Among all of the preposterous statements that Barak Obama made during his speech on Thursday I found this one to be particularly troubling:

We will not be safe if we see national security as a wedge that divides America.

Sorry, Mr. President, but you are the person in charge now. Decisions on national security can’t be made by focus groups. They can’t be made by polls or by any other method that’s the same as sticking your finger in the air to determine which way the political winds are blowing.

In his last seven-plus years in office, George W. Bush did what he thought he had to do to to keep the country safe. In doing so he outraged large numbers of people, caused his own approval ratings to plummet to record lows and sent his party from solid majorities in both chamber of Congress to decided minorities.

Yes, he was driving a wedge that divided America and he knew that there were more people on the other side of the divide than there were on his side of it. He knew that his policies were unpopular with our allies. But Bush knew that it was his most important duty to defend the people of the country and everything else was a distant second.

And for those seven-plus years we have not suffered another major attack.

To Obama it seems that if a policy that keeps us safe ruffles some feathers on either side of the Atlantic that policy is unacceptable. I just hope that if Al Qaeda tries to attack again–make that when they try to attack again–that the President doesn’t comission a poll, convene a focus group, and call Old World heads of state to figure out what to do about it. I pray that his desire to protect us exceeds his desire to avoid divisiveness because often those ends are mutually exclusive.

In case you haven’t seen it, here is CNBC reporter Rick Santelli’s rant on the floor of a stock exchange in Chicago. It’s five minutes, but you should watch the whole thing, it’s worth it.

If you want to know what Santelli is so worked up about, here’s a quick run of some numbers:

This $75 billion program will cost $100 billion because of interest on the borrowed money (and that’s a conservative estimate—do you really think that this program will go away when the current “crisis” is over?).

Let’s say that the average, productive, mortgage paying citizen in his/her peak earning years from age 41-65 pays $5,000 a year in federal taxes. That comes out to $125,000 paid in taxes per person over those 25 years.

At that rate, 25 years of taxes paid by 800,000 productive citizens will go to pay the mortgages of other people. That’s the entire population of Fresno, CA or New Haven, CT.

Many of these people struggle every day to pay their mortgages and their other bills. They now will be required to work for a quarter of a century to pay for the houses of those who don’t pay their mortgages.

And I bet none of them ever get a thank you card.

Or you can look at it in terms of opportunity cost. Social Security, of course, comes from the general fund. That $100 billion could provide a monthly benefit check of $1,000 for 555,000 citizens for 15 years. That money is likely to be gone when the citizens of Greenville, SC or Denver CO try to get it.

Ten billion here, ten billion there, pretty soon you’re talk about real money for which a whole lot of real people work a lifetime.

Also posted at The Rational Conservative

There is no allowance for election fatigue in Virginia.

There are no off years in the commonwealth. In even-numbered years we have the Federal elections along with the rest of the country. While most states take the odd-numbered years off. But in the Old Dominion, those years are for the elections for state offices.

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