I think I understand the English language fairly well, having a teaching major in secondary language arts. I understand hyperbole, sarcasm, wit, and several other niceties of the American idiom. What I don’t understand is how the leader of this country can make the kind of statements he has made and do what he has done this past week and give him any credibility.

For example…"The other party spent a decade driving the economy into the ditch..now they want the car keys back. They can't have them back. They don't know how to drive," the president told a crowd at a grassroots fundraiser in Missouri for Senate hopeful Robin Carnahan. The same day he blasted Republicans over their attacks on runaway Washington spending, saying that the debt and deficit are one of the things that keeps him up at night. Look in the mirror, Mr. President. That should scare you out of sleep altogether with your wild spending sprees.

"It's a little odd getting lectures on sobriety from folks who spent like drunken sailors in the last decade," said the president. How disingenuous.

Even his own administration projected the national debt this year to rise to $14-trillion and in 2013 wind up at $17.1-trillion dollars – very close to matching the size of the entire economy as measured by the projected Gross Domestic Product. And taxpayers will be paying hundreds of billions in interest on the debt each year.

The President’s current budget, which carries the title "A New Era of Responsibility," shows that at the end of ten years, the national debt will hit $23.1-trillion dollars – exactly matching the GDP that year.

In the second fundraiser in Kansas City, the president also sharpened his attacks on the GOP's economic policies "They are peddling that same snake oil that they've been peddling for years and somehow they think you will have forgotten that it didn't work," he said.

On another subject, liberals have had a field day castigating Sarah Palin for her comments about “death panels” under Obama-Care.

Yet this past week, the President used the two week congressional recess to appoint Dr. Donald Berwick to head the agency that oversees the Medicare and Medicaid bureaucracies. Wait two weeks for a Senate hearing on the man…is that too much to ask?

Apart from the financial entanglements that trouble those lawmakers whose questions were effectively muzzled by President Obama's end run around the "advice and consent" of the Senate is Dr. Berwick's stance on euthanasia.

In an article published in 1994 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Berwick opined, "Most metropolitan areas in the United States should reduce the number of centers engaging in cardiac surgery, high-risk obstetrics, neonatal intensive care, organ transplantation, tertiary cancer care, high-level trauma care, and high-technology imaging."

Provocative statements such as that would assuredly have been read back to Berwick by Republican Senators who would have demanded an explanation. It would have been an impressive demonstration of rationalizing gymnastics to listen to Berwick justify how a man intended to manage the healthcare of millions of elderly Americans wrote that he thinks government rationing of life-critical services is the answer to the so-called healthcare crisis.

Given the President's fondness for naming czars, how long will it be before Dr. Donald Berwick is styled the "rationing czar?" In light of his notions of who will and who won't receive medical care, will the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services be transformed into the "death panel" for the poor and elderly? Will the "rationing czar" be empowered to pull the plug in the name of cost-effective rationing?

The executive director of the National Right to Life organization, David Osteen, described Berwick as a "one-man death panel."

"President Obama's appointment of this open advocate of rationing to implement his health care law underlines the need for repeal before untold numbers of vulnerable Americans suffer death from denial of life-saving treatment," Osteen observed.

I am so tired of seeing this President of ours continue to campaign with nonsense as the basis of his rhetoric and use subterfuge to appoint a bean-counter who may very well make life and death decisions for many of us.

Language should mean something. With Obama, it doesn't seem to.

Ed Hahnenberg

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