A good article worth reading

[Sir_Galahad]

I enjoy reading Charles Krauthammer as he appears to be a no-spin kind of guy. This article was posted at townhall.com the other day. Yes, of course, it is a good article depending of how you view the events of the day.

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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.

[BigDrawMan]

chuck was in the p-g today.

chuck is not a "no-spin" guy, unless you meant it in a Bill O"reilly kind of way.

You will notice that Chuck put forward no ideas of his own on how to stanch the crisis.

Maybe he will get to that next week.

[peacock2121]

chuck was in the p-g today.

chuck is not a "no-spin" guy, unless you meant it in a Bill O"reilly kind of way.

You will notice that Chuck put forward no ideas of his own on how to stanch the crisis.

Maybe he will get to that next week.

and maybe T.O. will be a different kind of player in Buffalo.

[Jeemie]

chuck was in the p-g today.

chuck is not a "no-spin" guy, unless you meant it in a Bill O"reilly kind of way.

You will notice that Chuck put forward no ideas of his own on how to stanch the crisis.

Maybe he will get to that next week.

Why are you asking Krauthammer to do something Obama hasn't yet?

And I love the "attack the messenger" reply.

Maybe you'll stop doing stuff like that next week.

Although there's as much chance of you not using poisoning the well tactics as there is of TO being a different player in Buffalo.

Actually- there's probably a better chance of TO being a different player- he always behaves his first year with a team.

[BigDrawMan]

chuck was in the p-g today.

chuck is not a "no-spin" guy, unless you meant it in a Bill O"reilly kind of way.

You will notice that Chuck put forward no ideas of his own on how to stanch the crisis.

Maybe he will get to that next week.

and maybe T.O. will be a different kind of player in Buffalo.

chuck is a smart guy, he will only stick his neck out so far
Offering his own ideas can cost him his pundit license,if they turn out to be foolish.
And good ideas are hard to come up with.

[Jeemie]

chuck is a smart guy, he will only stick his neck out so far
Offering his own ideas can cost him his pundit license,if they turn out to be foolish.
And good ideas are hard to come up with.

Actually, Krauthammer offers his own ideas many times.

He had a great solution on how to fund a transition off of foreign oil while funding alternative energy at the same time...one that should have been passed 20 years ago...but both Congress and Reagan shot it down.

But please...keep attacking the messenger instead of the article...because I know in your world, if Rush Limbaugh says the sun is shining, that means it's dark out!

[Jeemie]

Here's my take, so bdm can see how you critique the substance of an article, rather than divert attention by attacking the messenger.

Krauthammer is wrong on the energy portion of Obama's plans- Obama's plans for energy make sense- we not only need to solve the immediate problem of the banks, we need to set the foundation for future growth- which alternate energy is going to be. I would include more nuclear, AND development of our oil sources offshore and in Alaska- if only because we will need fossil fuel inputs AND the wealth those inputs would bring to lay the foundation for the alternative energy future.

Krauthammer is wrong on the education portion of Obama's plans- we trail the rest of the world- DANGEROUSLY- in advanced degrees in the science/technical arena. I think the problem of "over-educated, smart-ass MBAs" has taken care of itself quite nicely.

Krauthammer is RIGHT about Obama's health care plans- this has JACK SQUAT to do with our economic issues, and is indeed Obama using the crisis to advance an agenda item of his. Typical of politicians to do so.

Krauthammer is RIGHT that Obama has diddled long enough on solving the bank crisis- but here again I stick with the old adage- when you ask bankers to solve economic problems, do not be surprised when the solutions they come up with enrich bankers. Here we need to quietly stop the bailouts, nationalize the banks and clean up their assets, then sell the banks back to the private sector.

ALONG WITH tightening up the regulations on the financial industries and punishing those bankers that misrepresented risks.

But those are also politically untenable solutions, which the right squawks at, so I'm not surprised those are taking so long to roll out.

So anyhow- THAT'S how you actually address the ISSUES, rather than simply ATTACK the messenger.