Obama Signs Second Stimulus, Will Require Intervention

Halfway into his first 100 days in office, President Barack Obama has broken nearly all of his campaign promises, and a big one fell yesterday. The president promised that he would veto pork-leaden legislation and go through it line-by-line to eliminate waste if he had to.

However, the first fastball thrown by Congress went right by the president. He signed the $410 billion stimulus bill (which was packed with pork) before the ink was even dry, mumbling something about "responsibility and accountability."

Let there be no doubt: this piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business, and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability ... I am signing an imperfect ... bill because it's necessary for the ongoing functions of government, and we have a lot more work to do. We can't have Congress bogged down at this critical juncture in our economic recovery.

Pardon the analogy, but this is like telling your daughter not to have sex while you're handing her a box of condoms and the keys to your nice, roomy Cadillac.

Frankly, Obama is beginning to sound like a cheap junkie. "This is it, I swear," the addict says. "After this, I'm going straight to rehab." The junkie knows he'll never get to rehab, and Obama knows he'll never stop spending. Neither man can help himself.

Just a moment ago, for example, Obama told a press conference, "If we see money being misspent, we're going to put a stop to it. If however, that money is being put to good purpose, well ... "

Clearly, the president needs an intervention. And the Republicans aren't the ones to arrange it (he'd never listen to them). Perhaps the Blue Dog Democrats can sit him down, put an arm around his shoulder and tell him that saying one thing and doing another isn't a new way of doing business in Washington. Maybe they are the ones to tell him he needs help, to tell him that he needs to stand on his own two feet and demand Congress stop the earmark-spending.

Maybe those 11 Democrats who voted against the original bill in the House could help, too. They could go around the room and each tell the president, "Your spending rampage has affected me in the following ways ..."

OK. I'll stop with the analogies now, because I think you get the point. Which is this: if the president doesn't stop spending and continues to break his promises, he's going to break our economy, as well.

The worst case scenario, however, is that, with no help from Obama or his Democratic brethren, the economy will right itself. If this happens, it would egregiously validate the liberal agenda in the eyes of the American public and give credit where it is not due.

And that is not out of the realm of possibility.

Consider this: before the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was enacted, projections by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecast that the economy would begin recovery in 2010 without any action from the federal government. The CBO also projected that unemployment would peak in 2009 and see a steady decline as 2012 approached, again without any Congressional action.

It is unclear what impact, if any, the stimulus package has on those projections, but one thing remains true: if the economy does turn around in spite of the president's drunken spending spree, it will enable him to continue spending for the rest of his presidency ... and it will be our children who are left paying for his nasty habit.

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