Obama on pork: Gone With The Change
posted at 2:12 pm on March 11, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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I’ll think about it tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day.
The final couplet from Gone with the Wind offers an instructive look at the approach of President Barack Obama on pork. He spent two years railing about special interests, lobbyist influence, and pork-barrel spending in Washington, and insisted that it took an outsider to bring Hope and Change to the federal government. Instead of taking a stand, however, Obama allowed Congress to roll him for thousands of earmarks worth billions of dollars to lobbyists and special interests.
But Obama wants to assure us that he’ll … well … work on it tomorrow:
“I am signing an imperfect omnibus bill because it’s necessary for the ongoing functions of government,” Obama declared. “But I also view this as a departure point for more far-reaching change.”
In a sign of his discomfort with the bill, Obama did not sign it in public. And he declined to answer a shouted reporters’ question about why.
Running for president, Obama denounced the pet projects as wasteful and open to abuse — and vowed to rein them in.
Explaining his decision, Obama said that future earmarks must have a “legitimate and worthy public purpose”, and the any earmark for a private company should be subject to competitive bidding rules. Plus he said he’ll “work with Congress” to eliminate any the administration objects to. …
During his presidential campaign, Obama promised to force Congress to curb its pork-barrel-spending ways. Yet the bill sent from the Democratic-controlled Congress to the White House on Tuesday contained 7,991 earmarks totaling $5.5 billion, according to calculations by the Republican staff of the House Appropriations Committee.
Fiddle-dee-dee! Governing in consonance with one’s stated principles is just too hard to think about right now. He’ll think about it tomorrow.
Yeah, sure.
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Gone with the Pork
Ortzinator on March 11, 2009 at 8:24 PM
He is the first mudslime that loves pork!
grapeknutz on March 11, 2009 at 8:41 PM
Completely out of his league. Utterly incompetent. Dangerously ignorant.
n0doz on March 12, 2009 at 1:48 AM
If only he were as smart as Bugs Bunny, we’d end up with Reid and Pelosi stepping off a cliff.
hawksruleva
Bugs would have that moron spinning like a top and crashing into a wall. Ogabe isn’t even in Elmer Fudd’s league. Unfortunately for us, he is the “present”. If things get too warm for him, he could just start a war to get our minds off him. Hey, maybe with England. He’s already shown how much hatred he has for them (must be the whole colonialism in Africa thing). I’m confident congress would fund the war. Hell, they fund every other damned thing.
SKYFOX on March 12, 2009 at 5:11 AM
I wonder if he let the Dems in on his little plan, figure he’ll let them pack this bill to the gills and then when he vetos some other bills he’ll look like a good pres.
Rbastid on March 12, 2009 at 11:21 AM
Bush did not sign it because it was full of pork projects that did nothing for the country and had nothing to do with running the government. Obama comes in and signs it with a verbal warning… BS. What happened to line by line. What a bad call by this guy. Not a leader, just pelosi’s hand puppet.
workingforpigs on March 12, 2009 at 1:26 PM
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