When then-senator Obama said during the 2008 campaign that he feared his daughters might be “punished with a baby” if not properly schooled in contraceptive practices, he probably thought the statement would be regarded as self-evidently reasonable. Among some it might.
Obama’s public viewpoint on sex falls within what some call “lifestyle liberalism,” treating moral instruction on sex as private and strictly confining public instruction on it to limiting its undesired consequences (or punishments, if you like). As far as the state is concerned, the greatest fallout from a sexual mistake is not a lessening of innocence, self-worth, or ability to be faithful, but the creation of new life–the punishment a baby brings.
It’s not hard to see that this utilitiarian view of sex can lead one to an almost purely economic approach to sexual ethics. What costs me time, money, health, or mental anguish is a negative consequence of sex, and what does the opposite for me is good. Unfortunately, it’s hard to work out this calculus until after the deed is done.
Internalizing this view, and perhaps suffering “punishments” through trial and error, it’s further unsurprising that some people develop aversions to normally natural things–such as fertility and babies–especially when they prevent one from living the good life–or saving the environment.
This may explain Presdient Obama’s visible disbelief during a town hall meeting last Wednesday in Pennsylvania, when two audience members told him of their large families–one with seven children, the other with ten. The remarks came as Obama criticized owners of large SUVs and vans, implying they had only themselves to blame for high fuel costs.
Mention of the first large family induced in the President a surprised shrug and a smirk, and the second drew out an exasperated quip hinting at how sheltered Obama has been from an entire sector of American families:
It’s a great question. Can I just ask before I answer, though, is there some rule at Gamesa that you got to have a whole bunch of kids? I mean, you got 10 over here, you got seven over here. Golly.
April 11th, 2011 | 11:52 am
Wouldn’t charity incline one to simply think President Obama was used to the current norm in the U.S. of much smaller families?
April 11th, 2011 | 12:03 pm
Why wouldn’t large families not be responsible for the cost of transporting them? That is part of the cost of having large families. It is a choice to have a large family as much as it is a choice to have an abortion. I am not pro-abortion, but I find it hard to understand why we should keep gas prices low, so that the very few families that choose to have 7 or more children can afford to drive them.
April 11th, 2011 | 12:26 pm
Just because one has a large family that does not mean that there is more “transporting” going on. I think that is a broad generalization.
The bigger our family got the more we stayed home and chose our activities carefully and with great care to economy of travel.
We homeschool so there is even no added “burden” of transportation on a bus or carpool.
Most families that I know who have 1 or 2 children drive WAY more than large families.
Only children (more often) seem to be involved in numerous activities and need to be driven to friend’s homes, have “play dates” and eat out frequently.
Granted this is my experience and it may not be indicative of the world . . . but I take offense at Obama’s response.
“Golly”, which children does he suggest they get rid of?
I wonder if he even stopped to think how demeaning that response was to the families – especially the children?
April 11th, 2011 | 12:27 pm
I think the implication is that SUV owners are “to blame” for high gas prices and that gas prices would be lower if everybody drove smaller cars… and that it’s surprising to some segment of the population that ANYONE needs a car larger than a Cooper Mini.
I’ve heard similar blindness from folks in Manhattan regarding the cost of fuel—as most of them don’t drive, some blithely assert that it’s not a hardship, and that fuel prices should go upwards so that people use transit more. Nice idea, but it ignores the fact that transit doesn’t work in many places, and that food transportation requires fuel too. So higher fuel costs lead to higher food costs, which those self-righteous types then complain about. (Note that I do not say all or even most Manhattanites think this way, but the few who do are very vocal in their opinions.)
April 11th, 2011 | 12:28 pm
Call me crazy, but I’ve never met a working class American (who happened to be single) who DIDN”T take an “almost purely economic approach to sexual ethics.”
The singles with less-than-stellar incomes whom I’ve encountered work this calculus out well BEFORE “the deed is done.”
I’ve never met a working class single (of either sex) who didn’t consider everyday concerns like money, health, mental anguish, BEFORE they met a potential mate, WHILE they met them , as well as AFTER meeting them.
Then again, I’ve never met an American who voted for their president based solely on the candidate’s “public viewpoint on sex.”
April 11th, 2011 | 12:30 pm
Why wouldn’t large families not be responsible for the cost of transporting them? That is part of the cost of having large families. It is a choice to have a large family as much as it is a choice to have an abortion. I am not pro-abortion, but I find it hard to understand why we should keep gas prices low, so that the very few families that choose to have 7 or more children can afford to drive them.
