President Barack Obama is not famous for a stoic ability to take any amount of criticism, let alone the level heaped upon anyone who is fortunate enough to win the job he has and wanted. So it really comes as no surprise that he used his commencement speech at the University of Michigan today to address his critics instead of the graduates. The surprise, albeit a mild one, was that he tried to use the founding principles of the country to do it.

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While acknowledging that debates about the size and role of government are as old as the republic itself, the president said he was troubled "when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad. For when our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it conveniently ignores the fact in our democracy, government is us." To paraphrase another president who loves to play word games, that depends on what your definition of us is. (source)

While it's true that the first words of our founding document are "We the People of the United States," Candidate Obama proudly declared five days before he was elected president, "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." (watch the video) In the 18 months since, President Obama and his cronies have done everything they could to keep that promise. They have not presided over a government that is, in President Lincoln's immortal words, of the people, by the people and for the people but rather one that seeks to divide the people, demonize the people and disregard the people's opinions.

So when American citizens speak of government as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, we are not speaking of the government defined in the US Constitution. We are not speaking of the government of, by and for the people. We are not even speaking of the current government under the Obama administration. We are speaking of a government that with every speech and every federal power grab disguised as comprehensive reform is getting closer to that fundamentally transformed United States of America. And that government is definitely not "us".