The American Spectator : The Spectacle Blog : Nation-Building at Home

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If President Obama wants to lift metaphors from Thomas Friedman, then it's only fair that Matt Welch rips his Afghanistan troop withdrawal speech to shreds. The offending metaphor? That instead of nation-building in Afghanistan, it "is time to focus on nation building here at home."

Welch also notes that Obama's been selling infrastructure repairs for a long time now:

If the rebuild-our-infrastructure vow sounds familiar, that's because Barack Obama has been demanding we do precisely that since campaigning for president, being elected president, pushing through a $787 billion stimulus package in early 2009, announcing a $50 billion infrastructure-building plan in September 2010, making his 2011 State of the Union address, and on and on. Why, it's almost as if his repeated promises to stimulate the economy by rebuilding infrastructure results in precisely neither of those things happening!

View all comments (9) | Leave a comment

JP| 6.24.11 @ 7:21PM

Of course if we had a press corps that wasn't in the Dems' pocket perhaps a few reporters would corner the President on this. If one includes the 2005-06 Transportation Bill and all of the domestic spending since then, we have spent well over $1.5 trillion on "infrastructure" (highways, bridges, airports, telecom, education, harbors, community centers, etc...).

Japan and Germany have spent as much as we have on infrastructure and all they have to show for it is high unemployment, weak real GDP growth, and mountng public liabilities.

Outside of Asia, no one really knows how to create wealth anymore.

Frank| 6.24.11 @ 9:02PM

Easing environmental reviews and regulations and doing away with Davis-Bacon Act requirements would 1) speed things along and, 2) make the money spent, go farther.

Mike| 6.24.11 @ 9:22PM

In the Colburn v. Norquist debate, Colburn is right,
Norquist is an idiot, at best. If he were a foreigner, I would declare war on the bastard.

nike dunk sb| 6.25.11 @ 2:17AM

good blog!

Handy| 6.25.11 @ 7:13AM

This nation built itself without a lot of federal income taxes or federal spending.

Starve the pig. Shoot a tax collector.

Timothy L. Pennell| 6.25.11 @ 7:53AM

You're not understanding what he's saying.
He wants to "Nation Build", here. He wants to "Fundamentally Transform this Country".
JP brings up Germany and Japan. We Nation Built, in these two Countries. We Fundamentally Transformed them. How did we do this?
We DESTROYED what was already there, first.
Get the picture?