It is because of comments like this that I do not feel any sympathy whatsoever when I hear of gay marriage “sob stories” about men and women who feel entitled to be cared for in their old age, despite a lifetime of having contributed exactly nothing to the care and well-being of the next generation’s worth of children.
Being cared for in old age is a “right”.
But caring for the children who ought to pay for it is a “lifestyle choice”.
April 11th, 2011 | 12:38 pm
I find it hilarious that we have 10 kids but most people in our neighborhood have two or three. Their houses are bigger, they drive SUV’s, Hummer’s, etc. Good thing for those people who will want low gas prices because evidently those of us who choose to have large families should be punished for it. God help us all.
April 11th, 2011 | 12:38 pm
Much has been made of the president’s statement on “punishment.” And yet more critics fail to supply the context. It’s not unlike the canard about pro-lifers being pro-life only till birth.
It’s important to remember the cultural burdens of many black women: dropout pregnant teen mothers with absent fathers. That’s a more real experience than the Crusades or Ayn Rand.
The president has said many good things about the duties and responsibilities of fatherhood. I’m inclined to give him a pass on a three-year-old remark taken out of context. That people keep returning to it (and not much else) is probably evidence Mr Obama is soundly pro-family, whatever his cultural baggage might be.
April 11th, 2011 | 12:38 pm
Obama’s family calls to mind the character Saladin Chamcha from Satanic Verses – a man who distances himself from the unhappiness and shame of his origins by embracing Englishness – Chamcha is more English than any native Englishman. In the same way, the First Family has to appear more perfect than any real family to make up for the fact that it stands alone, at least on Barry’s side – based on his experiences, at a fundamental emotional level family life is something he understands almost nothing about.
I’m trying to sincerely pray for our president’s conversion. It helps to think of him as a little kid who grew up in an insane environment, and is overcompensating will all his might. I think the people who have enabled and used him (Harvard, the Chicago machine, Acorn) are probably more culpable than Obama himself.
April 11th, 2011 | 12:59 pm
at a fundamental emotional level family life is something he understands almost nothing about.
This is beyond ridiculous. One part arm-chair psychologist, one part psychic Tarot card reader.
It helps to think of him as a little kid who grew up in an insane environment.
It certainly does “help” if ones conclusions are already pre-defined. Let’s just fill in the blanks where needbe now. I mean there’s no Bill Ayers reference even!!
April 11th, 2011 | 1:07 pm
I think people who have large families shouldn’t have to pay any taxes at all. President Obama should have said “thank you for your service to our country,” to those families. After all, their children will grow up and pay the social security to support all the old people who didn’t have any children, or only one. As we all know, soon there will be lots more older people than younger ones.
April 11th, 2011 | 1:11 pm
I watched that town hall meeting. Large families have heard these “Golly” comments so much that it is an instant turn off. But what’s more, Obama was not connecting or relating to the people there, instead deflecting the seriousness of their questions by trying to be funny, and at their expense. It seemed very unpresidential to me.
April 11th, 2011 | 1:31 pm
I doubt that Obama would have talked about being “punished with a baby” if he had known what would happen to Bristol Palin:
April 11th, 2011 | 1:37 pm
I hope all of these large families train their children to vote wisely.
Barack is out of touch with America, and he is smug about it.
April 11th, 2011 | 1:40 pm
This is about listening to what you want to hear, not trying to listen to what is being said.
I didn’t say that people have a right to care in their old age. Nor did I say it was wrong to have large families.
I don’t think Obama said it was wrong to have large families either. He said that large SUV and high gas consumption car are contributing to the cost. Can you explain to me how that is wrong? Yes some families have large families, but that is their choice and at least should be part of the consideration of having large families. Gas is going up, and people that have large families and large cars are going to feel that more than people with small families and small cars. Do you think the government should hold the price of gas artificially low because some people have large families?
April 11th, 2011 | 3:09 pm
Jim Jacobson:
You say: “I hope all of these large families train their children to vote wisely.
Barack is out of touch with America, and he is smug about it.”
It took me quite a long time to find even this statistic. In the United States, “28 percent of women ages 40 to 44 had three or more children, 4 percent had five or more and just 0.5 percent had seven or more.”
A family of 10 children is really quite remarkable, and quite rare, and I think it would be unusual for Obama, or almost anyone, not to bat an eye when told by a father or mother that they had 10 children.
I think many people here, not the least of them Kevin Staley-Joyce, are letting their personal animosity for Obama color their perception of his reaction to hearing these people had large families. I don’t think his reaction was at all negative.
