Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

When Caught Raiding the Cookie Jar, Mr. Obama, Obfuscate

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There are other examples. Jimmy Carter comes to mind. His obfuscation over a faltering economy? Rescue the hostages from Iran. But since he’d pulled the underpinnings out from under the military’s conventional weapons support structure, the rescue crashed and burned in the desert. So did the Democrats’ hopes in the 1980 election. (Among others, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J… )

We could go on. “Read my lips, no new taxes!” Or The Great Aspirin Factory Bombing. (This is after all, an equal opportunity critique.)

But never in my aging memory has a Congressional honeymoon been over with so quickly for a new President. His own party dominates a Congress, which, unwilling to put up with any more corruption, shredded his list of Cabinet Appointees, with a whole bunch of “wait a minute, not so fast,” stoplights. He is under attack by members of both the left and the right for the obscene Wall Street, auto industry and bank bailouts. The media are ripe with innuendo, intimation, and even some outright accusations of Chicago-style corruption wandering around loose in the new administration. Obama’s response?

Obfuscate. Go after the military’s “bloated budget.” http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/200… But wait a minute, here. His proposed budget? 3.5 TRILLION. The military’s proposed share? 664 billion.

That’s less than 19 percent. That’s a dollar increase of 1.5 percent over this year. Gee, inflation is running more than twice that. I just got a Social Security COLA of almost three times that.

And, for all of his conservatism, Rosenberger makes some salient points, http://www.americanthinker.com…

Regarding Mr. Obama’s opinions about the government’s role in railroad origins, public education, the GI Bill’s effects, and what a great job Obama thinks the government has done ‘catalyzing private enterprise.’

And earmarks? “What earmarks?” How about, Mr. Obama, if we start with the 9,247 mentioned in a bill you’re touting, by your erstwhile opponent in the recent to-do over who would occupy your new residence? http://www.thenextright.com/wa…

Gun control? http://cayankee.blogs.com/caya…

The Blago statement? http://campaignspot.nationalre…

And, will the real Obama birth certificate please stand up? http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad…

Mr. Obama appears headed down a slippery slope of obfuscation. He should take note: it has politically destroyed a lot of presidents. And he is not immune; the American people, you see, have long memories.

One final comment. A lot of the sources quoted here are conservative. That doesn’t alter the truth of their content a whit.

Best,

Chuck

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Comments

  2. So the big lead-in to this article, the big scoop (linked from another righty, natch, although whether “Larwyn” is also an Ayn Rand disciple is unknown, at least until somebody cares enough to check) is that…

    <

    p>Wait for it…

    <

    p>Somebody changed Obama’s name on his wikipedia page from “Obama Jr.” to “Obama II”.

    <

    p>Well, stop the freaking presses, and kindly reposition them over the internet tubes that are forced to spend their lives transmitting this crap.

  3. Here are some interesting economics blogs that are well worth reading:

    Paul Krugman
    Calculated Risk
    Baseline Scenario
    Brad DeLong
    Mark Thoma
    Econbrowser
    Naked Capitalism
    RGE Monitor:Nouriel Roubini
    The Big Picture

    If you must read conservatives, might I suggest that The Next Right seems like the most interesting place to go these days. NRO and Weekly Standard are looking pretty dumb these days. RedState is focusing on scandals, as far as I can tell, as long as such scandals don’t involve the Bush Administration. Like Drudge, it is obsessed with the attacks on Rush Limbaugh. RMG has been very dull of late. So I think Next Right is the best you can do.

          • Do you take seriously the publications of the Flat Earth Society? Do you carefully weigh their arguments? How about advocates of the Ptolmeic system that had the sun revolving around the earth? Do you carefully weigh their pros and cons.

            <

            p>No, you don’t.

            <

            p>No one does.

            <

            p>I know we’re all so biased toward round and Copernican.

            <

            p>Some conservatives in the last eight years have indicated a similar disinterest in truth. Senator Santorum is among them. I’m happy to wait until someone I trust says “Rick Santorum is onto something” before bothering to separate truth from nonsense.

