Victor Davis Hanson at the National Review Online has
ten lessons from President
Downgrade Obama. Here are selections (emphasis mine):
The election of Barack Obama brought all sorts of contradictions. A man with about the least prior executive experience in presidential history was suddenly acclaimed a “god” and the smartest man ever to assume the office.
Most important, a number of critical changes were heralded that would help address the supposed disasters of the Bush administration: a new “reset” foreign policy, a Keynesian economic miracle, a commitment to “millions of green jobs,” and a promise to end politics as usual, specifically the hardball divisive rancor of the past. Obamism, in short, was not a mere change in administration, but a religion.
In less than three years, however, the Obama administration has established a far different legacy from the one it promised, and the lessons of 2009–2011 will be with us for a long time:
2. For the time being, the media have lost any credibility as nonpartisan and disinterested investigators of presidential candidates. That many journalists now admit they were “saps” or accept that Obama was unqualified only confirms prior culpability. After 2008, can anyone possibly take the media seriously [that ignored] a candidate ... once bragged that he attended every service (“each week”) of a racist pastor, or that he once liked “blow”?
4. ... The age of Obama has turned “green” into a refuge for scoundrels. The next era will be marked by unprecedented national wealth from vast new gas and oil exploration, not from thousands of acres of subsidized solar panels and windmills. How ironic that Barack Obama will eventually do more for the gas and oil industry than any other president in recent memory.
5. We are reminded that populism and the high life don’t mix. ... Obama cemented the notion that liberal Democrats are the party of really big money and of very little money — and of few in between. The next populist will have to cut back on golf, stay at Camp David, and avoid the playgrounds of the rich and famous.
6 Keynesian economics are about over for a generation. The antidote to the Bush $4 trillion debt was not another $4 trillion in less than half the time. With near-zero interest rates, record numbers of Americans on food stamps and unemployment, an annual federal budget $2 trillion higher than just ten years ago, and nearly $16 trillion in aggregate debt — and all this along with a moribund economy — few will any longer believe that printing more money and growing government work. More of what has not worked won’t magically start to work. [Note: We can only hope about this one... ]
7. ... Apparently Guantanamo is no longer a gulag, rendition no longer a crime, preventive detention no longer a shredding of the Constitution.
Recommend you head over and read the whole thing. Is is our duty to the nation that we don't let our nation forget these lessons.
2 comments:
There is a huge psychological barrier to the "end of Keynesianism" thing. It's true, but it is still unaccepted by much of the public.
In a lot of ways, Obama's election was collective wishful thinking. Everyone knew he wasn't qualified. People chose him precisely because he was willing to believe, and say, three impossible things before breakfast every morning.
>> People chose him precisely because he was willing to believe, and say, three impossible things before breakfast every morning.
In short, he was the ideal libtard:
No rational sense of any kind need apply inside.
I concur with MOM that the prediction of the end of Keynesianism is premature. It is stunned, rocked back on its heels, yes, but, like Marxism, it tickles the mood centers of a certain class of people:
"Karl Marx is to economists what Khalil Gibran is to philosophers.
In the real world there is no Marxist program, but inside the
human brain he tickles the mood centers."
- Alexis A. Gilliland, 'Long Shot for Rosinante' -
OTOH, though, we are raising a generation who grasps what a ludicrous stinking pile of festering dung it is, so it will be weak and powerless for another generation until we get a new crop of Useful Idiots to whom it can appeal to.
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