April 11th, 2011 | 3:13 pm
Adam Shields wrote: I didn’t say that people have a right to care in their old age. Nor did I say it was wrong to have large families.
I don’t think Obama said it was wrong to have large families either. He said that large SUV and high gas consumption car are contributing to the cost.
***
And here I thought what he said was, “don’t I look good in Jimmy Carter’s sweater?”
Of course I was also responding to the overall tone and tenor of this discussion. Are babies a “punishment”? Are babies nasty little things you get as an unwanted price of having fun? Are they the same in kind as sexually transmitted diseases? Is it “bad” for people to have large families?
No, it is not bad to have large families. Children are our hope and our future. They are the ones we do everything for.
Everything we know, everything we have, is given to us because our ancestors gave these things to us. People whose ancestors built for them are people who flourish. People whose ancestors viewed “having fun” as life’s most important goals, are the people who mewl about how unfair life is – because their own family does not care enough about them to provide for them.
And now we see it working in the other direction: people want to be free to mistreat their spouse, ditch him or her for some “experience” that will feel good – without ever connecting their own behavior to the question of whether or not they will have kin who are honorable and decent and willing & able to care for them in their old age.
April 11th, 2011 | 3:32 pm
Blake, you are just making things up. Obama was not a talking about large families as punishment. He was talking about the cost of fuel to drive large cars. This post is putting together an animosity toward large families that has no basis in reality.
No one is talking about mistreating spouses or having kin to care for them in their old age as a results of the price of oil. And no one is talking about the government taking care of abandoned children. What seems to be suggested by the questions was the opposite. That because some people have large families the government should make sure oil prices are low so that large families can drive their families around. That is not the role of government. Government should not control the price of oil (nor do they). There are lots of things to blame on Obama. Making up stuff like “he hates large families” not only doesn’t make sense it detracts from actual issues.
April 11th, 2011 | 4:18 pm
Are babies a “punishment”?
It was unfortunate for Obama to use the word “punishment,” but for unmarried teenagers who accidentally get pregnant, babies are hardly “rewards.” Even if they keep them and love them, I think almost every parent of a young, unwed, pregnant daughter wishes the pregnancy had not happened. I have never heard of an unwed teenage girl saying, “Mom, Dad, I’m pregnant,” and her parents responding, “What a joy! God has blessed us with a grandchild!”
April 11th, 2011 | 4:47 pm
David Nickol wrote: I have never heard of an unwed teenage girl saying, “Mom, Dad, I’m pregnant,” and her parents responding, “What a joy! God has blessed us with a grandchild!”
There are two kids in our family tree who were born out of wedlock.
We don’t use language like that around them. The “punishment” for their parents’ irresponsible behavior is not their existence. Their existence is not a punishment.
If anything, the “punishment” for their parents’ irresponsible behavior is that they, the kids, are now forced to live without the stability, the commitment, and the economic resources they would have had, if their parents had behaved better.
But I suppose some people would say they should just be grateful not to have had their brains punctured.
April 11th, 2011 | 4:52 pm
GingerMan – Premise: family life is something one learns by experience over the course of years. Reviewing Obama’s bio, there’s simply no way he could have learned it, based on his spending his entire childhood being shuffled around, handed off, having various father figures come and go.No crystal ball or shrink’s coach is required to reach this conclusion.
So, if I’m wrong, it would seem to me that either my premise or my reading of Obama’s biography is wrong. The reach I’ll plead guilty to is thinking his life now is a reaction to his life as a child – that is a theory based on the dozens of families I do know, and how they view their families. There is an epidemic of seeing having a family as yet another item on a “See? I’m a Success!” checklist, consisting of 2 perfect children along with the perfect house and perfect career. It seems to fit, but I can’t know that.
While I do know that his early history has provided little opportunity to experience a stable, healthy family for any length of time – which is the only way to learn what I’m talking about – I do not know if, in fact, his current life is in reaction to this earlier lack. So, guilty as charged.
My goal is not to hate Obama, but to find a way to love him as a human being. His actions as President don’t make that task any easier.
April 11th, 2011 | 5:11 pm
“unmarried teenagers who accidentally get pregnant”? Are those the same unmarried teens who “accidentally” had sex? We are doing a grave disservice to our teens by continuing to allow society to reach them that sex without consequences is some sort of human right.
The fundamental purpose of sex is procreative and to not drill this into our children – and the idea that they should not be having sex at all until they are able to properly support all possible consequences – will only perpetuate the foolishly selfish and utilitarian notion of sex so on display in our culture, from the president on down.
