Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Obama’s Left Turn

7 Comments

Stuart Taylor:

…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.

Political Commentary

Obama’s Priorities

45 Comments

He seems to be fiddling while Rome burns. And he’s the arsonist.

[Afternoon update]

More thoughts from Charles Krauthammer:

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 as to why the market is plunging? Ask the investors:

BusinessWeek interviewed a wide array of investment professionals, and many said the first six weeks of the Obama Administration have soured their outlook on the stock market…

…”The basic agenda of Obama’s Administration is going to be more leftist and less centrist than I had anticipated,” says John Merrill, chief investment officer at Tanglewood Wealth Management in Houston.

They’re shocked, shocked. Fools.

[Update a few minutes later]

More investor non-confidence from Silicon Valley.

And is it time for Geithner to go? As she notes, it’s really Obama’s fault for not staffing Treasury. I think that the Obamaniacs are discovering that governing is a lot harder, and a lot less fun, than campaigning. So they revert to campaigning and (among other things) demonizing the opposition.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Lost Cause

5 Comments

Jim Powell, on continuing failed attempts to rehabilitate FDR’s Depression record:

Black commits one of the most familiar fallacies by reciting a litany of New Deal projects — libraries, schools, public works, and so forth — as if their funding came out of thin air. But government doesn’t have any money other than what it gets by (a) taxing people now, (b) borrowing money now and taxing people later, or (c) inflating the currency, which is another form of taxation. Every New Deal project on Black’s list meant that less money was spent elsewhere because it was taxed away. New Deal economics basically involved robbing Peter to pay Paul, with added inefficiencies along the way and a net loss for everyone.

Remember, too, that the New Deal was mainly paid for by the middle class and the poor, because the biggest revenue generator for the federal government during the 1930s was an excise tax on cigarettes, beer, chewing gum, and other cheap pleasures enjoyed disproportionately by those two groups. Until 1936, the federal excise tax generated more revenue than the federal personal income tax and the federal corporate income tax combined. Not until 1942 did the personal income tax become the biggest source of federal revenue. You can look it up in Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, volume 2, page 1107.

Perhaps Black is suggesting that politicians have a special talent for spending other people’s money in a way that will do more to stimulate the economy than if those people had spent it themselves. That proposition is laughable. All the available evidence verifies the common-sense truth that people are less careful with other people’s money than they are with their own. That’s true even when their intentions are good and their motives are pure — which was rarely the case in the New Deal. FDR’s spending programs stimulated a mad scramble among political bosses for control of the loot and the patronage.

This is an important debate to continue, because mindless and ahistorical worship of the New Deal lies at the heart of the current disastrous policies.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

More Words Of Conservative Wisdom

2 Comments

T. Coddington Voorhees VII is guest blogging at Iowahawk’s place again:

That conundrum of electoral calculus was the topic of much discussion two weeks ago, when my Nassau confreres and I were summoned to the White House for an intimate repast with the new President and his inner circle. Mr. Obama was radiant as ever, still basking in the afterglow of his historic victory. I admit to a recent wobble or two in my faith in him, as the severe beatings suffered by my various family trusts have necessitated some unanticipated cutbacks in my household staff. But that easy, commanding elegance was a bracing reminder of why I endorsed Mr. Obama as the true conservative presidential choice. After dessert (black walnut dacquoise with sections of quince) we retired to the Blue Room where chief of staff Rahm Emanuel entertained us with some droll tales of his days as terpsichorean with the Mossad ballet auxiliary, even treating us to a few thrilling, if f-bomb laced, arabesques. He was followed by Vice President Joe Biden, who put on a fine display of his famed wit and penchant for unpredictable cerebral infarctions. Amid the sparkling bonhomie the President solicited our views on the causes of — and solutions to — conservatism’s sad state. Seizing the opportunity for a tete-a-tete with the world’s most powerful, popular, and beautiful man, I explained the tragic plague of rubes who stand athwart our modernization program.

“Why not just drive them out?” asked the President, elegantly French inhaling his Marlboro Light 100. “Under the old bus, so to speak.”

“Alas, were it so easy,” interrupted Brooks, in a clumsy attempt to draw Mr. Obama’s attentions from me like some cocquettish debutante. Parker, Noonan and Frum were too lost in orgasmic schoolgirl giggling to offer anything more substantive. I ignored their embarrasing faux pas and pressed on with my thesis.

“We’ve tried, Mr. President,” I explained. “But there are unsavory elements within the party who keep bringing them back in.”

My reference, obviously, was to the self-styled luminaries of “populism” who hang like a millstone around the Republican neck — the Sarah Palins, the Plumbing Joes, the Bobby Jindals, the Rush Limbaughs, the motley middlebrow state college pretenders to the conservative throne. A shared contempt for these arriviste oafs unites the Nassau summitteers perhaps even more than our shared fondness for a snifter of well-behaved armagnac VSOP. I have made no secret of my feelings about la Palin and her grim brood of ill-mannered snowbillies, as well that horrid toilet tinkerer from Toledo whose fifteen minutes have somehow refused to expire. The recent emergence of Bobby Jindal and Rush Limbaugh in the intraparty maelstrom yet affords fresh opportunities for conservative dismality.

What is a conservative to do?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Probably Both

24 Comments

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.

Political Commentary

A Voice Of Sanity Among Democrats

4 Comments

I hope they’ll listen to Senator Bayh.

[Thursday afternoon update]

Stephen Spruielle makes a good point (that sort of occurred to me at the time):

If one accepts the dubious proposition that government spending is required to mitigate the effects of the recession, how can one oppose higher spending that would take place this year — especially after voting for the trillion-dollar stimulus package? All this handwringing over the size of the omnibus from the likes of Bayh and Specter is just comical. It’s like listening to a guy who downed an entire bottle of tequila lecture his buddies on the dangers of taking one more shot.

Sometimes it seems like the lunatics are running the asylum.

[Bumped]

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

I Hope He Freezes In The Dark

52 Comments

Timothy Noah is cheering what he hopes is the upcoming demise of the nuclear power industry, in the wake of Obama’s closing off the Yucca Mountain option. I was never a big fan of Yucca Mountain — I think it a ridiculously overpriced solution to an hysterical non-problem. But for the money that they planned to spend on it, we could have come up with a safe and reliable launch industry, by using it as a market for storage on the moon.