Benchmarks for President Obama

RUSH: I’ve got this: ‘Obama Sharpens War Goals in Afghanistan.’ This sets up the benchmarks. He’s got no benchmarks in Afghanistan. Remember all benchmarks we had to have for the surge and the success in Iraq? There are no benchmarks. ‘Obama next month will send Congress a new plan for measuring success in Afghanistan and Pakistan,’ but it will not include victory, I guess, because we can’t say we’re at war with them! ‘In an effort to build confidence among wavering Democrats and give sharper direction to a costly and increasingly bloody war, the administration has begun seeking feedback on the plan from lawmakers in their staffs. The finished version will be delivered to Capitol Hill by September 24th. ‘There is an intense impatience here for results and I think…”

So we have a surge. Basically we have a surge going on in Afghanistan with no objective. So Obama in a month has got to put out what his new objective is. Lee Cary at the American Thinker says, this is sort of ‘bassackwards,’ isn’t it? You come up with the objective and then you do the surge? But we’ve ordered the surge and we don’t have an objective yet. How do you not have an objective! Remember these people demanding an endgame in Iraq, demanding what we were going to do to get out of there, all these demands, all these benchmarks of the Iraqi government, and Obama has doubled troop levels and has this big surge going on over there without an objective! So let me help out. I have studied President Obama.

I have some goals that he can put in his paper that he’s going to release on September 24th. Here’s what he should say: ‘I will create or save 100,000 new Afghani freedom fighters before the end of the year. For every car bomb that is detonated, I will punch back twice as hard. I will lower the mountains where the Taliban hides. I will inspire Afghanistan poppy growers to plant different crops by telling them, ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.’ I will destroy their economy, too,’ and if that doesn’t work with the poppy growers, Obama can nationalize the poppy farms and turn ’em over to the United Auto Workers and send union leaders from America over to run the poppy fields and collect the profits.

After five years, the operation will be so bogged down with red tape, strikes, and stalled negotiations with drug lords, the whole poppy industry will collapse under its own weight. Just apply liberalism, Obama liberal socialism to the whole poppy problem in Afghanistan and you can kill it, by giving it to the UAW and the Service Employees International Union. So let’s go back to the economy. The deficit grew by $181 billion in July. Well, we need some benchmarks here in the economy, too. We have no benchmarks in Afghanistan. I just helped out, gave some. My favorite is lowering the mountains where the Taliban hides so that our troops can more easily get in there and wipe ’em out. Obama would lower the mountains like he is going to lower sea levels. Our troops won’t have to climb as high, and the Taliban won’t know what’s happening to them. Can you imagine being on a mountain and all of a sudden the thing starts sinking on you?

We’ll drop little pamphlets say, ‘Obama is doing this until you give up, your mountain is going to continue to sink.’ All right. Three reality-based benchmarks to judge Obama’s handling of the economy: job creation, tax revenues, and spending budget deficits. Using those three benchmarks we’ve got utter failure. If the economy is not producing jobs, there’s no growth in tax revenue. Right? And if spending isn’t controlled when jobs aren’t being produced, then Obama is failing. Everything collapses like a house of cards, which is what is happening. We know that the Porkulus bill has not produced jobs. We know that Congress has been on a reckless spending binge. Tax revenues are down. We have a catastrophe in the making, and we are watching it, we are witnessing it. This recession will not end until jobs are created, tax revenues increase, and spending is slashed. Until that time, we’ll have a few periods of less pain here and there, but the disease has not been cured. I love helping out this way: ‘Okay, here’s how we measure Obamas economic success,’ and there isn’t any, we pronounce it a failure, ‘and my advice and goals for Afghanistan for Obama to announce on September 24th.’ What a service we do here.