April 11th, 2011 | 5:20 pm
Adam, you keep repeating this thing about people saying that government should keep gas prices low so people can afford to drive their large families around.
I don’t know who said that government should keep gas prices low. The objection is to the idea that those who have large families “just shouldn’t complain” if it’s expensive to drive their kids around because it’s “their fault” they have a large family and therefore, for some odd reason, they don’t have the “right” to be unhappy about something that we’re all unhappy about.
It’s treating large families like some kind of suspect choice that puts people at a disadvantage when they are then unhappy about negative circumstances, rather than what it is — a good thing, that does have its predictable burdens. “You made your bed now lie in it” responses are generally only appropriate when the leading circumstance is a *bad* choice. When it’s a good choice, people should get encouragement in their difficulties, not “what did you expect responses.
April 11th, 2011 | 5:23 pm
David, babies are neither primarily rewards nor punishments, since they are people. That’s the point. It’s not all about how someone feels about having a child — it’s also about the fact that a whole new person exists, and to refer to that person as a “punishment” to any degree is worse than unfortunate, it’s dehumanizing.
April 11th, 2011 | 6:40 pm
Pentamom, then what is the point of this blog? The issue is that a complaint was made about needing large vehicles to carry families with many children and the fact that Obama didn’t start with an assumption that it would be painful especially for large families is a result of him finding children ‘a punishment’.
That is a jump that is both unwarranted by the actual facts and the actual discussion. So the only other reason why people could be blaming Obama for high gas prices is that they think that Obama should be keeping the prices low.
I honestly haven’t felt the cost of the gas increase because I don’t drive much. And when we drive far, we drive a car with very good MPG. So no, I am not complaining about the cost of gas. I think it is good for the long term economy to have high gas cost. I would like to see it go up just a bit more actually. But in the short term it does hurt. And it will hurt the poor and those with large families the most. But the right response to that is not to complain about the President hating children.
April 11th, 2011 | 7:11 pm
Pentamom,
What I see here is Kevin Staley-Joyce taking Obama’s reaction to a father saying he had ten kids—a reaction most people would find humorous and inoffensive—and without any real justification, linking it to a 3-year-old, off the cuff, admittedly indefensible remark for the purpose of beating a dead horse, because a great many people here harbor personal animosity toward Obama and enjoy tearing him down as a person.
Granted, if someone did much the same thing with Bush and “Mission accomplished” or “Bring ‘em on” or “weapons of mass destruction,” I might be tempted to beat those dead horses myself.
April 11th, 2011 | 8:21 pm
I think that the high gas prices affect everyone, not just people with many children. The comment I read up there was ridiculous. Who wants high gas prices? I have NO children, and I certainly don’t want the gas prices to be high! Geez. Now, if I were married, I can assure you that I WOULD be open to a large family. There is nothing wrong with that. Most of my grandparents came from families with 10-18 kids. I certainly don’t regret that. What if one of their parents had decide to abort or not have my grandparent!? I wouldn’t be here.
April 11th, 2011 | 9:16 pm
David Nickol:
Having never met President Obama, I’ve never had the chance even to entertain personal animosity against him, and in the unlikely event I met him, I can assure that I’d do my best to repel it.
But I think it’s clear that this is not the reason for connecting the two statements in question here. An off the cuff remark can sometimes be a cleaner insight into a person’s belief than a prepared statement, and whether the early example is a dead horse or not, the new example hasn’t yet much been beaten around.
All that aside, you also say there’s no justification provided between Obama’s two statements here. The justification seems clear enough: Obama has stated and confirmed many times that his view on sex aligns with the sketch I noted, the point being that he’s being consistent from one point to the next. Both remarks are consistent with the governing philosophy of sex education he subscribes to.
If fuel costs are high, why not simply limit your family size? This question makes sense to some people more than others, as a matter of degree.
You also say Obama’s reaction was understandable and benign. I agree. But I think it differs from the instinctive reaction of someone more attuned to the variety of American family sizes.
April 11th, 2011 | 11:02 pm
If fuel costs are high, why not simply limit your family size? This question makes sense to some people more than others, as a matter of degree.
Kevin Staley-Joyce:
I found nothing in Obama’s words or in his facial expression that indicated his intended message was that if fuel costs are high, you should limit your family size. When the man says he has ten kids, Obama doesn’t say, “You should have fewer kids.” He says, “Well, you definitely need a hybrid van then.”
