The line that will, deservedly, haunt Barack Obama forever is getting center-stage treatment at the Republican National Convention, which has designated the Tuesday evening session “We Built This!” The session is meant as a rebuke to Obama’s “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen” speech.
Among the featured speakers will be Sher Valenzeula, candidate for lieutenant governor of Delaware, and a small businesswoman who, along with her husband, “started an upholstery business that makes padding for baseball umpires and military vests worn by members of the Israeli military,” according to a Fox News report.
Small business owners have been using variations of “We Built This” as a battle cry ever since Obama denigrated them in his Roanoke speech. Deli owner Ross Murty catered an Obama event in Iowa last week wearing a T-shirt that said, “Government didn’t build my business, I did.”
Bakery owner Chris McMurray refused to allow Vice President Joe Biden to use his Virginia business for a photo op the next day, and said the reason was “very simply, ‘You didn’t build that.’” His bakery, called “Crumb and Get It,” experienced a massive surge of business from appreciative customers… including a few Secret Service agents, who reportedly told McMurray “Thanks for standing up and saying no” before buying cookies and cupcakes.
Murty and McMurray would be wonderful surprise guests for “We Built This” night, but if they can’t make it, the RNC should have no problem finding plenty of small business owners to take the stage. It would also be fun if the evening threw a spotlight on the more amusing attempts to spin Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech away. Some of them used very elaborate sentence diagramming techniques to assert that no credence should be given to the plain meaning of the conversational English words used by the Greatest Orator in History.
Why, there’s an entertaining example right in the Fox News report on “We Built This” night, which makes a pained effort to take the Obama campaign seriously: “Opponents have seized on the ‘you didn’t build that’ line in television ads, web videos, stump speeches and interviews, while the Obama campaign says the president meant business owners didn’t build roads and schools.”
Got that? Roads and schools aren’t built by businesses. They’re built by magical infrastructure fairies, which Obama releases from his horn of plenty as he rides past the construction site on his unicorn. The fairies work cheap, and their meager salary is paid with bills plucked from the dollar tree growing behind the White House.
