The Daily Plunge

President-elect Obama hasn’t even been sworn in yet and some are wondering if they’re beloved liberal is actually a centrist. David Corn who’s greatest claim to fame is being part of nadagate has an article in the Washington Post.

Perhaps Obama is trying to pull off something subtle — a sort of stealth liberalism draped in bipartisan centrism. But it’s understandable that progressives are worried. “I feel incredibly frustrated,” OpenLeft blogger Chris Bowers exclaimed. “Even after two landslide elections in a row, are our only governing options as a nation either all right-wing Republicans, or a centrist mixture of Democrats and Republicans? Isn’t there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration?” And he asks, “Why isn’t there a single member of Obama’s cabinet who will be advising him from the left?” Writers at the Nation have decried Obama’s national security team as a “kettle of hawks,” denounced his economic aides as acolytes of “recycled Clintonism” who fancy “straight-up neoliberal deference to the market,” and assailed the retaining of Gates as a move that “has a dispiriting, stay-the-course feel to it.”

First of all, Obama got roughly 53% of the vote which is hardly a landslide. The only way to win a general election in this current political climate it to govern from a centrist position. The problem a lot of “progressives” face is that Obama ran away from the “Left” like Forrest Gump. If there wasn’t this messiah like adoration for the man it would have been readily apparent instead this article by Corn is hilarious because he’s concocted a “new theory” about how Obama is still a “progressive.” It’s like a weird conspiracy theory. A man who’s written two books about himself at the ripe age of forty-six cares far too much for his “legacy” to not be reelected. That means governing from the center.

Here’s some more crazy talk. I thought the Christian Right was dismissed as crazy just for being Christian. This article doesn’t have such a dismissive tone. Why you might ask? Because these Christians support the One.

“You cannot put him on a pedestal and wrap him in cellophane so that people will fall down and worship him. It is not fair to expect someone to swoop down and save you,” said Lawrence Carter, dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College in Atlanta. “I don’t think Jesus so much came to save us as much as he came to free us so that we could save ourselves.”

[...]
Carter said many people look for a sign from God when times are turbulent. And, he said, there are many elements to Obama’s win in which Christians can find spiritual significance. “It is powerful and significant on a spiritual level that there is the emergence of Barack Obama 40 years after the passing of Dr. King,” said Carter. “No one saw him coming, and Christians believe God comes at us from strange angles and places we don’t expect, like Jesus being born in a manger.”

So Jesus didin’t save us, he freed us so we could save ourselves? That’s an interesting theology. If Christians are looking for “spiritual significance” by looking for a sign they should be reminded… “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.” Matthew 12:39

As Ronald Reagan so eloquently said so long ago “it’s not that liberals are ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” It’s true. How many enduring myths are treated like gospel? One enduring myth is that Senator Saxby Chambliss questioned Vietnam veteran Max Cleland’s patriotism in 2002 in the Senate election. Evidently running an advertisement about Cleland’s 11 Homeland Security votes was “beyond the pale.” If you can’t run an ad on a Senator’s vote’s what can you do? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Just read perpetually depressed liberal John Nichols reaction to yesterday’s runoff election.

Chambliss, who won his first Senate term by attacking the patriotism of Vietnam veteran Max Cleland, who had lost three limbs while in the service of his country, served one term as unreconstructed corporatist whose greatest loyalty was and is to Wall Street. Now, after waging an only slightly-less-creepy campaign that promised to thwart Barack Obama’s initiatives, he will serve another.

Democrats are going to have 58 or 59 votes in the Senate and Nichols is complaining that Georgia is living the twentieth century because they elected the incumbent? After one of the greatest wins for Democrats in half a century Nichols can’t even savor the victory. Instead he rehashes the lie, calls voters names, and blames it on a low turnout (even though turnout wasn’t that large in November). I’d hate to be around this guy when inevitably the tide turns again.

It seems like the entertainment industry has inundated our culture with movies about Nixon, McCarthy. We already have a movie about the President. There was even a hit piece on Reagan not too long about that CBS refused to air. During the Great Depression there were a lot of abuses of power by the Government. These abuses have been largely ignored by educators who are unwilling to breach the Roosevelt narrative. The prosecution of Andrew Mellon is one example another is the story of the Schechter brothers. I had never even heard about the Schechter brothers until I read the book the Forgotten Man. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration trampled all over the Constitution. The story is summed up well over at the Austrian Economists

The Schechters, as you may have guessed, were targeted by the NRA enforcement crew. They were inspected repeatedly during the summer of 1934, which forced them to violate their own Kashrut practices, telling customers that they could not reject individual birds as keeping Kosher allowed. Not surprisingly, their deeply religious customer base began to dwindle. The constant inspection turned up a variety of violations, including allegations that they had, in fact, sold sick chickens (not surprising, if true, given that part of their own internal inspection process was negated by the NRA code itself!). They were also accused of “competing too hard” and keeping prices “too low.” Shlaes recounts a couple of hilarious exchanges between the government lawyers and the Schechters where the knowledge of the actor is much greater than the knowledge of the expert..

The case was a huge deal at the time and big news throughout the nation. The Schechter brothers eventually took their case to the Supreme Court where they won in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States. The court found the NRA’s laws to be unconstitutional. It’s a great story and one that’s mostly forgotten against the backdrop of the Great Depression narrative. Thankfully some light is being shed on the history of the Great Depression. Steve Horwitz concludes with this fascinating insight….

The other fascinating element is what this says about the relationship between Roosevelt and the Jews. The other night I happened to catch for the second time the episode of PBS’s terrific series on “The Jewish Americans” that covers the Depression era and the Holocaust. It notes how much the Jews loved Roosevelt, but also notes the criticism he took for not acting more aggressively to save Eastern Eurpoean Jews (only his friend Morgenthau’s intervention finally pushed FDR to act by giving Morgenthau the authority to start rescuing people – about 20,000 altogther – which was better than nothing but still a drop in the bucket.) And it’s certainly true that FDR remains iconic among Jews, especially my parents’ and grandparents’ generation. But with the Schechters, we have a case where the Administration targeted Jewish merchants/middlemen for the dual sins of being good capitalists and observant Jews, both of which didn’t fit the NRA’s plans. And the way in which the prosecution was conducted and was covered by the newspapers put a whole bunch of anti-Semitic stereotypes into play. Why didn’t this sour more Jews on FDR? And why, when you take this case and FDR’s too little, too late approach to the Holocaust, is FDR still viewed so positively by so many Jews? I can offer a few answers to that question, many of them obvious I think, but it remains interesting that his sins were, and are, overlooked by many Jews.

Horwitz’s interest in this piece of history has drawn some ire from some Leftists. Mainly due to his correct use of the word fascist to describe the NRA at the time. All and all it’s a wonderful piece of history.

A week or so after the election Club Soda (yeah, he’s still alive) asked me what I thought would happen in the Minnesota election between Senator Norm Coleman and deranged comedian Stuart Smally… I mean Al Franken. I said they would keep counting votes until Franken took the lead and call the election. This has been the modus operandi in recent elections. In the Washington state governor election in 2004 Democrat Christine Gregoire trailed until all the illegal felon votes were counted. Once those votes are counted it’s impossible to take them back. If Coleman does end up losing the race he can thank voter fraud. Governor Gregoire won reelection despite the fact she stole the 2004 election. Voter’s memories are short in politics.

Good ol’ Southern sarcasm. I thought Fred Thompson was probably the best candidate on the Right. I don’t think he would have necessarily fared better considering the political environment, but he’s still funny.