            <

            p>Or let me state it differently. They lied us into a war. Just one example. The forgeries about Niger. Most of Europe knew they were forgeries. Ambassador Wilson merely confirmed the obvious. Did our Lovers of Truth say, “No, Iraq is not seeking uranium from Niger. Sorry, we got that wrong, but we shouldn’t have.”

            <

            p>No, they did not.

            <

            p>What did our Lovers of Truth say after the falsity was revealed? “Oops”? “Sorry”? “This shouldn’t have happened”? “The Bush Administration should be more careful in matters of national security”?

            <

            p>No, they said none of that.

            <

            p>There is no reason to read them anymore. They are not lovers of truth.

            <

            p>Good-bye.

  4. That was about the stimulus bill (0 earmarks), not the budget (many earmarks, disproportionately Republican).

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    p>At 19%, Defense remains the biggest, and least checked part of the budget.  Does your 19% figure include Iraq and Afghanistan?

    <

    p>And yes, mentioning the birth certificate thing strikes a lot of credibility from this entire post.

    • Lighten up on the birth certificate thing, already! It was a JOKE!

      <

      p>I mean, I didn’t take SNL seriously when they did their little cut-ups about Sarah Palin.

      <

      p>Best,
      Chuck

      • You have no sense of your audience, do you?

        <

        p>Either that or your purpose is to be a distraction.

        <

        p>Back to business:

        <

        p>What do people think of this refutation of the Treasury View. The Treasury View was the approach the British Treasury tried to take during the Great Depression. The anti-stimulus conservatives appear to be repeating it — at least that is what Brad deLong and Paul Krugman claim. Questions I have:

        1. Are conservatives recapping the Treaury View?
        2. Does the linked article refute it?

        • My ‘audience’ I have believed is a rather well-read one, and I thus expect them to relate to a satirical statement when they see it. Or perhaps it is true, as the conservatives believe, that the Ivy League just isn’t what it used to be . . . And my purpose is not to distract, but to foment rational thought and contemplated response.

          <

          p>Back to business. The Treasury View was an economic surreality of the simplistic kind. It totally failed, in its infinitely highest-level complexity, to take into account the lowest-level exchequer. And it would even more totally fail, in today’s complex fiscal environment.

          <

          p>If you have a widget, and I have a shekel, or the ability to borrow one (KEY FACTOR!) we might come to agreement regarding an exchange. Exchange happens, and two satisfied people go their ways.

          <

          p>Progressively, complexity is added to the lowest level by such complications as taxing the exchange, taxing the earning of the shekel itself, the cost of marketing and stocking the widget, the fixed and variable overheads associated with the production of the widget in the first place, the costs of the bureaucracy overseeing the society in which the exchange takes place, and the necessity to pay for non-producers of other kinds; for instance government employees, or welfare recipients, or my military retirement check.

          <

          p>And, complexity is added, if I borrow the shekel to buy the widget, and I’m not good for the money. But if I’m not as smart as some of the people in the exchequer, whose income is based on the shekels they can loan, and if I’m not smart enough to understand that I really am NOT good for the money, well, Houston, we’ve got a problem.

          <

          p>And, when the burden of the government becomes so great as to interfere with the exchange(s), they stop happening,  if the government shovels money into this, the money is gone. Kaput. Evaporated like so much WAMU stock.

          <

          p>I could go on, but you get the idea. The Treasure View failed, because it didn’t examine the whole picture, IMHO.

          <

          p>So, are the capitalist warmongers guilty of the same short-sightedness?

          <

          p>Some of them are. They are the ones who dive into these waters without knowing where the rocks are. The careful investor wades in slowly, and checks and double-checks the rocks’ location, before wading further.

          <

          p>I see the former at freeway off-ramps, all the time.

          <

          p>So, based on this oversimplified analysis, no, the conservatives are not recapping the Treasury View. What they are doing is sounding an alarm. Don’t go there, we aren’t good for the money.

          <

          p>And in a seemingly contradictory view, to answer a seemingly contradictory question, the article doesn’t refute the Treasurey View. Its model is too simplistic.

          <

          p>Best,
          Chuck

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