President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address was a “laundry list of ideas that were either small-bore or half-baked or have been proven to fail in the past,” veteran journalist and author John Fund tells Newsmax.
Obama did not address vital issues such as the burgeoning national debt, his refusal to allow an immediate start to the building of the Keystone XL pipeline or America’s most contentious foreign policy issues, said Fund, a senior editor for the American Spectator.
“It was an election-year campaign document, not a policy document,” Fund said during an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV. “Attacks on millionaires is campaign rhetoric, it’s not designed to reduce the horrible national debt we have.”
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Fund said he accepts the fact that all presidents are focused on their re-election by the time their third State of the Union address comes round.
“It always helps if the state of the union is good when you are making a campaign speech. In this case the president ignored the state of the union in large part because it is so bad.
“Let’s be honest: Barack Obama owns this economy. He has admitted that himself, and this economy is flat-lining — it’s not declining, but it’s not going up. We are not creating enough jobs to reduce unemployment, to reduce under-employment or to get the country moving again.”
Fund said the president’s silence on Keystone “indicates a weak defense.”
“Instead, the president decided to go talk about solar energy, green jobs — and this is in the wake of the Solyndra and other scandals that show that force-feeding the alternative energy industry with government money usually leads to very poor results.
“Keystone is primarily a private-sector enterprise and will create private sector jobs and people are ready and waiting to go to work to build it and then to ship the oil and natural gas to consumers. Once again, it will make America less dependent on foreign oil,” he said.
“The president claims he wants to do that. Instead, he is chasing phantoms — solar energy, wind power, things like the Chevy Volt, which is being returned by consumers to the dealers every day. It just goes to show that the president is doubling down on failed policies.”
Fund said he gives Obama full credit for killing Osama bin Laden, and he had every right to crow about the operation during his speech. “But there is awful lot that hasn’t been done in foreign policy,” he said.
“We have not properly addressed a whole set of weaknesses that we have in Latin America, such as with Hugo Chavez. We have not been able to resolve the Pakistan issue. We have not been able to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan.
“I hope we get lucky in Iraq with the withdrawal of American troops there and that it doesn’t descend into civil war and chaos. But that is asking a lot in terms of wish fulfillment and hope.
“The old cliché is ‘Time will tell.’ I guess the president is crossing his fingers and hoping nothing will go wrong there until after November.”
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