Some thoughts on one of the president’s more duplicitous rhetorical tactics:

I thought of a few of Obama’s statements along these lines. We choose either his entire program of massive deficit spending or we choose “an economy built on reckless speculation, inflated home prices, and maxed-out credit cards.” We either choose his budget, which is “inseparable from this recovery,” or we go back to “the very same policies that have led us to a narrow prosperity and massive debt.”

Obama frames himself as the man with all of the solutions. Even if America has experienced noteworthy bubbles and busts of some kind in nearly every decade of its existence, we’ve never had a leader like Barack Obama before, so maybe we can prevent it from ever happening again:

[T]he most critical part of our strategy is to ensure that we do not return to an economic cycle of bubble and bust in this country…The budget I submitted to Congress will build our economic recovery on a stronger foundation so that we don’t face another crisis like this 10 or 20 years from now.

Those who have other ideas, who worry about nationalization of the economy, the doubling of the national debt in six years, and who fear that they are watching the nation collectively drink Drano to fix its stomach-ache — we call them “nay-sayers.”

And haters. And racists.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Only peripherally related, but here’s someone diagramming an Obama sentence.

Unlike the blogger and commenter, I never enjoyed, or was very good at, diagramming sentences. Fortunately, though, like spelling, I seem to have a good innate sense of English grammar.

Neoneocon has some thoughts:

Barnett noticed—as many had, even at the time—the enormous difference in articulateness between Teleprompter-Obama and Obama unplugged (the latter is the title of Barnett’s article). That was the easy part. The more discriminating observation Barnett made was between the message of Teleprompter Obama and the message of ad-lib Obama. The two were not just different in degree—they were profoundly opposite in tone and essence. Ad-lib Obama was far more angry and more radical—indeed, although Barnett doesn’t mention it, this Obama resembled the angrier and more radical Michelle Obama, in her earlier campaign remarks that drew so much controversy.

Obama is addicted to his Teleprompter not only because he knows he sounds better—smoother and smarter—with it than without. The deeper reason for his reliance on it may just be that he differs so profoundly from the persona he wishes to convey that he quite literally cannot trust himself to speak without it. Shorn of the Teleprompter, he not only runs the risk of revealing a disfluency that could rival (or even exceed?) that of his reviled predecessor George Bush—he may reveal who he truly is, an angry man with a profoundly radical agenda for America.

No surprise to those of us who paid attention all last year.

The media should resign over President Obama’s failure.

Actually, they won’t have to resign. Given the continuing financial failure of newspapers, they seem to be getting fired. What will happen to Frank Rich when the New York Times finally goes under?

[Late morning update]

Whoops, there goes another one. After a hundred seventy four years, the Ann Arbor News is closing its doors this summer.

I pointed out a few posts ago that the current style in Washington is the Chicago Way. Now John Kass, who has been covering Chicago politics for a long time, agrees:

“Stunned, stunned is the word,” said Obama.

Stunned?

It turns out that his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner—who didn’t pay all of his federal taxes but was still deemed worthy by Obama of collecting yours—knew all about the AIG bonuses weeks ago.

That was long before Washington Democrats began shrieking in pretend outrage over the bonuses, as if they didn’t vote for them, sort of like Chicago aldermen shrieking about corruption from the 5th Floor.

It’s like Mayor Richard Daley saying, “Gee, I dunno” when news breaks that his nephews are in another multimillion-dollar government deal. Or that time that Daley gave $100 million in affirmative action contracts to men he knows well, yet was stunned to learn later that they were white guys, not black females.

These days, the Washington Way is looking just like the Chicago Way. Those of us from Illinois can see it, what with City Hall guys pulling White House strings.

And no, that’s not a good thing.

And anyone who is surprised is a fool.

Some thoughts:

Liberals are determined to mock and ridicule the notion that Obama’s moving America in a European direction. But of course he is. Liberals have been — unapologetically — pushing America in that direction for generations.

Anyway, what I didn’t get into in the column is how this contrasts with the theocracy-panic of five minutes ago. Back then, the liberal consensus was that we need to be very, very, very scared that the bible thumpers were going to take over everything and turn us into a Handmaid’s Tale (itself a classic example of paranoid fiction). But back then, if I had suggested that America’s rich history of religious tolerance and pluralism could stand up to the Orwellian onslaught of Bush’s Office of Faith Based Initiatives, I would have been laughed off as ludicrously naive.

But when Obama is literally spending trillions of dollars to move us in a European direction, conservatives like Mark Steyn, Charles Murray, and others are supposedly daft for thinking this is anything worth worrying about.

It’s just the substitution of one religion for another — worship of the state.