Yesterday, President Barack Obama gave the commencement address to the graduating class of Ohio State University at Ohio Stadium in Columbus, Ohio.

During his speech, he said,

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.

We have never been a people who place all our faith in government to solve our problems. We shouldn’t want to. But we don’t think the government is the source of all our problems, either. Because we understand that this democracy is ours. And as citizens, we understand that it’s not about what America can do for us, it’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government. And class of 2013, you have to be involved in that process.

Let’s translate this, shall we?

 Don’t believe the haters. They are just jealous of my wonderful plan to radically change America into a Socialist paradise, where we will “share the wealth”…

“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Do not pay attention to the new media. Instead, hang on every word of my friends in the Main Stream Media. After all, the truth is highly overrated. 

This is not a sovereign nation , established by Christian men seeking Freedom of Religion, through an escape from tyranny. The Constitution is not relevant anymore. It is a fluid, changing document, subject to revision, in order to keep up with changing cultural mores, and the political plans of the present Administration. America is not the “shining city on a hill”. It is an “experiment”, And, You are all my lab rats.

Trust me and my Administration. We are smarter than every other American Administration in history. Working in the Dog Eat Dog Capitalist System is is for the birds. Come and work  for our ever-growing Federal Government. or, better yet, become a part of  “the 47%”. Baracky Claus knows what’s best for you. 

Now, compare what Obama told those young people, full of hope and potential, to these excerpts from Ronald Reagan’s famous speech, “A Time for Choosing”, given as a stump speech, at speaking engagements, and on a memorable night in 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign:

It’s time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, “We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government.”

This idea — that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power — is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man’s age-old dream–the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, “The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.”

The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.

Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, “What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power.” But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.

Yet any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we’re denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals. It seems impossible to legitimately debate their solutions with the assumption that all of us share the desire to help the less fortunate. They tell us we’re always “against,” never “for” anything.

…Are you willing to spend time studying the issues, making yourself aware, and then conveying that information to family and friends? Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? Realize that the doctor’s fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can’t socialize the doctors without socializing the patients. Recognize that government invasion of public power is eventually an assault upon your own business. If some among you fear taking a stand because you are afraid of reprisals from customers, clients, or even government, recognize that you are just feeding the crocodile hoping he’ll eat you last.

If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what’s at stake. We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars. There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability within the United States. Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right. Winston Churchill said that “the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits–not animals.” And he said, “There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.

Obama’s speech to those O.S.U Graduates was disingenuous, given his Presidential Track Record of Executive Orders, signing unwanted bills into laws against the wishes of the American People, and his self-centered temper tantrums we have witnessed when things do not go his way. Contrast that with the marvelous, uplifting oratory of Ronald Reagan, an American Leader who spoke of a hopeful future, of American Freedom,Entrepreneurship,and Exceptionalism, and of the courage and worth of average Americans.

I wish we had a leader like Ronald Reagan, today.

Until He Comes,

KJ