Apparently this is the first blog post to allege Obama is “out of touch with large families,” and it is now being echoed all over right-wing and pro-life sites. He attributes to Obama something that Obama did not say.
You say in your original post:
I didn’t see a “smirk,” and I heard a humorous remark, but I would in no way describe it as “exasperated.” I am not denying that is how things struck you.
April 11th, 2011 | 11:06 pm
Note that above when I say, “Apparently this is the first blog post . . . ” I am referring to the post I link to on Red State, not the post on First Things.
April 12th, 2011 | 4:31 am
Going off at a tangent but it amazes me that Americans think they have high gas prices. Try living in Europe. In the UK unleaded is £1.35 a litre. Converting to USD means gas is $8.32 a gallon. (1.35 x 3.785 x 1.63)
April 12th, 2011 | 6:02 am
I think that the high gas prices affect everyone, not just people with many children.
The self-employed who must drive (and small businesses that involve transportation) will be hit hard.
Poor people who work for a living will be hit hard.
But I suspect what Obama is really aiming at are the rural people, who have no public transportation option and who often have to drive greater distances to get where they are going. Obama has made no secret of his desire to see America urbanized – by coercion and by policy, since it’s plain that America will not be urbanized voluntarily.
April 12th, 2011 | 10:17 am
Obama has made no secret of his desire to see America urbanized – by coercion and by policy, since it’s plain that America will not be urbanized voluntarily.
They’ll have to pry the steering wheel from your cold, dead fingers?
Look, the structure of US residential development is highly impacted by both zoning laws and the massive subsidies for highway construction, so it isn’t as if we are living in some Randian libertarian paradise with respect to these public goods. It’s fine to argue against greater housing density, if you think it’s bad public policy, but try arguing a little better and wrapping yourself in the flag a little less.
April 12th, 2011 | 10:26 am
Blake,
Are you saying Obama is somehow deliberately raising oil prices to force the urbanization of America? If “Obama has made no secret of his desire to see America urbanized,” could you point to something he has said along these lines?
You say: ” . . . it’s plain that America will not be urbanized voluntarily”
The shift from rural to urban in the United States has been taking place since 1790!
April 12th, 2011 | 1:05 pm
austinn
“I think people who have large families shouldn’t have to pay any taxes at all. President Obama should have said “thank you for your service to our country,” to those families.”
Well actually they probably pay little or any taxes unless they are very high income. Ten kids is quite a few deductions.
As for the old harping on the ‘punishment’ line purposefully taken out of context by pro-lifers:
Look it’s pro-lifers themselves who use the punishment line…… More than a few times we hear pro-lifer endorsed politicians declare that they favor making abortion illegal ‘except for rape and incest’. Well why the ‘except’? The subtext is more than clear, “that’s what you get for having sex” is what is being said and the exception for rape victims is because they were forced against their will. For a generation now the abortion debate has mired itself in tiresome games of linguistic ‘gottcha’. You don’t have to ‘hate babies’ to see that in many circumstances having a baby is not a good idea, it is in fact a very bad idea for both mother and child. That doesn’t mean you have to agree that abortion is a legitimate answer but pretending pregnancy anywhere and everywhere is always a great thing is just being stupid. The right has really gone way down hill since the days of even Dan Quayle.
In terms of large families:
Err ten kids is a lot. It’s a lot today, it was a lot in 1950 (around when Groucho Marx said to a guest on his show who had something like ten kids “I like cigars too but I take it out of my mouth once in a while!”) it’s even a lot in developing countries where large families are the norm. A bit of good natured ribbing is not hostile or sinister unless you insist on approaching obama from the POV that he’s some type of evil one.
In terms of SUV’s, well look vehicles that burn more gas do increase the cost of gas. Now when you’re moving a lot of people around, the equation changes because the gas burned per person goes down. It’s a lot more efficient to pack ten people into one big vehicle to drive them somewhere than it is to use three or four smaller vehicles. Trains and busses work on this principle.
Very few gas guzzlers, though, are due to ‘large families’. They are small families or even individuals who are engaging in what is probably gratuitious personal consumption…i.e. gluttony. On the contrary, most SUV owners are no friends to the family with ten children, all they are doing is making it that much harder for that large family to make ends meet. Yet because your partisanship blinds you, you make that undebatable truth into a convoluted plea for Obama to….what get people to have lots of abortions so there’s plenty of gas for him to enjoy driving big SUV’s by himself? Yea ok….
