Obama Should Leave GM Alone & Beat Up ON North Korea For A While

When Joe Biden predicted during the 2008 campaign that, if elected, Barack Obama would quickly be tested by the world, many people (some for the first time) took Biden seriously. And yes, it is more likely that it was not Biden’s prediction but rather something he was warned of and should have kept quiet about, but that’s just Joe being Joe.

So far President Obama has had two very challenging tests and he has chosen two very different ways of handling each of them.

The first test was the global financial crisis which has its roots in the U.S. housing markets. President Obama chose to handle this crisis by completely immersing himself (and the federal government) into the situation. He passed the largest spending bill in history, after sufficiently scaring the public and the private sector into paralysis, telling the public that we needed to act right away or we may never fully recover. He also said his bill was designed to create jobs and thaw the frozen credit markets, something which still hasn’t happened yet. President Obama then continued the bailout mania which started toward the end of the 2008 election season, and the government now owns much of the failures in the auto and banking industry.

The second test has to do with the brazen nuclear missile launches by the North Korean government. Obama has decided to handle this a little differently than his first crisis, using more of a hands-off approach. Instead of the panic-inducing rhetoric that Obama used to take action on the financial crisis, Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have been generally quite about the actions of North Korea. There have been no addresses to the American people from the oval office speaking of the “dangers of doing nothing” and there have been no press conferences held on what the Obama administration intends to do about Kim Jong Il’s consistent disregard of the agreements North Korea has made with the rest of the world.

Instead all we hear from Secretary Clinton is that the Obama administration is considering putting North Korea back on the list of states that sponsor terrorism, and that she takes the actions of North Korea “very seriously”. An explanation of how weak and ineffective such a response is won’t be necessary since the North Koreans are demonstrating it all the time with new missile tests. In fact the latest test of their Taepodong-2 missile, which is planned for July 4th, will be directed toward Hawaii. That’s right, while Americans are celebrating our independence; North Koreans will be testing ways to take it away from us. But don’t worry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton take this stuff seriously…

The solutions President Obama has been promoting for the problems this country faces seem to be backwards.

Take General Motors for example. The federal government propped-up GM to the point where we-the-people are now majority owners in the company. The government kept sending money to GM in order for the company to somehow avoid bankruptcy. Failing to do so, the government is now the biggest influence on the company’s Chapter 11 proceedings much to the dismay of GM bondholders and to the delight of union bosses. This is the most profound example of where “doing nothing” would have been the best option for the government to take.

In the case of North Korea, the United States is faced with an extremely volatile regime that now has nuclear weapons capabilities. North Korea is testing the extent of their nuclear capabilities in order to refine and improve upon them, eventually enabling North Korea to threaten the interests of the United States. The problems that North Korea has provided for the U.S. have become increasingly worse since Bill Clinton and Madeline Albright were in office, and now they are only a few years away from being able to reach the Hawaiian Islands with nukes. Some might say that this is a situation where “doing nothing is not an option,” but the Obama response so far has amounted to pretty much just that.

Fighting North Korea with words and pieces of paper is not going to stop the progress toward their nuclear goals. Kim Jong Il has already forfeited the war of words a long time ago when he lied about his nuclear intentions and broke the treaties and agreements of the past. North Korea is now only interested in a war of actions and the Obama administration with Secretary Clinton must recognize that and act before it is too late.

The primary role of the federal government is to keep this country’s citizens safe, yet President Obama seems resistant to inject himself into the North Korean crisis. Kim Jong Il will view this as weakness and he will be emboldened to do what he wishes. At the same time the federal government’s role in the private sector economy is strictly limited on purpose by design of the founding fathers, yet Obama insists on injecting himself into the economic crisis. In both instances he is making the problem worse, instead of better. The only way to reverse the troubling course we are on is if Obama starts employing a more hands-on strategy with North Korea like he did with the financial crisis, and he abandons his assault on free market capitalism.

Joe Biden may have been right about the tests that Obama would face when elected President, but he appears to be wrong about one thing: President Obama is not passing his test with “flying colors”.

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• June 28, 2009 -- The Broken Promises Of Barack Obama
• June 18, 2009 -- Meet The Man Responsible For Obama Being President…As Well As Our Economic Crisis