More on 'Who Built That'

Since Barack Obama and his supporters seem determined to pretend that he said something different than what he said, let me share two items that relate: the first is a recent comment about it from Charles Krauthammer on Fox News; the second is to watch for yourself the entire video of the speech put out by the Obama team itself.  Decide for yourself what he meant.

From Special Report with Bret Baier | Wednesday, July 25, 2012

On whether Republicans can still make use of President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” remark:

"Yes, because it was the ultimate gaffe. It betrayed what he really believes. And in context you can see [it] because he elaborates on this. It isn’t one thing that slipped out. I think the RNC, Romney ought to run… the whole context, run the whole thing in an endless loop until the end of time or at least until the election, which seems about the same length of time.

But it is so damming. For Obama to go in that [new] ad and say: what I meant is we have to support — we have to get behind — success. I would play that and then just show him beginning his ["you didn't build that"] remarks [by] mocking success and saying: “You think you’re so smart, that it was your intelligence? You think it was your hard work?”

In other words, he was saying — in introducing the whole ["you didn't build that"] idea — that if you succeed, it wasn’t your brains or your sweat. It was what? It was government.

That’s what he believes. It’s the essence of his philosophy of society — that it is government centered, whereas the conservative, Republican idea essentially is individual-centered. It is a contrast that is… very clear. And because it’s so revealing, Obama has to keep pretending he said something else.

He didn’t. All you have to do is watch the tape, read the transcript."

And here it is:



And from Jay Nordlinger of National Review Online comes this to put a point on it:

A reader whose father-in-law was a dissident in the Soviet Union makes the following observation:

“When the Soviets denied people the right to emigrate to America or Israel, they often said, ‘The State has educated you, so your know-how is State property. It does not belong to you.’ These people had not built themselves, so to speak. The State, in its benevolence, had built them, and it had a right to all they produced.”