Try Saying THAT Real Fast!

by Michael D. Hume, M.S.

This week, President Obama used his favorite word several more times. That word is "unprecedented." Easily, the present president has used that word to a degree which is without precedent, unprecedented by any of the preceding previous presidents who previously preceded him. Easily.

Remember when Mr. Obama was on the campaign trail? Boy, that was some uprecedented presidential campaigning. I remember hearing, for instance, how unprecedented it was that we were prosecuting wars overseas, especially two different wars in two different countries. Can you imagine that? Unprecedented! Not since World War II had we done such a thing!

Of course, there were other unprecedented problems to attack, too. For instance, gas prices were very high back in those ugly days of 2008. You might say (he did) that those prices were, well, unprecedented! They dropped down to a national average of around $1.84 by the time Mr. Obama took office, and they're much higher now than at any time in our nation's history... but the important thing is that, back then, we needed to elect him because of those unprecedented high gas prices.

And what about housing, Wall Street, and the economy? The unprecedented greed, accompanied by unprecedented corruption in Congress, caused unprecedented economic woe. Only unprecedented Stimulus Packages I and II (one preceded the other) could save us! So as a member of the U.S. Senate, Mr. Obama helped create Stimulus I, and as president, he later signed Stimulus II. He promised that, by providing these stimuli, the unprecedented rate of unemployment would not go above eight percent. That rate has been roughly 9-10 percent since then, but that's not the point.

The point is that the problem was (say it with me) unprecedented. And only an unprecedented president, as he's been proclaimed by his media sycophants to be, could solve it.

This week, back on the campaign trail, the president warned us that more sacrifices lie ahead. It turns out that the problems left behind by his predecessor, the reviled George W. Bush, were far worse than anyone could have known - downright unprecedented! Never mind that gas cost half what it does today, or that the unemployment rate was close to half what it is today, when Bush left office. If you bring up facts like those, you just don't get how unprecedented Bush's incompetence must truly have been. And the president has pointed out that it's going to take unprecedented action that only he can execute (more goodies like his unprecedented government takeover of health care) to turn this thing around. Hang onto your wallet! Experts say we're heading into hard times, the likes of which we've never seen before.

Seems like there's a word for that, but it eludes me at the moment.

I heard a pundit today ask why Mr. Obama wouldn't have known how bad things really were when he ran for president. Wasn't he a member of the Senate, since 2006? Wasn't he present for the housing crisis, the Fannie-and-Freddie debacle, the troop surge in Iraq, the financial meltdown, the persistent efforts of global terrorists, the hurricanes and earthquakes, and all the other plagues that began to torment us right around the time his party took control of Washington? Yes, he WAS present. In fact, that's how he often voted: "present." The question is this: is he really present now, in his current job? Does he have any idea what it's like to run a business, work a job, or try to make a sound investment in his fundamentally-transformed America of 2011?

At present, one must wonder how things would be different if we didn't have an unprecedented un-present president leaving the nation nearly un-presidented.

About the Author: