Rev. Jeremiah Wright: During ObamaFest 2008 (otherwise known as the 2008 presidential election) then Senator Obama could do no wrong. Hanging out with former terrorists? No big deal. Spreading the wealth around? He didn’t really mean it. Attending a radical church? Nothing to see here, move on… The Daily Caller has some more JournoList revelations. This time, members of the group were trying to figure out how to spin the Jeremiah Wright story:
In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”
This is how these people think. It’s okay to slander people as long as the progressive agenda moves forward. Is it really that surprising then that Obama received the greatest media coverage in modern history? From the beginning I didn’t think it was possible for someone with such a lack of experience and ties to shady characters to get elected. I underestimated the members of the liberal media. It’s beyond me how any liberal can complain about the Right’s paranoia when it comes to mainstream news coverage.
Saint FDR: Historians are frothing at the mouth defending Franklin D. Roosevelt’s record during the Great Depression. Over the decades there’s been some kind of deification of Roosevelt’s policies during the Depression. The problem is that upon analysis the story doesn’t add up. Amity Shlaes has a point by point take on Conrad Black’s assertion that FDR’s policies saved the economy. I love Shlaes and I’m happy to learn she’s writing a biography about Calvin Coolidge. If she would only write one about Lindsay Lohan, then I’d really be stoked.
About Massachusetts: As a followup to yesterday’s post about the electoral college, I am so sad to learn that the popular vote legislation being kicked around in Massachusetts wouldn’t take effect until enough states have passed identical legislation. In other words, I won’t hold my breath waiting for this trend to sweep the nation. As an interesting side note, the Constitution actually calls for the election of electors, who would then cast votes for the President. The founders envisioned a true republic in which the only popular election was for the House. True wisdom.
Top Ten Most Left-Biased American Journalists: Big Journalism is doing a series on biased leftist journalists. One of my favorites, the indelible Paul Krugman is #3. The cartoon character Krugman is a hypocrite at best and at worst an ugly partisan hiding behind a Nobel Prize. “But he writes for the New York Times!?!” So what? Who cares?
That’s all I got today. It’s only Tuesday. Tuesday nights mean Hell’s Kitchen on FOX and endless Google searches for the latest on Lindsay Lohan. Now that’s my kind of entertainment.
“Please! Remain in your seats, I beg you! We are not children here, we are scientists! I assure you there is nothing to fear!”
-Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein
Back in April 2002, David Levy proclaimed that the Unted States was in “the Frankenstein recovery.” If 2002 was the Frankenstein Recovery, then this is the Young Frankenstein Recovery. It’s so bad that it’s a parody of a stitched-together, made-up recovery. Charged with finding what we need to reanimate our economy, the geniuses on Capitol Hill, a.k.a., Igor, bring us the Abby Normal brain of “stimulus” spending. Unfortunately, after inserting the abnormal brain and pumping megagigawatts of electricity into his creature, Dr. Frankenstein didn’t have a plan after it came to life.
Likewise, our own Dr. Frankenstein, Obama, and his foolish sidekick, Igor, have created a monstrosity that threatens to force a double-dip recession. Sure, I suppose there’s a smattering of “shovel-ready” jobs, but that doesn’t exactly save the economy. To see another version of how Obama and Congress explained all the pointless spending to the American taxpayer, please check out the video clip below (the part of Obama/Congress is played by Marty Feldman; the part of the American taxpayer by Gene Wilder):
Liberals continue to believe the Great Depression myth that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s massive growth of the federal government somehow saved the economy and will always save it. All it really did was create a 7-foot-tall, 54-inch-wide gorilla that lumbered around terrorizing the villagers for an entire freaking decade. Now the monster’s twice as large and the angry racists villagers are fresh out of torches and pitchforks. Oh well. At least it can sing Puttin’ on the Ritz…
Michael Tomasky has an op-ed in The Guardian lamenting the fate of the health care takeover being pushed by “progressives.” The article is full of generalizations, mischaracterizations, and historical inaccuracies. The piece is truly difficult to read. Tomasky’s aura of faux intellectualism is so strong he doesn’t have time to look at the details. Most liberals have this problem. It’s why Reagan said that “it’s not that our liberal friends are ignorant, they just know so much that isn’t so.” However naïve Tomasky is, he does have some self awareness.
What a change from just six to nine months ago. During that period, from the wake of Barack Obama’s victory through the first 100 days, liberal optimism was higher than it’s been in this country for 40 years. One could believe, on a good day, not only that America would pass healthcare reform and climate change bills (that’d be the easy part), but that Israelis and Palestinians and Iranians and Syrians and Indians and Pakistanis and North Koreans and you-name-it just might all wake up one day and text one another: you know, Obama’s win suddenly makes us aware of how silly we’ve been all these years. Let’s grow up and make peace.
