Obama has discovered the problem - America isn't worthy of him!

Posted 11/14/2011 06:52 PM ET

Leadership: We're starting to
grasp how hard a job the president has. It can't be easy to rule a
country filled with so many soft, lazy, greedy fat cats who can't make
good stuff anymore.

At a business forum Saturday, President Obama complained that "we've
been a little bit lazy over the last couple of decades." He apparently
meant we've let foreign investment go slack, since "we aren't out there
hungry, selling America and trying to attract new business into
America."

But this is just the latest slur against the United States uttered by its leader.

In October, Obama complained that "we have lost our ambition, our
imagination and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden
Gate Bridge." Earlier that month he groused that the U.S. "used to have
the best stuff" but doesn't anymore. In September he described America
as having "gotten a little soft."

And that's when he hasn't been complaining about greedy Wall Street executives who think they deserve to make a profit.

But calling America lazy is going too far.

First of all, foreign direct investment has more than tripled over
the past two decades. So it's hardly like businesses abroad haven't
noticed that the U.S. is a good place to invest.

And while the president might have been too busy writing
autobiographies to notice, the past two decades have shown an America
that is anything but soft or lazy. Since our president doesn't seem to
know about this, here's a quick review:

We
have invented, among many other things, an entirely new industry — the
Internet — that has reshaped almost every aspect of our lives, from
communication to education to medicine to commerce. Every great Internet
company — Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo — has been
born in the U.S.

We've produced incredible breakthroughs in science, medicine and
technology — everything from smartphones, DVDs, digital cameras and flat
panel TVs to the mapping of the human genome and spectacular new
medical technologies.

In the past two decades, we've managed to add more than two
additional years to our lives thanks to gains in medicine and health
care. And competitive forces have produced continued efficiency gains,
letting the country do more with less energy.

And even before Obama arrived on the scene, the nation managed to
defeat communism, mount a global war on terrorism, liberate Kuwait from
Iraq and then Iraq from Saddam Hussein — the latter two in a matter of
days.

You'd think the president would want to boast about a country that's
produced so much in so short a time. But when Obama looks out his Oval
Office window, he apparently sees a nation filled on the one hand with
layabouts — or, as his wife described them during his presidential run,
the "uninvolved and uninformed" — and on the other with greedy, selfish
millionaires and billionaires.

Maybe Obama is mistaking his own experience as president for some broader trends.

It's certainly true that many things have gotten worse since he took
office. Unemployment is up, earnings are down. The poverty rate has
climbed, the dollar has fallen. Gas prices are way up but housing prices
are way down. And the economic recovery, which started a mere five
months after Obama was sworn in, has been the most anemic since the
Great Depression.

But despite Obama's endless efforts to shift blame, the fault for
these trends lies not with the American people or the actions of his
predecessors. It lies with Obama's own wrongheaded efforts that have
vastly expanded the size and intrusiveness of government, weighed the
country down with massive debt and threatened ever higher taxes.

Americans don't need lectures from their president about how soft,
selfish or shiftless they've become. We need only to relieve the country
of his policies.