The Bus Stops Here

Greyhound One, they’re calling it; or Bus One.  Obama has taken to the campaign trail early, both to save his struggling current presidency and pave the way for 2012.

Greyhound One is an ironboound, armorplated, blacked-out behemoth, much like his Obamacare package that was steamrolled through Congress.  There is no transparency in Greyhound One.  Not that you’d expect him to ride in a clear-windowed vehicle any more than Pres. Kennedy should have been driving (against his wife’s wishes and his astrologer’s warning) in an open limousine through Dallas in November of 1963.

Bus One, however, is the perfect allegorical symbol of Obama’s “transparent” presidency.  He only rides in it for show, no one can see what’s inside, and it looks like a very long tank.  Diesel buses are also notorious polluters.  They’re efficient in the long run, but like the fluorescent bulbs, they waste enormous amounts of energy getting started, so it’s easier to just leave them running.

Once the bus stopped in Decorah, Iowa, Obama’s mitigating speeches to Iowa’s moderates about reforming entitlement programs did nothing to soothe the founder of Iowa’s Tea Party, Ryan Rhodes.  Rhodes demanded to know whether he agreed with his vice president that Tea Party activists were comparable to terrorists.

According to Fox News, Obama did not directly answer the question.  Instead, he fired back that he knows better than anyone what it’s like to be slammed for his political views and was not about to accept a lecture on the topic.

“Now, in fairness, since I’ve been called a socialist who wasn’t born in this country, who is destroying America and taking away its freedoms because I passed a health care bill, I’m all for lowering the rhetoric," Obama said.

Obama did say he would discuss the matter further with Rhodes after the event. And the duo was spotted in an animated conversation a few moments later.   Rhodes later told Fox News that the president denied that the vice president ever made such a statement.

Rhodes said. “If he doesn’t want to even admit what was on TV nationally -- all over the place -- then how can you have a conversation?”

Fox News says, “The incident stems from a private meeting Biden attended, at the height of the debt ceiling debate, with House Democrats who were angry that Republicans were not meeting the president halfway. One lawmaker, Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Pa., went so far as to say that Republicans affiliated with the Tea Party had behaved like “terrorists” during the debate.

“Some Democrats familiar with the meeting said at the time that Biden had appeared to agree with the sentiment expressed by Doyle and others as a way of moving the conversation along and convincing Democrats to support the final compromise. But Biden himself denied to CBS News that he had uttered the word ‘terrorist’ in the meeting in the context of the Tea Party.”

Rhodes added that Obama brushed him aside. “Then he said, ‘We can't have a conversation because you're saying I called you a terrorist,’” recalled Rhodes. “The fact is it demonstrates the deep divide that he is unwilling to negotiate without going after the other side. The whole day was about going after Republicans and talking about how unreasonable they are.”

The private conversation between Rhodes and Obama was partially picked up by a TV camera, but the audio was tough to make out. Obama in general seemed to be saying the incident with Biden was misconstrued and that if Rhodes wanted to insist that the word “terrorist” was used then they were never going to see eye-to-eye.

Obama may not have called us “terrorists” but he and his own “lackeys” have called us just about every other colorful metaphor in the propaganda book to discredit Conservatives and convince uncertain Moderates that the Liberals want only the best for the country, while Conservatives are guilty of “brinksmanship” – that is, playing chicken with the economy.

The black, armor-clad bus is a sign that the bus will not stop here, there or anywhere and will run over any obstacle on its way to establishing progressive socialism as the United States’ de facto form of government.