There’s no doubt American liberals completely misread the tea leaves regarding the election. The unfortunate truth is liberals are just as naïve about health care. Unable to clearly deliver an argument about how this utopian program will ever work they’d rather complain about the opposition. At the prospect of the losing the debate Tomasky would rather complain about “a historic victory for the birthers and the gun-toters and the Hitler analogists.” Look down at the birthers all you want, and there’s plenty of reason to do so, but what can you say about someone who is well-educated like Tomasky who can’t even adequately explain how health care can work?
Maybe “well-educated” is a generalization. What can we say about an education system that continues to create people who are woefully ignorant about economics and history? Before we endorse changing one of the largest parts of our economy shouldn’t we have some evidence that it might work? Why should we trust people who don’t even have a firm grasp on history? Look at Tomasky’s insight about FDR:
Ditto with Franklin Roosevelt, to whom Obama is often unflatteringly compared. FDR, the comparers say, fought the right tooth and nail, took no prisoners and was unapologetically liberal, even leftwing by today’s standards. Many very important points are left out of this comparison. Roosevelt made lots of mistakes – the bill he’d intended as the landmark legislation of his first year, the national industrial recovery act, was an abysmal failure, eventually struck down as unconstitutional by the supreme court. Unlike Obama, he didn’t have to worry about Senate filibusters, which weren’t really invoked in those days but which are a constant threat today. And while the right wing he faced was real, it wasn’t nearly as well-financed and orchestrated as today’s version, which even has its own national disinformation “news” network.
According to Tomasky FDR was able to pass the New Deal because no one used filibusters, the opposition wasn’t well financed, and FOX News didn’t exist. Frankly, Tomasky should be embarrassed by that paragraph. He obviously has no idea about the history of the Great Depression. Four years of depression and super majorities in both the House and the Senate are the reason the New Deal passed. Furthermore Obama hasn’t faced a filibuster for any of his key agenda. Again, Tomasky displays his naivete in regard to history. He’s got all the people in the right period but all the facts wrong.
Despite all of his talents, FDR would not have been a match for FOX News.
Liberals like Tomasky are shadowboxers fighting an invisible enemy. The liberal’s true enemies in the health care debate are facts, and one of those is that we have no way to pay for health care reform. We can’t afford Medicare, the Prescription Drug Plan, or Social Security. In the grand scheme of things I don’t really care if liberals think that health care is a right. We can’t afford it, and until someone has a plan that’s worked somewhere else we should move forward with real reform.
A couple of weeks ago Time magazine asked, “What can Barack Obama learn from FDR?” That got me thinking about the Great Depression. It’s an event I’ve studied a lot over the past three years. There’s one major problem with the Obama as FDR idea though; it doesn’t fit. This idea obviously fits the left’s romantic idea of FDR and Obama, but from a historic perspective it’s a little puzzling. A better question would be, “What can Barack Obama learn from Hoover?” When Roosevelt was sworn into office on March 4, 1933, the depression had been going on for three and half years. Hoover had been president for just seven months when the stock market crashed in October 1929.
Herbert Hoover was an extremely popular guy. It was the reason he elected president. Hoover’s exploits as a mining engineer and a humanitarian had made him an obvious choice for president when Coolidge refused to run for another term. To be sure, no reasonable person would blame Hoover for the stock market crash seven months into his term. This is the same problem Obama faces.
When the crash happened Hoover used every tool at his disposal to mitigate the effects of the downturn. Hoover didn’t have a “hands off” reaction; in fact, many of his policies were later copied by FDR. It is my belief (and I’m not alone) that Hoover’s policies after the crash (followed by FDR) turned a great recession into the Great Depression. This is the lesson Obama must learn. Unprecedented government intervention could make the economy much worse. After three years of meddling Hoover was unable to turn things around and paid the price at the polls. If the economy doesn’t turn around Obama will be viewed as Hoover, not FDR.
I want to revisit a thought I touched on yesterday: “progressives” are full of empathy and have a great deal of pride in their empathy. The fact that they supposedly “care” means they’re not responsible for bad policies. When Democrats pass a stimulus bill that serves as pork barrel payback to special interests, it’s framed by the media as a way to save jobs for teachers and firefighters. Who could possibly be against that? To opposed the bill must make one heartless and cruel. What if the media framed the issue fairly, taking both sides of the issue into account?
The option here isn’t just about teachers and firefighters. The true story is about inflation, higher interest rates, and crippling the economy with debt. Instead of piling on Governor Mark Sanford for denying a federal handout, the real story should be how irresponsible all this spending is and documenting the dangers of government bankruptcy. The current course is going to affect everyone. This idea that having good intentions equals good policy is ludicrous.
