Like It Is

Remember that great scene in “Bridge on the River Kwai” where Alec Guinness discovers the plot to blow up the bridge, and says, “What have I done?” before he and a couple of the plotters are killed?

I want you to clip this column and tuck it away somewhere for future retrospection because I predict we’ll see something like that a couple of years down the road if Barack Obama is president.

The “What have I done?” will be voiced by the American people.

Because if Barack Obama pursues the agenda he has been voicing for the past two years and he has substantial majorities in the House and Senate, this is what we are facing:

With his stated goal to “strengthen the ability of workers to organize unions,” he is a co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would eliminate the secret ballot in union organizing elections.

All union officials would have to do is collect signed union authorization cards from a majority of employees at a work site.

The minimum wage, which is set to rise to $7.25 an hour in 2009 would be set to rise to $9.50 per hour by 2011 and be indexed for inflation.

He would have provided tax rebates of $500 per worker or up to $1,000 per family to encourage consumer spending.

Individuals making more than $200,000 per year would have a 10 percent hike in taxes. The same for families making more than $250,000.

Those making less would receive tax credits, including those who pay no income tax at all.

The share of Americans who pay no income tax would rise from the current 38 percent to 48 percent.

He will be working on unilaterally rewriting the North American Free Trade Agreement if Canada and Mexico aren’t going along with his ideas on labor and the environment.

As of Jan 1, 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency will have classified carbon as a dangerous pollutant under current clean air laws.

That would impose new regulations and taxes across the entire economy, something considered Congress’s territory.

The EPA would be monitoring carbon emissions of everything from cars, planes and boats to lawn and garden equipment.

The “fairness doctrine” (vetoed by Reagan) would be restored by forcing radio stations to give equal time to liberal response to conservatives’ talk radio shows.

Obama has promised to cut 15 percent of the Pentagon’s budget in favor of “education, health care, job training, alternative energy development, world hunger and deficit reduction.”

Also, to slow development of future combat systems and not develop new nuclear weapons. Biden says the same about “Star Wars.”

Openings on the Supreme and federal courts would be filled with “somebody who’s got the empathy to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom.

“The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

Reparations? Obama has said it needs to be done also in the area of help in education and health expenses.

I have heard him several times promise that when he’s president, “I am going to go over the budget page by page and line by line.”

I, not we.

That would take at least a year or two per budget. When you consider he slept through 20 years of hate sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he’ll probably fall asleep on this job too.

If Obama is not president, I’d suggest a huge sigh of relief.

If he is, what have we done?

Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.