Michelle Obama: This country is “just downright mean”

The wife of Dem presidential hopeful Barack Obama keeps stepping in it, first with her “first time in my adult life I’ve been really proud of my country” and BO can “fix your soul” remarks, and now we read this from an interview she gave The New Yorker (emphasis added):

[Michelle] Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean” we are “guided by fear” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Forty-four!”

From these bleak generalities, Obama moves into specific complaints. Used to be, she will say, that you could count on a decent education in the neighborhood. But now there are all these charter schools and magnet schools that you have to “finagle” to get into. (Obama herself attended a magnet school, but never mind.) Health care is out of reach (“Let me tell you, don’t get sick in America”), pensions are disappearing, college is too expensive, and even if you can figure out a way to go to college you won’t be able to recoup the cost of the degree in many of the professions for which you needed it in the first place. “You’re looking at a young couple that’s just a few years out of debt” Obama said. “See, because, we went to those good schools, and we didn’t have trust funds. I’m still waiting for Barack’s trust fund. Especially after I heard that Dick Cheney was s’posed to be a relative or something. Give us something here!”

Gimme gimme gimme! Only full-scale Socialism will do!

Just how awful are things for Mr. and Mrs. Obama financially?

The Obamas’ financial standing has risen sharply in the past three years, largely as a result of the money Barack earned from writing “The Audacity of Hope.” In 2005, their income was $1.67 million, which was more than they had earned in the previous seven years combined.

[…]

Just after Barack was elected to the United States Senate, Michelle received a large pay increase-from $121,910 in 2004 to $316,962 in 2005.

With that meager amount, I’m shocked they can even afford to have a decent meal.

This, BTW, isn’t the first time that Mrs. Obama has peddled a sob stories about her struggles and being able to “make it” in this country. Byron York wrote last week about a round-table discussion Mrs. O recently had with six women at a day nursery in Ohio:

Michelle Obama is sitting with a group of six women around a table in the basement playroom of the Zanesville Day Nursery, here in economically troubled central Ohio. Her talk is of struggle β€” her own struggle, the women’s struggles, the struggles of women across the country. There are struggles over money, over kids, over jobs, over husbands and ex-husbands. And perhaps most of all, there is the struggle inside.

“It’s a constant sense of guilt” Obama, dressed simply in a blue sweater with a triple strand of pearls, tells the women of her own dilemma as a working mother. “It’s guilt, feeling guilty all the time.”

So how does she keep it all together? “I’m fine, because I have a strong informal support network” Obama says. “I have a mother who lives five minutes from me. I don’t know what I would do, even if we weren’t running, I don’t know what I would do as a professional without having that kind of support system. So that keeps me sane.”

But not everyone has a close relative living nearby. And not everyone can afford to keep it all together, especially here in Muskingum County, where, according to the census, the median household income in 2004 was $37,192, below both the Ohio and national average. Out of that, there’s the mortgage. And child care. Health care. Education. Lessons. “I know we’re spending β€” I added it up for the first time β€” we spend between the two kids, on extracurriculars outside the classroom, we’re spending about $10,000 a year on piano and dance and sports supplements and so on and so forth” Mrs. Obama tells the women. “And summer programs. That’s the other huge cost. Barack is saying, Γ’β‚¬ΛœWhyyyyyy are we spending that?’ And I’m saying, Γ’β‚¬ΛœDo you know what summer camp costs?'”

With all those concerns, one might wonder whether the women should be comforting Mrs. Obama, but she assures them that she’s really O.K. “We don’t complain because we’ve got resources because of our education. We’ve got family structure” she says. “So I tell people don’t cry for me.”

But there are still problems. As she has many times in the past, Mrs. Obama complains about the lasting burden of student loans dating from her days at Princeton and Harvard Law School. She talks about people who end up taking years and years, until middle age, to pay off their debts. “The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt, so you’re in your 40s, still paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids” she says.

The self-loathing pity-party liberalism that Michelle Obama routinely displays is one of the main reasons I turned to the ‘dark side’ and converted to conservatism. Not that I needed the reminder, but thanks all the same, Mrs. O, for reaffirming my commitment to self-determination and personal responsibility. It’s bad enough to see it coming from an average Joe Citizen who has been brainwashed into believing that government is the only solution, but it’s repulsive when it comes from people who are not only living an “upper class” life many others would give their first born for, but who also stand poised to take prominent leadership roles in our country, people like, oh, a potential president and first lady, maybe?

Hat tip: JammieWearingFool via Newsbusters

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