…with the nation already plunging deep into probably necessary debt to rescue the crippled financial system and stimulate the economy, Obama’s proposals for many hundreds of billions in additional spending on universal health care, universal postsecondary education, a massive overhaul of the energy economy, and other liberal programs seem grandiose and unaffordable.
With little in the way of offsetting savings likely to materialize, the Obama agenda would probably generate trillion-dollar deficits with no end in sight, or send middle-class taxes soaring to record levels, or both.
All this from a man who told the nation last week that he doesn’t “believe in bigger government” and who promised tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans.
All this from a man who believes in the audacity of lies. I just don’t understand, though, how ostensibly smart people like Stuart Taylor let themselves be so willingly bamboozled.:
I still hold out hope that Obama is not irrevocably “casting his lot with collectivists and statists,” as asserted by Peter Wehner, a former Bush aide and a leading conservative intellectual now with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in Commentary magazine’s blog Contentions.
And I hope that the president ponders well Margaret Thatcher’s wise warning against some collectivist conceits, in a 1980 speech quoted by Wehner: “The illusion that government can be a universal provider, and yet society still stay free and prosperous…. The illusion that every loss can be covered by a subsidy. The illusion that we can break the link between reward and effort, and still get the effort.”
Unfortunately, hope has no power, though it was a powerful enough message for the mindless to get him elected.
[Update a few minutes later]
Neither moderate not centrist:
A couple of implications here are worth noting. The first is that a deep, recurring pattern of American life has asserted itself yet again: the cluelessness of the elite.
Buckley, Gergen and Brooks all attended expensive private universities, then spent their careers moving among the wealthy and powerful who inhabit the seaboard corridor running from Washington to Boston. If any of the three strolled uninvited into a cocktail party in Georgetown, Cambridge or New Haven, the hostess would emit yelps of delight. Yet all three originally got Obama wrong.
Contrast Buckley, Gergen and Brooks with, let us say, Rush Limbaugh, whose appearance at any chic cocktail party would cause the hostess to faint dead away, or with Thomas Sowell, who occupies probably the most unfashionable position in the country, that of a black conservative.
Limbaugh and Sowell both got Obama right from the very get-go. “Just what evidence do you have,” Sowell replied when I asked, shortly before the election, whether he considered Obama a centrist, “that he’s anything but a hard-left ideologue?”
The elite journalists, I repeat, got Obama wrong. The troglodytes got him right. As our national drama continues to unfold, bear that in mind.
Let’s hope they won’t get fooled again.
Have you ever noticed the odd fact, that being a corrosively cynical old-school right-wing paranoid makes you right more often than any other approach?
It reminds me of that speech about Poland that Susan Sontag made back in the early eighties that had her fellow leftists up in arms about: who would have been better informed about communism — someone who read only The Nation, or someone who read only Readers Digest? She averred the latter.
The problem is that in this case, the “won’t get fooled again” realization may have come too latel
There was no “turn” to the Left. Didn’t they notice his Senate voting record? Or his State Senate voting record? Or the people he considered close friends and confidants?
He was always Left. But now they choose to see.
Back when everyone still assumed Hillary would be the nominee and nobody knew much about Obama, I started paying very close attention to everything he said about gun-control, as that is my own pet issue. I knew the D.C. v Heller case was due to come out in the middle of the presidential campaign and therefore all the candidates would have to address the gun-issue. It provided one of those important ‘clarifying moments’ in politics.
What that moment demonstrated to me was just how much Obama was a calculating liar, putting even Bill Clinton to shame. So every Obama backtrack, broken promise, and pundit befuddlement has come as no surprise to me.
What has surprised me though is how quickly the mask is dropping and Obama has lost patience to push his true agenda. Unlike Clinton, Obama lacks the experience of surviving in a political realm of effective opposition. The only time Obama has had any real opposition was during the presidential campaign.
I just looked up the Sontag reference that Rand mentioned above. Very interesting.
I’ve probably posted the following here before:
“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man would be such a fool.” –George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”.
Read the whole thing; it’s available online. His “negative nationalism” describes the attitude of today’s left to a T.
Right, Thatcher. The woman who single-handedly killed the UK auto industry. Now they even buy their aircraft carriers and nuclear reactors from France! This from a country which some decades before had managed to invent radar (cavity magnetron), the jet engine, and at one time boasted the world’s largest navy. The mind boggles.