This isn’t a Republican or Democrat issue; both parties have shown an appetite for spending. Comparing the fiscal record of Republicans and Democrats is a beauty pageant between Miss Ugly and Miss Hideous. Why should I be impressed that Miss Hideous seems to care more about the disadvantaged when her policies are worse than Miss Ugly. Why should I care that Miss Ugly is a better alternative than Miss Hideous when her polices are still ugly? Such are the choices Americans face these days. What good are our social programs if they mean economic calamity for all? In future decades when we’re all living in cardboard huts are we going to look back and say, “You know, this isn’t so bad; at least everyone had health care for awhile before everything broke down. Yeah!”
I’m definitely not one to continually beat the doom-and-gloom drum, but this is a real problem. Instead of spending billions of dollars promoting the theory of global warming, wouldn’t it make more sense to educate people about the dangers of total economic collapse? A worldwide economic collapse is certainly a larger danger to mankind than global warming. Many people forget the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s helped create Nazi Germany. Desperate economic times creates chaos. The dangers facing the world today are much graver than before World War II. A similar economic meltdown would certainly mean a nuclear holocaust.
These are the real consequence facing our nation. The mounting debt and impending bankruptcy wouldn’t just be an economic bump in the road. Does anyone truly believe Americans today could survive another Great Depression? Every politician who promises unsustainable spending is betting yes.
There’s perhaps no greater threat to the state than ignorance about economics. This is especially true when politicians pander to this ignorance for votes (see: Edwards, Huckabee). One of the greatest mistakes made at on the onset of the Great Depression was the restriction of free trade. Some argue this is precisely the reason the economic downturn was so dramatic. It’s scary when 58% of Americans believe that foreign competition is bad. Economic isolationism is a recipe for disaster.
“Do you think the fact that the American economy has become increasingly global is good because it has opened up new markets for American products and resulted in more jobs, or bad because it has subjected American companies and employees to unfair competition and cheap labor?”
HT: Greg Mankiw
Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man is easily the most fascinating look back at the Great Depression I have ever read. The book is a breeze to read and serves as a refreshing look at the well intentioned policies that help prolong and strengthen the severity of the depression. The book starts in the twenties and reevaluates the myth of the “reckless twenties” that became the embodiment of the thirties propaganda. The center of the economic policy of that period was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon who served the post for three presidents. The twenties were a boom period for business, much like this decade and the nineties.
President Coolidge’s pro-business policies fueled the economic growth of that period. The immensely popular Coolidge decided not to seek a third term and was replaced by Herbert Hoover. Hoover’s idea of economics were at odds with Mellon and the previous administration and when the stock market finally corrected in 1929 after inflated growth the President did everything wrong. Hoover raised taxes, tariffs, interest rates and turned a normal recession into the Great Depression.
Political change was inevitable in 1932 and once Roosevelt became President the poor economic policies continued. It’s easy to point the blame on Roosevelt, but I’m not sure there was any rational alternative. The Republicans at the time didn’t have any better ideas. They were far too prone to support the kind of isolationist policies that were helping compound the problem. The only decent candidate to run against Roosevelt was Wendell Willkie who ran in 1940. By that time the war was the number one issue and there’s no doubt that Roosevelt was a tremendous leader.
President Roosevelt’s administration also spent a great deal of time going after businesses and Wall Street. This war against the private sector ultimately made the Depression worse as well, eventually leading to Black Tuesday in 1938. The administration’s overzealous attack on Wall Street quelled investment and stopped growth. One example of the cluelessness of the administration was the price of Gold. When FDR was asked why he had sat the price of gold to twenty-one cents he replied “it’s a lucky number, because it’s three times seven.” This kind of daily meddling wasn’t uncommon and is an amazing insight into why the Depression is the greatest government blunder in our nation’s history.
Despite the gloom of the period the book is an inspirational look at the truly “forgotten men and women” of the depression. These heroes overcame one of the most difficult periods in our history despite the incompetence of government intervention. For too long people have debated why the Great Depression happened and ignored why it lasted so long. The answer to the last question is the answer to both. The differences between Hoover and Roosevelt were slight; however, Roosevelt helped calm the public. Ultimately the start of World War II ended the Depression and the anti-business and anti-trade policies of the thirties faded after 1940. It’s important for Americans to remember the mistakes made by the government during that period because they’re too easy to make again. On the Right, Isolationism in trade and in immigration policy is damaging. On the Left anti-big business and class warfare are equally disturbing. The Forgotten Man is a stark reminder of how both out dated ideologies got it wrong.
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