Obama has openly declared his plans to transform America; we can't say that we weren't warned

President Obama on Tuesday declared for all the world to hear that he won't rest until our country has been remade in the image of the European Union.

You know, that worker's paradise of freedom and entrepreneurship.

That place where the health care is free, if you can get an appointment.

That place with a bureaucracy that rivals the one found in Terry Gilliam's dystopic masterpiece Brazil.

Charles Krauthammer summarizes Obama's bold plans:

(1) Obama wants to be to universal health care what Lyndon Johnson was to Medicare. Obama has publicly abandoned his once-stated preference for a single-payer system as in Canada and Britain. But that is for practical reasons. In America, you can't get there from here directly.
Instead, Obama will create the middle step that will lead ultimately and inevitably to single-payer. The way to do it is to establish a reformed system that retains a private health-insurance sector but offers a new government-run plan (based on benefits open to members of Congress) so relatively attractive that people voluntarily move out of the private sector, thereby starving it. The ultimate result is a system of fully socialized medicine. This will likely not happen until long after Obama leaves office. But he will be rightly recognized as its father.
(2) Beyond cradle-to-grave health care, Obama wants cradle-to-cubicle education. He wants far more government grants, tax credits and other financial guarantees for college education -- another way station to another universal federal entitlement. He lauded the country for establishing free high school education during the Industrial Revolution; he wants to put us on the road to doing the same for college during the Information Age.
(3) Obama wants to be to green energy what John Kennedy was to the moon shot, its visionary and creator. It starts with the establishment of a government-guided, government-funded green energy sector into which the administration will pour billions of dollars from the stimulus package and billions more from budgets to come.

The America he leaves behind at the end of his term will be nothing like the one any of us have known.