Exclusive: Herman Cain presents compelling, irrefutable facts about country --WND





The real State of the Union

Posted: January 25, 2010
1:00 am Eastern
© 2010

We already know that the president will deliver an eloquent State of the Union address filled with exaggerated accomplishments and some not-so-subtle blame-Bush references. Whereas the president must try to be as optimistic as possible, we must also be realistic about the state of the union through the voice of the people, because problems do not fix themselves.

Assessments of the state of our union will prompt different opinions by different people. The majority party in control of Congress and the White House will tend to be overly optimistic, while the minority party will tend to be more pessimistic about the health of the nation. And there are plenty of selective statistics out there to try and make one's desired political case.

But consider some of the compelling and irrefutable facts about our country:

War is never good but sometimes necessary. But it breaks my heart every time I hear of another casualty in Afghanistan or Iraq, and not feeling confident that the administration has done all it can do to give them what they need to defend us and themselves. That includes the timing of decisions and the decisions themselves.

We have spent billions on homeland security since 9/11, along with millions on commissions, studies, recommendations and changes among and between our intelligence agencies. It is then not too comforting to be told by the president and the heads of those respective agencies that they dropped the ball, and failed to connect the dots with the attempted Christmas 2009 terrorist attack of a commercial passenger jet. I don't feel real safe yet.

The Social Security system is headed for bankruptcy, and neither the president nor Congress is doing anything about it. Instead, they have focused their attention on passing another big new bureaucracy around health care which is destined to be a disaster in the future.

Medicare began paying out more than it is collecting from the Medicare tax this year, yet the president and the Senate proposed to cut nearly $500 billion from the program and promised no cuts in services and no rationing. We are not stupid.

The national debt has increased nearly $4 trillion in President Obama's first year, which equals the increase in the national debt in all eight years of the Bush administration. To say that spending is out of control is an understatement. It is embarrassing that the value of the U.S. dollar is now less than the Canadian dollar and the European euro for the first time in history. We cannot spend our way to prosperity.

While analysts disagree on when the recession started, they at least agree that we are in one now. Similarly, analysts disagree on when we will be out of this recession and whether it will be a V-shaped, W-shaped or U-shaped recovery. Unemployed Americans and businesses just want a real recovery instead of inaccurate claims by the administration that the recovery is underway, or a $787 billion stimulus bill that did not work. But they want us to believe that it is working and will eventually get better. Right!

This country does not have an energy independence strategy. It starts with utilizing all of our own natural resources, but their exploration and development have been blocked by this administration and Congress at every turn. We do not have to go broke to go green. Without a strategy, we become increasingly more vulnerable to oil-producing countries who are not necessarily our friends.

New threats to our livelihoods and liberties are unprecedented by this president and Congress with proposed legislation. The good news is that "We the People" are waking up and fighting back. Just consider the latest gubernatorial results in Virginia and New Jersey in November 2009, and the most recent upset victory by Senator-elect Scott Brown in Massachusetts.

These are the facts, and I invite you to draw your own conclusions about the real state of the union. But there are some encouraging signs of late that are good news. We the people are still in charge of this country.

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=123028