


(from dailycaller.com)Certainly all the indicators are there: the teleprompters to maintain eye contact; the tennis match back-and-forth from left to right, to address the audience in equal increments; hand gestures to dramatize his rhetorical points; and the long, cool and studied gaze over the heads of congressmen and senators, looking upward to the balcony—hands folded on the lectern—waiting for applause to die down.
The lugubriousness of the drama was offset only by the flibbertygibbety antics of Nancy Pelosi, who could be counted on to be the first to spring from her seat like a jack-in-the-box on sundry applause lines for Democrats.
With manipulative tone and carefully crafted rhetoric, Obama’s performance resembles not so much the obligatory SOTU addresses that presidents make every January; rather, it has eerily taken the cast of televised speeches by certain Latin American caudillos like the Castro brothers, or more recently, Hugo Chávez.
Socialist politicians like Chávez use television as vehicles to hector their opponents in marathon speeches and to stoke passions in their followers, particularly during times of domestic hardships or foreign entanglements. In practice, they try to consolidate their hold on power by stifling dissent, outlawing independent media, nationalizing key industries, manipulating the currency, replacing skilled employees with political cronies, raising taxes and pumping up public spending—ultimately bringing their countries to economic and social ruin.
But does Barack Obama bear any similarities with these guys? First, he has a hard-left background from his early days, as well as a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress that is in thrall to the party’s hard left. Using a rationale based on both real and imagined crises, Obama has been able to aggregate more power to the government by bringing the financial industry—both banking and Wall Street—to heel by either partial ownership/control through taxpayer loans or by threatening punitive regulation.
Obama’s ideological proclivity would be to make the country over through collectivist means instead of free market capitalism. Thus his takeover of General Motors became an excuse to pay favors to the UAW, as well as thump for his “green power” campaign hobbyhorse. The insurance and medical care industries are still in his crosshairs for a thinly disguised government takeover unless the public pushes back even harder against creeping socialized medicine.