Count former congressmen Allen West among the Republicans aggrieved by the fact that mean bully President Obama won’t give them everything they want now that they’ve shut down the government.
In an interview with NewsMax’s Steve Malzberg yesterday, West said that the president is a “pathological liar” and acting like a “spoiled brat child” because American voters gave the president “everything he wanted” by electing him. Americans voting for Obama in democratic elections, according to West, is just like a parent who gives in to “a screaming, ranting child in the cereal aisle”:
The United States participated in a Pavlovian experiment. WE have been giving Barack Obama everything that he has wanted. We gave him a state senator position in Chicago, we gave him a U.S. Senate position out of the state of Illinois. Unproven, untested, no resume, we gave him the presidency twice. So, if you continue to reward bad behavior you’re going to get more of that bad behavior. And, Steve, you can go to any grocery store, you can see any parent that acquiesced to a screaming, ranting child in the cereal aisle, you’re going to get that every time you go to that cereal aisle.
Malzberg then went on a rant about how the president was raised “not by his parents but by political believers that surrounded him” so he doesn’t “view America the way you and I do” and therefore doesn’t mind “the hurt that he’s putting on people unnecessarily” during the GOP’s shutdown. West agreed, saying that the president has an “animus” toward the United States.
Later in the interview, the two discussed the deal that the Defense Department struck with the private charity Fisher House to pay death benefits to military families during the shutdown, which the Pentagon would reimburse after the shutdown ended. Yesterday, the issue became moot when President Obama signed a bill restoring the benefits during the shutdown.
West and Malzberg, however, claimed that Obama would refuse to sign the bill and West declared that the plan to contract out the death benefits to a private charity “is beyond a disgrace, it’s an outrage, it’s reprehensible, it’s disgusting, it’s despicable.”
But then West turned the issue around to claim that the “reprehensible” temporary private contracting of military death benefits was actually a “triumph” because it proved that “we don’t need to have this big, onerous government if Americans can step up to the plate and fix that which government refuses to do.”
“I guarantee you that there are many other ways that the American people can take care of each other instead of having this society of dependency, which is what Barack Obama wants,” he added.
What does that teach you about government? What does that teach you about the American citizen? We don’t need to have this big, onerous government if Americans can step up to the plate and fix that which government refuses to do. So, really, for me, this is a triumph of the indomitable American spirit and our benevolence toward our fellow American man and women and especially the families of our fallen, that we don’t need the government to do it. We’ll figure it out either way. I guarantee you that there are many other ways that the American people can take care of each other instead of having this society of dependency, which is what Barack Obama wants.
