Thoughts from Andrew Klavan:
Within the narrative cloud created by these journalists, Obama remains safe in his illusions while the rest of us suffer the consequences. He believes that playing the president and being the president are much the same thing. It is as if Bruce Willis believed he could save a skyscraper full of people by jumping off the roof clutching a fire hose.
For those of us who face the world head on? We don’t need Mulder and Scully to tell us: the truth is out there. Obama has lost the gains of the Iraq war and sacrificed the lives of our soldiers in Afghanistan to no purpose. He has alienated our allies in Germany, France and, God help us, Saudi Arabia, while playing the fool for our enemies in Iran and Russia. He has ruthlessly curtailed free speech by abusing the powers of the IRS against his political opponents, spying on and persecuting journalists, and encouraging the imprisonment of a video maker to suit his political ends. He has brutally hobbled our economy with anti-business regulations written by the very legislators who brought on the recession in the first place. And now, through lies and corrupt political machinations, he has saddled us with a chaotic and overbearing health care law that, even when operational, will never be worth its weight in debt and curtailed liberties.
But other than that, it’s great.
[Update a while later]
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been opposed to government health care because, as I’ve said in at least two books, it fundamentally redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state into one closer to that of junkie and pusher. But that’s a philosophical position. Others prefer constitutional arguments: The federal government does not have the authority to do what it’s doing. Dear old John Roberts, chief justice of the United States, twisted himself into a pretzel to argue that, in fact, the government does. But he might as well have saved himself the trouble and just used Nancy Pelosi’s line: Asked by a journalist where in the Constitution it granted the feds the power to do this, she gave him the full Leslie Nielsen and said, “You’re not serious?” She has the measure of her people. Most Americans couldn’t care less about philosophical arguments or constitutional fine print: For them, all Obamacare has to do is work. That is why the last month has been so damaging to Big Government’s brand: In entirely non-ideological, technocratic, utilitarian terms, Obamacare is a bust.
I think, and hope, it was a regulatory policy bridge too far.