Keith Hennessy on Barack Obama’s Bart Simpson defense.
I would add that it’s not possible to know to what degree “tax cuts” boosted the deficit, because they weren’t “tax cuts.” They were tax rate cuts, and they may have actually reduced it by boosting the economy and incomes.
The rise of free-market populism in this country finally has manifested in an election. And judging from the hyperbolic reactions, you know it’s a political movement with staying power.
When tepid, traditional conservative candidate Doug Hoffman knocked off liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava—a candidate who was supported by nearly every boogeyman in the GOP handbook—you might have thought that the rabble had stormed the Bastille.
Sophisticated New York Times columnist Frank Rich called the event “a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war” and compared the conservative surge to a murderous Stalinist purge. (Remarkably, the esteemed wordsmith failed to unleash similar histrionic language when one-time-Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman met the same fate.)
Purging moderates is indeed a self-destructive strategy for any national party. But running a party without any litmus tests on the central issue of the economy seems to be similarly self-defeating.
The most impressive trick played by Rich and other liberals, though, is creating a narrative wherein the ones attempting to fundamentally reconfigure the American economy are cast as the moderates.
The nearly powerless who stand in their way? Well, they play the part of Stalinists.
But of course, as Orwell pointed out, the real Stalinists are the people who torture the language like Frank Rich does.
…or 1938?
Democrats lost 80 seats in the 1938 election, after gaining seats in 1930, 1932, 1934 and 1936.
How did this happen? As Amity Shlaes notes in her history of the Depression, “The Forgotten Man,” Roosevelt believed less competition and high wages would heal the economy. Aided by Congress, he went about engineering those two things with a vengeance, trebling the size of the federal government in less than a decade.
At the time, such drastic action may have seemed warranted. Within three years of the 1929 crash, GDP had fallen nearly a third and a fourth of the U.S. work force was idle. Even so, the economy appeared to stabilize in 1934 and 1935, and in 1936, Democrats won landslides in both Congress and the presidency.
What happened next is a tale of overreach and hubris — one that holds lessons for today’s Democrats.
But they seem determined not to learn them. Because to do so would negate their entire world view.
Is there any amount of money that this thing could cost that would cause you to say, “OK, it’s not worth it”? Because to listen to them defend it, you’d sure think that the answer is “no.” That the only important thing is that it’s “safe,” and to hell with the cost.
It looks like they just won almost a million dollars in the power beaming contest.
I sure hope that the administration will request a lot more money for Centennial Challenges, and Congress grant it. Tomorrow’s award of the NGLLC prizes at the Rayburn Building would be a good opportunity to make the point that, dollar for dollar, they put to shame anything else that NASA is doing, Constellation most of all.
If this is true, whoever sets up lectures at Harvard had his sense of irony removed at birth:
HARVARD UNIVERSITY EDMOND J. SAFRA FOUNDATION CENTER FOR ETHICS
Eliot Spitzer, former Governor and Attorney General of New York, will deliver a public lecture as part of the 2009/10 Labs Lectures on the Question of Institutional Corruption.
Truly amazing.
…over at DumpDede.com.
Dennis Wingo says that NASA doesn’t need more money, it just needswhat NASA needs is a better architectural approach. I agree. But that’s doesn’t keep the jobs in the right places.
Despite my initial misreading of it, though, I even think that it’s possible to do it without the extra three billion. And it had better be, because I doubt if they’re going to get it.
One of the things that I do miss about living in Florida for the past five years was the occasional (but in retrospect, not often enough) opportunity to get together with Bob and Lou Poole for dinner (they lived about twenty-five miles away). Here are his thoughts on the influence of Ayn Rand.
…to Obamacare. Couldn’t happen soon enough, but maybe it did.
I think that historians will note that the high-water mark of the Obama presidency, at least in terms of trying to ram his radical agenda through in the wake of his election victory, will be the cap’n’tax bill that passed the House in the spring. From here on out, he won’t even have enough support from the Blue Dogs to attempt to commit political suicide with the rest. They know now that he can’t save them. And as Rush said yesterday (I caught ten minutes of him on the way to a client’s office), Nancy Pelosi doesn’t care if they lose their elections, as long as she doesn’t lose her majority. She’d rather have a thin majority of faithful cadres than a bigger one of ideologically suspect and unreliable moderates. So they had better realize that their loyalty is to their own voters, particularly in the so-called “Red” states (I never fail to be amazed at how the media has managed to foist that color on Republicans, when it’s so much more appropriate to the other party — I could swear it used to be the other way around in the nineties), and not to either the White House or their leadership.
As for NY-23, I think that there are several lessons there, but one of them is that if the Republicans want to win, they have to put up good candidates. Face it, Hoffman was a pretty geeky guy, and the Democrat was a Blue Dog, and not a bad fit for the district. It’s actually better for the Republicans to have him in place now, when he won’t have much time to develop his incumbency, and can come up with a better (i.e., not a “Republican” to the left of him, or dweeby carpet bagger with no political experience) candidate next fall. If they hadn’t been idiots, they would have come up with a better candidate in the first place, but considering what a Charlie Foxtrot the thing was, it’s pretty amazing that they came as close to beating Owens as they did. The Republican establishment had better pay close attention, and draw the right lessons.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Just in case Dick Morris is wrong, and we need to put a wooden stake through its heart, get to Washington tomorrow if you can.