The opening lines of a New York Times story last Saturday about President Obama’s trip to China pretty much says it all: “When President Obama visits China for the first time on Sunday, he will, in many ways, be assuming the role of profligate spender coming to pay his respects to his banker.”
The article proceeded to point out that China is now the largest foreign lender to the United States and that Obama will be “spending less time exhorting Beijing and more time reassuring it.” The Chinese have expressed concerns to U.S. officials about Obama’s plans for national health care, specifically what effect this will have on federal spending and the value of China’s debt holdings.
As that old Virginia Slims commercial put it, you’ve come a long way, baby! Such a long way, in fact, that neither conservatives nor liberals are issuing one tiny little peep against China, which just happens to be one of the most brutal communist regimes in history.
Think back to the Cold War. That was the period of time when conservatives had more fear of the communists than they do today of the terrorists. The communists are bent on worldwide conquest, they exclaimed, and so it’s necessary to have an enormous military and military-industrial complex to prevent the conquest. American soldiers have to kill and die in Vietnam, they said, because, otherwise, the dominoes would begin falling to the communists and ultimately reach the United States.
Recall the liberals and their human-rights campaigns, which were directed to brutal regimes that were knowingly committing horrific human-rights abuses.
Yet, today both conservatives and liberals are keeping their lips sealed with respect to the communist regime in China.
Why, apparently communism isn’t so bad anymore. And apparently, human-rights abuses in China aren’t so bad either.
Nonsense. Everyone knows that the China communist regime is brutal and is still severely punishing people for exercising fundamental human rights.
What’s really going on is that neither the conservatives nor the liberals want to antagonize the regime that has loaned them the money to engage in their grandiose socialist programs at home and imperialist programs abroad.
That’s what the budget deficit is all about. To pay for their domestic and foreign programs, they’vee been spending more than they’re taking in in taxes. To cover the difference, they could have raised taxes, but they knew that that would have antagonized American taxpayers. So, they decided to simply borrow the difference.
Since the American people lacked the financial ability or desire to lend the necessary money, U.S. officials turned to the Chinese communists for the loans. And so now the U.S. government is in hock to one of the most brutal regimes in the world. And U.S. officials, supported by both conservatives and liberals, must play nice with that regime because it’s not wise to be nasty to the entity who can call in your loans.
Except for the widespread death and destruction that conservatives and liberals have wrought with their socialism at home and imperialism abroad, what better evidence of their moral bankruptcy than the fiscal and monetary debauchery to which they have subjected our nation, including placing America in hock to the Chinese communists?