The Smiths and Joneses (5 page)

“It’ll have to be one at a time; it’s a two-seater. If you get sick in it, you buy me a new one.”

“I think we can agree to that.”

“Mr. President, we really want to thank you for your time in helping us put this special program together. I know first hand that you put in many hours ensuring this program is fair and truthful.”

              Sean asks, “Sir, to kick off the program, when you first heard about President Obsma wanting to form a new nation based on progressive theories what was your reaction?”

“I can’t say it on air; it might be insulting to our neighbors in the LSA. I, too, thought the question of secession was settled in the 1860s. I was wrong.”

“Mr. President, it’s been twelve years.  To be honest, when I first heard about it, I thought they wouldn’t survive two years.”

“Sean, my first reaction was to laugh. I laughed because I thought someone was pulling a joke on me. My second was to cry, cry because of the destruction of the United States of America. America isn’t just a country. America is a way of thinking. America is something that’s inside each and every one of us. America was set up so that everyone would have an equal chance. Everyone would be free; the freedom of our press was built into our founding documents. America is one of the few countries that has a change of government without bloodshed. Had America never won its freedom, the world would have become a very different place. Many of the freedoms we take for granted would never have happened. The French revolution most likely wouldn’t have happened if the American Revolution hadn’t succeeded. Without America, Germany would have won the First World War. Can you imagine what a world that would have been? There are many who’ve said America stole resources from the Native Americans, from the slaves and later the world. If anyone studies the real history, not a populist view, but the real history, they will learn none of these claims are true. America is a unique country. I couldn’t believe how far away from the country’s founder’s view the country had moved. When I heard about the LSA, I realized I was facing a worse decision than President Lincoln faced.

“Third I was worried what the overall impact would be to those left behind in the USA. If you remember, the Russians and Chinese had just dumped the American dollar, the stock market crashed, our real unemployment rate was over 20%. Our dollar was becoming worthless; jobs were disappearing at a faster rate than any other time in history.  There was a real chance we’d go to war with Russia and China. We might have to fight the LSA plus Russia and China. I assumed President Obsma would ally with them to oppose us. He would have given them bases to attack us from; most likely bases that used to be American military bases. The country was being defocused by the establishment of the LSA. It was a distraction we as a nation couldn’t afford. At first I thought this was a normal Obsma distraction for some other plan that we hadn’t seen yet.  My cabinet and advisors discussed the pros and cons for two long days. None of us slept in those initial 48 hours. I finally decided if we didn’t allow Obsma to try to set up his progressive nation we would end up with a very bloody civil war, one that would have destroyed the American dream. The second civil war would have ended up destroying both America and the LSA. We might have had the Russians and/or the Chinese join Obsma against us. If this happened, there was a good chance the civil war would turn nuclear destroying America and most likely, major areas of Europe, Russia and China, if not the world. I was faced with a decision of allowing Mr. Obsma to break the union or potentially watching hundreds of millions of people die. Which path would you have taken? To be fully honest, I didn’t think the LSA would last five years. I thought their expensive overhead would collapse their own system. Trying to create a new nation and do so in the middle of an international currency battle and potentially on the eve of World War 3, scared me. I decided to let the LSA go and try to form their own nation because my heart was broken thinking of families once again having to take the field of battle against each other. I couldn’t send boys and girls to fight their brothers and sisters. It’s one thing to send boys and girls to fight the nation’s enemies, but our own neighbors? Our own families? I studied the Civil War. Over 300,000 northern soldiers died. How many would die this time? We almost didn’t make it back from the brink the last time we fought each other. The various issues that developed at the end of the Civil War almost tore the country apart. To this very day, there are many people who think the Civil War was a mistake. One President Lincoln shouldn’t have fought. There are many in the south who still hold a grudge 162 years after the end of that war.

“In the founding of America, the states came together to form a central government. Some historians believe the states had the right also to secede from the central government. President Lincoln said he was moved by God to free the slaves. He had to go to war to save the nation. I felt I had to let the country split in order to save the nation. I could not imagine a war fought with todays weapons between neighbor and neighbor. Can you imagine one of our cities being bombarded by hundreds of rockets every day? Can you imagine one side using chemical or biological weapons against another of our cities? Wouldn’t a nuke soon follow? We’d be looking at the destruction of both the USA and the LSA. We’d be looking at over 100 million dead Americans. I couldn’t allow it. Those dead souls would be on my head. It was my decision to make; I made the only one I thought that had a chance of saving the country.”

Wolf responds, “Thank you Mr. President. I’m sure your insight helps answer the question that’s in many people’s minds and hearts. I, for one, think you did the right thing. I think had you fought; it would have been the end of America. We would have destroyed each other, and if we somehow survived the war, we would have hated each other for generations.”

Chapter 3

              Wolf pauses before adding, “Mr. President given what you just said, did you seriously consider using force to keep the union together?”

              “Wolf, I did, I decided not to because no one would have won. By the time Mr. Obsma was impeached, the country was so polarized right and left that neither side accepted anything the other side said or did. It would have taken a miracle to force the two sides to work and live together. A new civil war wouldn’t have been one just between two armies; it would have also included millions of armed civilians. The death rates in modern wars fought between trained armies has actually declined. A war fought between untrained civilians would have resulted in millions of deaths and injuries.”

              Sean picks up the discussion, “Mr. President, do you think there was a way to sit around a table and talk out the issues?”

