Dr K on Obama/Tea Party/Clinton/Vat outrages

The Corner - National Review Online Dr K on Obama/Tea Party/Clinton/Vat:
Krauthammer's Take [NRO Staff]

On President Obama’s remarking of the Tea Party movement that “You would think they would be saying thank you”:

I think it was Obama with his usual condescension — except he ratcheted it up to Code Orange into snootiness — where he looks down his nose at the gun-and-god crowd, the lumpenproletariat, as he sees it. And he ridicules them because they're not grateful enough to him.

And look, it's quite obvious what he’s talking about. He thinks that they are stupid because they don't recognize that he hasn't raised their taxes.

The point is the movement began a year ago before there were any hikes in taxes, but it was a prescient movement: it understood — and it wasn't really that hard to see, although a lot of the press entirely overlooked it — that if you’re going expand the government hugely (as he has) you’re going to have to end up raising taxes. There‘s no other way.

That's why we’re all talking about a VAT.

He’s assuming that these people are paranoid or agitated because they are expecting that taxes are going to rise. We just had the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who’s not exactly a member of the Tea Party, say exactly that. In order to sustain our economy, we’re going to have to raise taxes.

So it's a fact. And I think it is in his character to ridicule — this is a man on the day he won the Democratic nomination said that day would mark a day on which the earth began to heal and the oceans recede. So he does not have a low opinion of himself.

On Bill Clinton’s comparing the rhetoric preceding the Oklahoma City bombing to that of the Tea Party movement:

I think it's disgusting. It's a replay of what he did — his administration did — after Oklahoma City. Remember, that happened shortly after he got crushed in the mid-term elections, the Gingrich revolution, that he began his comeback by exploiting Oklahoma City and implying — and having his minions imply — that it was a result of Newt and Rush and all the agitated, angry white males, as it was called by the media at the time. This is a replay.

When there was dissent in the Bush years, he was called a Nazi, Cheney a war criminal, and there was actually a play on the assassination of George Bush — you didn't hear a word from him or others about agitated language.

When a Republican is in power, dissent is the highest form of patriotism. And when a Democrat is in power, dissent is near treasonous and a call to mutiny and insurrection. This is really disgraceful.

On the increasing talk of VAT:

Well, here is the syllogism. If you enact Obamacare, it follows as the night after the day that you have to have a VAT, and the reason is if you legislate yourself, as we just have done, into European levels of entitlements, you are going to have European-level taxation — or you will end up with Greek levels of debt.

And the easier option, ultimately, is going to be the VAT. It's not going to be today. It won't even happen after the 2010 elections, but I assure you if Obama is re-elected it will all of a sudden be a big issue and a big proposal of Democrats.

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