What newspapers did Obama read?

The Left openly derided Sarah Palin for failing to name a newspaper she read in her interview with Katie Couric. I watched the video and I thought her answer was a good one, but that’s just me.

But the question came to mind after watching Barack Obama make a joke about those “shovel ready jobs” that the trillion dollar stimulus was supposed to create.

When I first heard the “shovel ready jobs” slogan I knew immediately that it was a crock. I’m not in the construction business, have never occupied public office and only know what I read in the paper or the Internet, but even I know that there are no “shovel ready jobs” ready to go for public construction waiting only on the injection of cash from Washington.

When one nutty environmental group can halt the construction of another nutty environmentalist group’s construction of a solar power facility in the middle of the God-forsaken Mojave Desert you know the truth. It is a tribute to the persistence, greed, single-mindedness (and often cupidity) of some people that anything is ever built in this permit-obsessed, rule-laden and law-encrusted country.

So when Barack Obama, hailed at his election as the smartest man ever to hold the office, is unaware of the fact that “shovel ready jobs” is an oxymoron when it refers to the public sector it makes you wonder. It is to give him the benefit of the doubt to call him ignorant; the alternative is to conclude that he knew the slogan was a lie. If he was ignorant, it’s a valid question to ask what else he doesn’t know and why he doesn’t know it. Flushing a billion dollars down the drain to educate the President about this little item is really more than the country can afford. Think of what else he doesn’t know and what the cost in blood and treasure may be to educate him.

To paraphrase Rush Limbaugh, in the end it may not matter whether Barack Obama’s destructive policies emanate from ignorance or are bad by design. The result for the country is disastrous. I could not help but notice that the people surrounding Obama in the video are not being hurt by his policies. Jeff Immelt, the head of GE, made over $15 million in 2010. Obama has free public housing, is surrounded by household staff catering to his every whim, a fleet of jet aircraft, and fleets of cars, is personally worth millions from the sale of books and will be able to command millions more from speeches once he leaves office. He can talk about the 20% unemployed as a bump in the road with the gracelessness as the French aristocracy just before the revolution.

But it would have been nice if the media had asked Barack Obama – just once – before the election: “what newspapers do you read.”    Perhaps we would have had fewer "bumps on the road to recovery."