“Sean, the media’s left bias was so pronounced that even if the right performed a miracle the press either wouldn’t have reported it, or they would have turned it around saying the left gave the right the background required. Had the media vetted Mr. Obsma like they did with any other candidate he would never have been elected, the country would have been completely different had he not been elected, we wouldn’t have had the nightmare we faced twelve years ago. The press decided he was their man. They protected him; they covered for him. They didn’t report anything negative about him. Take for an example the issue with his birth certificate. Anyone who knew anything about Adobe knew the birth certificate was made up. The press mocked those people. Even an Adobe expert was mocked by the media. The media were President Obsma’s not so secret weapon.

“Remember back when we as a nation suffered through the rollout of a nationalized health care that wasn’t ready to provide benefits. Months after people signed up and made their payments, they couldn’t get medical treatment. When they were able to get treatment they soon learned what a high deductible meant. People had to pay thousands before their insurance covered one penny of their coverage. In many cases, this left the poorest with less disposable income than they had before the nationalized health care system.  The very people the system was designed to help ended up being crushed by it.

“Mr. Obsma fought a war against the average American citizen; he closed coal mines and coal fired power plants which caused massive brown and black outs, while at the same time he ordered more electrical powered cars to be made, putting additional stress on the electrical grid. The EPA killed jobs at a faster pace than any other time in history. Food prices rose to their highest amounts in the country’s history and yet the media ignored all of it. Every negative reaction was blamed on someone else. No one in Mr. Obsma’s administration was adult enough to take or accept responsibility for any of their actions. They all came up in the educational system which believes in a perfect society where everyone was perfect, and everyone acted with respect to everyone else. The government could support everyone if only the rich paid a little more in taxes. The reality is the top 1% paid almost 60% of the taxes paid.

              “Our nation, on the eve of the LSA formation, was staring into the abyss. As a nation, we stood on one toe on the crumbling edge watching the nation on the verge of collapse. A war would have pushed us over the edge. We would never have been able to rebuild. The United Nations or the Russians would have allowed us to hurt ourselves seriously, and then they would have stepped in to protect us from ourselves. It would have been the end of America. The LSA wouldn’t have been born. It would have ended up being the end of the American dream.”

              Sean replies, “Mr. President, are you saying, President Obsma was working against the average American family?”

Before President Brownstone can reply, Wolf jumps in, “Mr. President, I don’t buy your argument. I think the plans President Obsma tried to pass would have helped the average American family if he hadn’t be fought at every turn by the Republicans and the Tea Party.”

“First of all, how can you use the title President when the Supreme Court has already ruled Mr. Obsma shouldn’t have been on the ticket, he shouldn’t have been elected? The court looked at the issue of the votes he received, the facts, yes let’s deal with facts, show that he should never have been allowed to be on the ticket. Wolf, if you think his policies were good for the country, which policies were good for the average family? The ones that increased their costs? The ones who destroyed the world’s best health care system? The ones that killed hundreds of thousands of jobs? The ones that put some animal ahead of water for farmers? Come on Wolf be honest. We agreed not to play normal politics with this program.  We could have saved hundreds of thousands of lost jobs and homes. We hopefully wouldn’t have passed multi-thousand page bills that no one read before passing. I’m surprised the outside authors of these massive bills didn’t sneak in a clause or two dismissing congress. We would have suffered through the President sending Congress home, and we might have avoided a financial war with Russia and China. Minot, North Dakota, would be standing, the thousands injured or killed would still be with us. The LSA wouldn’t have been born.

“The media acted as Mr. Obsma’s personal press department; they hid the dirt and reported anything he did as if it he was the second coming. The media carried Mr. Obsma’s water; they pushed his progressive agenda; they helped push his desire for both class and race wars. The media, and there I count you Wolf,  wanted violence, thinking the country would crack under the pressure, once cracked the people would have no choice but to beg the government to take care of them.

“Mr. Obsma opened the borders; he flooded the country with hundreds of thousands of people who didn’t speak English, who could only hold the minimum, basic job, if they could even get a job - jobs that could have gone to Americans begging for any job. They added to the drain already on the government’s entitlement programs. Mr. Obsma had a master plan to break the back of America so he could rebuild it in his own image. He ran the national debt up to $20.5 trillion, more money than existed in the world. While he spoke about pivoting to add jobs, his executive agencies like the EPA issued rules which increased companies’ mountains of paperwork, most of it in conflict with other agencies. The EPA alone issued thousands of pages of regulations that were never vetted by Congress.

“We went from a constitutional republic to a dictatorship. His simple act of sending Congress home should have been proof that he didn’t care about our traditions or our future.  He only wanted to expand his own power. He issued executive orders; he ordered his agencies to issue regulations that bound the country in mountains of red tape. He increased the taxes on the wealthiest to the breaking point while increasing entitlements so that 57% of the population, the population, not just citizens were on some sort of government program. The programs themselves often made no sense, he had the HUD offering mortgage assistance, but then he tightened the mortgage requirements so high that most single-family homes were purchased by corporations and rented out.

“By the time of Mr. Obsma’s impeachment, the labor rate was it’s lowest in 50 years, we had more than 101 million people unemployed while he kept the borders open to pull in additional illegals adding them to the labor force which was already bloated. Average wages fell year after year. Household incomes, home prices and net worth dropped more than 30%. Mr. Obsma kept his campaign promise to transform the country; it may have been the only promise he kept.

“By the time I took office the country was split. We were already
a
left and right. If I didn’t allow the LSA to become their own country, we would have been fighting each other in a bloody civil war. We had 300 million firearms in the hands of civilians before he confiscated them causing even more tension; we know now over 150 million firearms were never turned in.  These would have come out and been used against other civilians. Not many were trained in how to fight a war. I let the LSA leave to preserve the union and to save the lives of the citizens of both the LSA and the USA.