All about Obama
Bensblurb #574 10/18/10
This election: All about Obama
Hello again. Now that the hole in the macula in my left eye has been closed, following a mandatory two weeks with my head down (which was trying, to say the least), my blood is up again, anticipating a GOP tidal wave two weeks hence--and hoping never again to need eye surgery from the MD who truly resembled a junior in high school.
Obama reneges...
He recently said most stimulus funds didn’t go to any actual “shovel-ready” projects. I guess that was just his manner of his boosting construction spending that was actually slow to materialize. “Shovel-ready” spending thus disappears from his talks, after he used the term repeatedly until he found out the facts, I suppose.
Reminds me of something I read recently (before the eye mess) about programs that stimulated spending. Here’s George Will commenting on old remarks by honored economist Milton Friedman: “Upon seeing a foreign public works program without heavy equipment and being told there were so many men with shovels because theirs was a jobs program, he remarked, ‘Well, if it’s a jobs program, why don’t they have spoons instead of shovels?’’l
Further on in Will’s column there was this: “ We see, in the rampant indebtedness of our country and the European countries, what Yuval Levin has called a ‘gluttonous feast upon the flesh of the future.’ We see the infantilization of publics that become inert and passive, waiting for the state to take care of them. One statistic: 50 percent of all Americans 55 years old or older have less than $50,000 in savings and investment. The feast on the flesh of the future is what debt is.”
...And fails before our very eyes:
As Jonah Goldberg put it recently: “Obama has lost his connection with the American people. He's aloof without inspiring confidence. On issue after issue--terrorism, immigration, the oil spill, the environment, and the Ground Zero mosque--he seems determined to craft his responses in a way that will annoy the most people possible.
Liberals are frantically trying to explain away Obama's problems. Some want to protect their investment in Obama, and some want to protect their investment in liberalism. So some claim that his mistakes stem from not being progressive enough, while others insist that he's played his cards right, but we need to wait a bit longer for the payoff.
I'm dubious on both counts. Obama has delivered massively for progressives, and it strikes me as idiotic to say that if he had only squeezed a bit more liberalism into his first two years, everything would be better. Moreover, I don't think the payoff is coming, because I think the policies are wrong.
...AMEN.
...And now let’s get ready to see what Americans are going to do about them, at least so far as the elections in November are able to indicate.
--Ben Blankenship
##############
This election: All about Obama
Hello again. Now that the hole in the macula in my left eye has been closed, following a mandatory two weeks with my head down (which was trying, to say the least), my blood is up again, anticipating a GOP tidal wave two weeks hence--and hoping never again to need eye surgery from the MD who truly resembled a junior in high school.
Obama reneges...
He recently said most stimulus funds didn’t go to any actual “shovel-ready” projects. I guess that was just his manner of his boosting construction spending that was actually slow to materialize. “Shovel-ready” spending thus disappears from his talks, after he used the term repeatedly until he found out the facts, I suppose.
Reminds me of something I read recently (before the eye mess) about programs that stimulated spending. Here’s George Will commenting on old remarks by honored economist Milton Friedman: “Upon seeing a foreign public works program without heavy equipment and being told there were so many men with shovels because theirs was a jobs program, he remarked, ‘Well, if it’s a jobs program, why don’t they have spoons instead of shovels?’’l
Further on in Will’s column there was this: “ We see, in the rampant indebtedness of our country and the European countries, what Yuval Levin has called a ‘gluttonous feast upon the flesh of the future.’ We see the infantilization of publics that become inert and passive, waiting for the state to take care of them. One statistic: 50 percent of all Americans 55 years old or older have less than $50,000 in savings and investment. The feast on the flesh of the future is what debt is.”
...And fails before our very eyes:
As Jonah Goldberg put it recently: “Obama has lost his connection with the American people. He's aloof without inspiring confidence. On issue after issue--terrorism, immigration, the oil spill, the environment, and the Ground Zero mosque--he seems determined to craft his responses in a way that will annoy the most people possible.
Liberals are frantically trying to explain away Obama's problems. Some want to protect their investment in Obama, and some want to protect their investment in liberalism. So some claim that his mistakes stem from not being progressive enough, while others insist that he's played his cards right, but we need to wait a bit longer for the payoff.
I'm dubious on both counts. Obama has delivered massively for progressives, and it strikes me as idiotic to say that if he had only squeezed a bit more liberalism into his first two years, everything would be better. Moreover, I don't think the payoff is coming, because I think the policies are wrong.
...AMEN.
...And now let’s get ready to see what Americans are going to do about them, at least so far as the elections in November are able to indicate.
--Ben Blankenship
##############
posted by Ben Blankenship at
12:15 PM
