The president gave the sort of scare speech he not long ago warned against, and blasted the income-tax rates he not long ago agreed were necessary — in a context in which he has just presented a budget with a $1.6 trillion deficit of the sort he now says is unsustainable, and has warned about recklessly voting against raising the debt ceiling in a fashion that he himself had once done, in a larger landscape in which he had once damned attacking Middle East countries in optional wars, Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention, intercepts, wiretaps, Predators, and leaving troops in Iraq, and then embraced or expanded all that and more (this list is infinite and includes everything from drilling to campaign financing to earmarks).Hanson offers five alternative explanations for Mr. Obama's detachment from his previous firmly-held positions and declarations. Any or all of the five may be true, but there are other possibilities as well, none of them pleasant to consider, implying as they do that the president has a tenuous acquaintance with the importance of truth, and a moral character sufficiently protean that it can adapt itself to every exigency.
Anyway, check it out at the link.
Meanwhile, the esteemed Charles Krauthammer declares that the President's speech was "a disgrace".
Krauthammer has a point in more ways than he articulates in the brief segment at the link. The President invited Paul Ryan, the architect of the GOP budget proposal, to attend the speech and sit in the front row. Then Mr. Obama pretty much imputed the basest of motives to Mr. Ryan in front of a national audience, accusing him (though not by name - at least he observed that decency) of, among other things, wanting to throw grandparents into the street and abandoning autistic children. This ugly display, as short on honesty as it was on class, besmirched both himself and the office Mr. Obama occupies.
Mika Brzezinski liked it, though, which is not surprising, even if her rationale is:
There's much more commentary on Mr. Obama's speech and the disconcerting direction in which he seems to be determined to take this country at National Review Online.