungrammatical. 'Roads and bridges' is plural; 'that' is singular. If the Team is right about Obama's meaning, he should have said, 'You didn't build those.'

"... [H]is campaign asks us to believe he is not even competent to construct a sentence."

On the notion that the president's policies have "worked":

The president recently told a campaign gathering that, "[W]e tried our plan – and it worked."

"Worked" apparently means something different to Obama than to, say, working Americans. Did the president mean that it "worked" when U.S. business startups dropped from 554,109 in 1987 to 394,623 in 2010?

When Obama took office, unemployment was 7.8 percent. It is now 8.2 percent. Perhaps Obama's plan worked in the way a U.S. major meant during the Vietnam War when he said, "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

What are we to make of a president who proclaims with the certainty of a sunrise that, "If I don't get the unemployment rate under 7 percent, I deserve to be a one-term president," then runs for a second term even though unemployment has been above 8 percent his entire tenure? Did he not mean what he said? Or did he mean it in a way we simply don't understand?

The liberal trope about "fairness":

Here's more context: Four years ago Obama told an interviewer that even if raising the capital-gains tax rate resulted in less tax collected, as it has in the past, it's only "fair" to raise the rate because he believes "the rich" should pay more, period. Therefore, taxes aren't to pay for necessary government functions. Taxes "work" when they dish out punitive "fairness," at least in Obama-ese.

And who could forget this old standby:

In that same Virginia speech, the president described government "permitting" private-sector growth. Permitting? We have turned a significant corner when the government must permit private economic growth. It's yet a sharper left turn when we accept that not only is government permission required, but government subsidies and financing, too.