Aesop's Fables In The Age Of Obama

The Age of Obama will require an entirely new book of fables to instruct our children. Director Spike Lee predicted that from the moment of Barack Hussein Obama’s election, history would henceforth be recorded as Before Obama and After Obama. I’m beginning to think that he was right.

One fable from my youth that no longer has any relevance in this After Obama Age is the story of the ant and the grasshopper. According to the fable, all summer long, the ant worked hard to store food in preparation for the inevitable winter. Meanwhile, the grasshopper spent his summer playing music and otherwise enjoying the warm summer days. When winter arrived, the ant had plenty of food to keep himself and his family fed until the next spring. Meanwhile, the grasshopper starved.
The moral of the story was obvious, even to a four year old. Plan ahead. Work hard. Accept responsibility for yourself. And those who don’t will reap the consequences.

Today, the fable would end with the tax man taking half of the ant’s food stocks and giving it to the grasshopper so that the grasshopper could be liberated from the toil of labor and would be free to pursue his art.

It’s just as Nancy Pelosi predicted shortly before she was deposed as Speaker of the House. “Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or, eh, a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance,” she mused with her fellow travelers on MSNBC.

Sure! No problem. We’ll just pay for it all with leprechaun gold and unicorn petting zoos.
Aesop never could have imagined the 21st century Democratic Party.

Democrats have long endured lampooning as the party of the lazy, unproductive and parasitic. In this caricature, the quintessential Democrat voter resembles nothing more in the biosphere than a remora, the parasitic fish that attaches itself to a shark and survives off the scraps generated by the larger fish’s labors.

That’s the caricature. But now we learn that this is precisely how the Democratic Party views itself and its own voters.

As former Minnesota Vikings head coach Dennis Green famously said of the Chicago Bears in 2006: “They are who we thought they were.”

And, the Democrats are who we thought they were.

After the Congressional Budget Office predicted that, because of Obamacare, the equivalent of 2.5 million full time working Americans would voluntarily drop out of the work force and live off the public dole, prominent Democrats celebrated. Americans would now be “liberated from job lock” in the words of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D – Mustang Ranch).

And, in all truth, this is likely the only promise made for Obamacare that will come true. In other words, when added to public housing, food stamps and permanent unemployment benefits, millions more Americans are now free from ever having to lift a finger on their own behalf ever again.
I can see where this is going. By the end of Obama’s reign, the unemployment rate will be zero. But the liberated from job lock rate will be about 12% or so.

If I were a writer for a late night television comedy show, I could not have done any better than the Democrat-leaning Politico Magazine did when it selected a professor of “leisure studies” to pen an editorial ridiculing the outmoded Republican concept that people should work for a living.

“The president’s critics, in high dudgeon, are fulminating about lay-abouts and scofflaws actually choosing to work less than what God intended, predicting a host of ills that will supposedly befall the nation, from moral turpitude to economic ruin,” he argued.

And even though it reads like a skit from a Comedy Central “The Daily Show” parody, that was the informed opinion of a tenured university professor - of leisure studies. I get the impression that he liberated himself from productive work long ago, but still collects the paycheck.

Another symptom of the Age of Obama could be George Orwell’s Newspeak. We’ve gotten rid of terrorism by calling it “man-caused disaster” or even “workplace violence.” Illegal aliens are now “undocumented Americans.” And unemployment is now “job liberation.”

If this keeps up, we won’t have the words in our vocabulary to think thoughts that Obama disapproves of. And to think that we once laughed at a president who contested what the meaning of the word “is” is.