Roger Kimball wonders if the seeming wilful ongoing destruction of the American economy by the new administration is a result of incompetence or malice.

It’s hard to know for sure, of course. Back in the nineties, J. Porter Clark (at sci.space.*) came up with a variation on Clarke’s Third Law (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”), now known as Clark’s Law: “Any sufficiently advanced cluelessness/incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” I think it was in reference to spam, but it would seem to apply to current economic policy as well.

…Barack Obama’s Goldstein?

There are many things that bug me about Barack Obama — the insane laundry list speeches, the silly rhetoric, the hostility to the free market — but these are all talked about. He has another habit that hasn’t been talked about so much and, of all the things he does, it makes me the most queasy.

It’s pretty subtle, but I think it’s worth keeping an eye on because, if it were to become full-blown, it has the potential to be the most socially damaging element of his presidency.

I’m talking about what I’m going to call his Goldstein-ism, his tendency to make veiled, dark allusions to a recently vanquished “other”, an evil being (he is never specific) who is, he always implies, the real cause of all our problems.

George Orwell wouldn’t have been one of the rubes.

[Mid-morning update]

Obama’s sledging tactics of intimidation.

Why does this administration keep reminding me of my trip to the museum?

[Update late afternoon]

Rush makes the president an offer he can’t accept.

They want to have it both ways. If the White House really wants to portray Rush as the leader of the Republicans, then why not have the leader of the Democrats debate him? Harry Reid already found out what happens when you pull on Rush’s tail.

Is there anything that he’s done for which you would criticize him?

[Wednesday morning update]

Victor Davis Hanson has some advice for the Messiah, that he won’t take.

You see, as in the case of any other politician, one must look to what he does—and has done—not what he says for election advantage.

And in the case of Sen. Obama, in his nascent career in the Senate, he had already compiled the most partisan record of any Democratic Senator. He had attended religiously one of the most racially divisive and extremist churches in the country. His Chicago friends were not moderates. His campaigns for state legislature, the House and the Senate were hard-ball, no-prisoner affairs of personal destruction, even by Chicago standards. Campaign references to reparations, gun- and bible-clingers, and Rev. Wright’s wisdom were not words of healing.

But the rubes bought it, anyway.

But is there a head tilt of compassion, along with the regret? When will we see the pictures of Chris Buckley and David Brooks? Brooks must be really shocked. That’s not the Barack Obama he knew. Why, that Barack Obama read Reinhold Niebuhr!

I guess, as Jim Geraghty points out, that Dick Durbin was one of the people who Eric Holder was talking about, because he let Bobby Rush mau mau him into seating Roland Burris.