April 12th, 2011 | 1:09 pm
David, I do not know what Obama’s goals and thoughts are re: energy policy. He might be genuinely unaware of the impact his policies have on people. He certainly does not seem to care overmuch.
In all probability, his goals are probably environmental. Of course, environmentalism amounts to a redistribution of wealth, from the poor (who lose access to jobs and resources) to the wealthy (who gain pretty landscapes and smug self-satisfaction).
But, yes, I am not the first person to notice that he supports policies that punish suburban and rural people and thus “encourage” urbanization.
April 12th, 2011 | 2:03 pm
Interesting comment Blake.
How many billions of dollars in the stimulus package when to highways versus public transportation?
April 12th, 2011 | 3:10 pm
Let’s take on the issue with SUV’s. For the most part SUV’s hurt the poor in that they raise gas prices. In the very rare cases of huge families, SUV’s are helpful since they allow more people to be moved about for a given gallon of gas.
But the very large family is not the norm, it’s not even a normal adnormal. As was pointed out above, only 0.4% of women 40-44 had 7 or more kids (and of course some of them no doubt had kids widely spaced apart rather than all at once). In other words, there are probably more gay people than people raising 10 kids and as I pointed out while it doesn’t make raising so many kids easy, there’s some pretty serious tax subsidies to it.
But almost all poor families aren’t raising ten kids, they are working hard to deal with just one, two or three and for them most SUVs are not about helping families with even more kids than they have to deal with, most SUV’s are about people with the same or fewer kids raising the price of gas for everyone else. For the better off this doesn’t matter. I’ll drive about as much at $4.00 a gallon as I do at $3.00. For the poor this matters a great deal.
In terms of ‘forced urbanization’, there’s no there there. Obama put billions into highways which helps rural and suburban areas more than urban ones. The stimulus package lowered payroll taxes which goes further in rural areas where the cost of living is lower. Even the Cash for Clunkers program tends to benefit more the non-urbanite. Poor people who live outside of cities tend to have low end used cars. Poor people in urban areas often can get by without a car. C4C gave no one a bonus for buying a bus or subway pass. In the meanwhile it’s the Republicans who keep pushing for cuts in the estate tax and upper income brackets which overwhelmingly benefits the urban or near urban rich…..talk of ‘family farms’ and such aside.
This is all pretty remarkable when you consider the fact that many rural areas are almost solidly red no matter what Obama does so politically there’s no particular reason for him not to be fully anti-rural and pro-urban. Instead all you have to cling to is seeking out the most minor of slights (ohhh he must hate huge families…..as if The Walton’s is an accurate illustration of the typical rural family today)
April 12th, 2011 | 3:39 pm
Blake,
I have no idea what it is about Obama’s energy policies that you seem to object to. It is not as if he can raise and lower the price of oil or gas by fiat. He gave a lengthy explanation of what could and could not be done about the price of oil. What is it you find fault with?
April 12th, 2011 | 6:16 pm
I have no idea what it is about Obama’s energy policies that you seem to object to.
In the context of this post, it was “Presdient Obama’s visible disbelief during a town hall meeting last Wednesday in Pennsylvania, when two audience members told him of their large families–one with seven children, the other with ten. The remarks came as Obama criticized owners of large SUVs and vans, implying they had only themselves to blame for high fuel costs.”
Though honestly, I rather like Obama going on about Pennsylvania’s “bitter clingers” – this time whining about gas costs. As I said before: he looks good in Jimmy Carter’s sweater
/snark
April 12th, 2011 | 7:36 pm
So it seems Blake seems to think having ten kids is an ‘energy policy’. Well actually being surprised that two people have families of 7 to 10 kids is in itself an ‘energy policy’. Or it’s a rural policy, even though as a general rule rural people don’t have 7-10 kids…..
In other words, his criticism is devoid of substance….yet I suspect he probably expects to be treated as though he’s full of substance. I’m perfectly happy to treat him as if he is full of a particular substance…..but I’ll leave it to everyone else to guess what that substance is.
April 13th, 2011 | 9:28 am
So it seems Blake seems to think having ten kids is an ‘energy policy’.
No, honestly, I think that the people I was arguing with are apparently so unfamiliar with the policies I was talking about that it is not worth the time and effort needed to explain how Obama’s policies impact energy prices and/or rural or suburban people.
April 13th, 2011 | 11:03 am
Curious, you’re the only one here who asserts he is talking about a set of policies but is unable to actually cite a single policy…despite requests that you do so. Perhaps we are all really stupid people who just don’t know what you’re talking about. Or perhaps it’s you who doesn’t know what you’re talking about.
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