by minimus 167 Replies latest jw friends
Bush inherited his problems from Eisenhower.
How far back do you want to go? To the Garden of Eden?
At some point Obama is going to have to "man up" and show that he has the brains to match his speech. He's like a blind drunk, lurching and stumbling around, clueless to the damage he's doing. In other words, he is an excellent Socialist.
He's doing very well by any normal human standard. Not since WWII a US president has acted so aggressively on an economic crisis --- I just wouldn't like to think about what lethargic mess a McCain presidency would have brought America and the world's economy in.
The problem is half the stuff he is doing with his dishonest, gimmicky budget has got nothing to do with the financial crisis.
The kool-aid drinkers will continue to make excuses while the world falls apart around them.
WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.
Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.
All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.
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 yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.
What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.
Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.
BTS
He is doing Great.
Trends. Obama is at the lowest approve and highest disapprove since the election. Prediction: this will only worsen for him unless he radically changes his direction. Obama entered the government with a tremendous amount of goodwill and he is squandering it by ramming through his ideologically driven program rather than working on the current problems. Obama inherited a bad situation, but he is making it worse. Obama Approval history:
Date | Presidential Approval Index | Strongly Approve | Strongly Disapprove | Total Approve | Total Disapprove |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
03/07/2009 | +8 | 39% | 31% | 56% | 43% |
03/06/2009 | +15 | 42% | 27% | 58% | 40% |
03/05/2009 | +14 | 41% | 27% | 59% | 40% |
03/04/2009 | +16 | 42% | 26% | 60% | 38% |
03/03/2009 | +13 | 40% | 27% | 60% | 39% |
03/02/2009 | +10 | 39% | 29% | 58% | 41% |
03/01/2009 | +8 | 38% | 30% | 58% | 40% |
02/28/2009 | +10 | 39% | 29% | 59% | 39% |
02/27/2009 | +15 | 41% | 26% | 60% | 40% |
02/26/2009 | +16 | 41% | 25% | 60% | 40% |
02/25/2009 | +14 | 39% | 25% | 59% | 40% |
02/24/2009 | +14 | 39% | 25% | 60% | 39% |
02/23/2009 | +11 | 38% | 27% | 58% | 40% |
02/22/2009 | +11 | 38% | 27% | 58% | 41% |
02/21/2009 | +10 | 38% | 28% | 57% | 41% |
02/20/2009 | +12 | 38% | 26% | 59% | 40% |
02/19/2009 | +13 | 38% | 25% | 60% | 39% |
02/18/2009 | +14 | 38% | 24% | 61% | 38% |
02/17/2009 | +15 | 38% | 23% | 61% | 37% |
02/16/2009 | +10 | 36% | 26% | 60% | 39% |
02/15/2009 | +11 | 37% | 26% | 60% | 39% |
02/14/2009 | +13 | 39% | 26% | 60% | 39% |
02/13/2009 | +17 | 41% | 24% | 60% | 38% |
02/12/2009 | +19 | 43% | 24% | 61% | 37% |
02/11/2009 | +19 | 42% | 23% | 60% | 38% |
02/10/2009 | +15 | 39% | 24% | 60% | 38% |
02/09/2009 | +14 | 38% | 24% | 60% | 38% |
02/08/2009 | +11 | 36% | 25% | 59% | 39% |
02/07/2009 | +14 | 37% | 23% | 60% | 38% |
02/06/2009 | +17 | 38% | 21% | 61% | 36% |
02/05/2009 | +19 | 39% | 20% | 62% | 36% |
02/04/2009 | +18 | 39% | 21% | 62% | 36% |
02/03/2009 | +15 | 37% | 22% | 61% | 36% |
02/02/2009 | +17 | 41% | 24% | 60% | 38% |
02/01/2009 | +21 | 44% | 23% | 63% | 34% |
01/31/2009 | +23 | 45% | 22% | 63% | 34% |
01/30/2009 | +21 | 43% | 22% | 63% | 36% |
01/29/2009 | +22 | 42% | 20% | 62% | 36% |
01/28/2009 | +22 | 42% | 20% | 62% | 36% |
01/27/2009 | +23 | 42% | 19% | 62% | 36% |
01/26/2009 | +21 | 41% | 20% | 60% | 37% |
01/25/2009 | +22 | 42% | 20% | 60% | 36% |
01/24/2009 | +26 | 44% | 18% | 61% | 33% |
01/23/2009 | +29 | 45% | 16% | 62% | 29% |
01/22/2009 | +30 | 44% | 14% | 64% | 29% |
01/21/2009 | +28 | 44% | 16% | 65% | 30% |
My god you and your bloggers are shortsighted. I'm tempted to use the word idiot, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't apply. Calculated is probably more accurate.
I'm tempted to use the word idiot, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't apply.
I agree. Burn is not an idiot.
But as I said to Burn on another thread I do think he is one of the most, partisan, narrow minded people I have ever encountered.
And I've encountered a lot of narrow-minded partisans.
I think I read this from a Gary Buss comment:
- good judgment comes from experience, which comes from a lot of bad judgment.
We knew Obama was inexperienced and he got elected anyway. Maybe he is a fast learner.
