Obama Derangement Syndrome

[Griff]

Originally Posted by Brianna

I just watched a History channel show on the French Revolution. Yes, they went a bit overboard with the head chopping but it's still a fundamentally sound idea.

/smirk/

True nuf. The cool part is how the choppers get chopped as well. Anyone who was that committed to their politics was fair game. I'm good with that.

[classicman]

Ha Ha HAAAAAHHHH!! ! ! !!

[classicman]

Deception at Core of Obama Plans

Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.

All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.

The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:

"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

[Kaliayev]

Its amazing how Dr Strangelo....uh, Charles Krauthammer found his scepticism towards government again like that.

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by Zhuge Liang

Its amazing how Dr Strangelo....uh, Charles Krauthammer found his scepticism towards government again like that.

Yes, it's amazing, isn't it? Why, it seems like only yesterday that the right was telling us that to disagree with the president in wartime was treason, and that we - as Americans - "had better learn to watch what we say" (Thanks, Ari Fleischer, you little Nazi screwhead!).

And where has this urgent need for respect for our chief executive gone? At what point did the rules change? It seems that Krauthammer didn't actually respect the office he claimed was above reproach, but merely his party.

I love this decade.

[TheMercenary]

UTTTTT Oh. SO no gang rapes in the Olympic Training Center?

[sugarpop]

Well, neocons are much bigger hypocrites.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by sugarpop

Well, neocons are much bigger hypocrites.

Having read neocon essays -- surely more of them than you -- I disagree, quite.

You've been, you know, carefully taught, in the South Pacific sense. But you may actually get a chance to unlearn some of the bunk.

[classicman]

nah - they're just more obvious. A really good conman is much more dangerous. For example see Bernie Madoff.

[tw]

Originally Posted by classicman

A really good conman is much more dangerous. For example see Bernie Madoff.

... who was protected when an extemists dominated SEC refused to investigate Madoff tips from numerous whistleblowers. To continue as a conman, Madoff needed friends in the high places - the George Jr administration.

[classicman]

I was referring to the people he conned the money from. Thought that was rather obvious.

[sugarpop]

Well apparently he making a deal so his wife can keep the condo and the money. WTF?

[Aliantha]

Of course you disagree UG. lol

eta: you really crack me up. lol

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Well, inasmuch as Sugarpop has yet to express a view that didn't come out of the American academic left, she's... well, a pure and unmistakeable example. I think that's very ignorant, and that some worldly experience would do her thinking a world of good.

[classicman]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Well, inasmuch as my opinion has yet to express a view that didn't come out of the American academic far right, I'm... well, a pure and unmistakable(sic) example.

Does that shoe fit as well?