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Little-Acorn
03-06-2009, 12:09 PM
The author nails it, as succinctly as I have seen it done. Obama and his fellow Democrats are using the financial crisis as an excuse to put in place their liberal-socialist agenda, while doing little or nothing that could actually help the crisis.

In WWII, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis was sailing through waters known to be patrolled by Japanese submarines, just a few days before the war's end. Despite knowing the dangers around him, the captain did not zigzag or take any other standard precautions against possible enemy attack. He was spotted by a Japanese submarine, torpedoed, and the ship sank with heavy loss of life, many to sharks. The captain was later court-maritalled and convicted for failing to take adequate precautions.

Today we have a country in troubled waters, with many courses of action open to the "captain" of the ship of state. He is taking very few, if any, of them, while concentrating his attention on an agenda generally acknowledged to make economic conditions even worse, and even devoting attention to denigrating his critics rather than attending the crisis. And he has far more time than the Indianapolis captain ever had, to plan what to do. And while the cruiser captain's culpability is debatable, the country's "captain's" is not.

Is there a reason he should not get the same treatment the cruiser captain got, as the country sinks around him?

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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/03/a_dishonest_gimmicky_budget.html

Deception at Core of Obama Plans

by Charles Krauthammer
March 06, 2009

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.

hjmick
03-06-2009, 12:20 PM
Nothing to disagree with there. Krauthammer is right.

Classact
03-06-2009, 12:34 PM
Nothing to disagree with there. Krauthammer is right.You can read Krauthammer every day and watch him on the 6:00 PM Fox news and never find a fault with his opinion... that is to say you can listen to what he says and then follow up weeks/months later and prove he was correct in what he stated.

Little-Acorn
03-06-2009, 01:04 PM
Rahm Emmanuel's comment says it all.

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

"To do things" means, to put their liberal agenda in place, which Congress and President Obama are now doing at full speed, ramming votes through before any citizens can read and analyze them.

"...that you could not do before", means what, exactly? It means that the American people have not wanted their liberal agenda for years. The leftists couldn't enact it, because hordes of people kept calling their congressmen and demanding that such bills be defeated, in such numbers that the Congressmen feared for their re-election hopes if they didn't do what their constituents wanted.

In other words, the desire of Emmanuel and his fellow liberals to legislate against the will of the people, kept getting intercepted and defeated by the very people they were trying to subvert.

Democracy. It's a wonderful thing.

But now they can hang the "This is an emergency, we have to have this and we have to have it RIGHT NOW" mantra on it. And so they can jam the same unwanted agenda through Congress and have their compliant President sign it, before people even find out what's in it. And when the people object this time, the "We had to deal with the emergency" excuse is always ready... despite the fact that most of the agenda does nothing to deal with the emergency, and in fact makes it worse.

Elections have consequences. And the gravest consequence of the 2008 election, is the flagrant neglect of a crisis that came to a head in 2008, after starting in 1977 and swelling through the 80s and 90s.

The good news?

I hear the parties at the White House got a lot better in the last six weeks.

Joe Steel
03-06-2009, 01:23 PM
In WWII, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis was sailing through waters known to be patrolled by Japanese submarines, just a few days before the war's end. Despite knowing the dangers around him, the captain did not zigzag or take any other standard precautions against possible enemy attack. He was spotted by a Japanese submarine, torpedoed, and the ship sank with heavy loss of life, many to sharks. The captain was later court-maritalled and convicted for failing to take adequate precautions.

The Japanese submarine commander was a witness at McVey's court martial. In his testimony, he said zigzagging wouldn't have made any difference. He had the Indianapolis cold.

Little-Acorn
03-06-2009, 01:26 PM
Back to the subject:
Today we have a country in troubled waters, with many courses of action open to the "captain" of the ship of state. He is taking very few, if any, of them, while concentrating his attention on an agenda generally acknowledged to make economic conditions even worse, and even devoting attention to denigrating his critics rather than attending the crisis. And he has far more time than the Indianapolis captain ever had, to plan what to do. And while the cruiser captain's culpability is debatable, the country's "captain's" is not.

Is there a reason he should not get the same treatment the cruiser captain got, as the country sinks around him?

hjmick
03-06-2009, 04:35 PM
Rahm Emmanuel's comment says it all.

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

Hillary said the same thing over in Brussels today.