Hearing folks on the right carry-on about Obama needing to "be a leader" on the BP oil spill disaster thing, it drives me crazy. What kind of magic do people think the government can produce?
It's this whole "do something/do anything trap, we were told that sometimes things are so important that you have to just plunge forward and hope" that's put us in a mess to begin with.
When Palin agrees with Olbermann
Republican reaction to the president's reaction to the crude gushing in the Gulf of Mexico is a measure of how serious the GOP is about checking the spread of big government.
Every time I turn around, there's a Republican insisting that the Big "O" take over where Big Oil has (allegedly) left off. This Sarah Palin has been demanding as loudly as James Carville; Rep. Michele Bachmann as urgently as clown Keith Olbermann. The consensus on both sides of the political aisle seems to be that where British Petroleum has failed to stop the spread of the oil slick, the president will prevail.
If I didn't know Republicans better, I'd think they were making political hay out of the Deepwater Horizon leak, now in its 52nd day.
Baiting Barack with a takeover is cruel – to all of us. The meddlers got what they cried for, and then some. Obama will maintain the moratorium on drilling permits for six months. He has also suspended planned exploration drilling off the coasts of Alaska and Virginia as well as on 33 wells under way in the Gulf of Mexico.
The hyperventilating over presidential optics – for that is all Obama can be expected to achieve – is that BHO has gone "coastal," says the Washington Examiner's Julie Mason: "Instead of Australia, Guam and Indonesia, Obama heads back to the oil-slopped Gulf Coast next week for two days of squinting at the horizon and getting briefed by local officials. It's a no-win for Obama: If he goes, we wonder why. If he stays away, we go on cable to say he doesn't care."
So what does the idolatrous Idiocracy want from its Golden Calf?
It seems like a great political gotcha, and maybe even it is to some extent. But in the long run, it can only work against us.
For the most part, ‘nothing’ is precisely what government is supposed to do
When a political leader snidely ridicules the free market, characterizing those who challenge his initiatives to vastly expand federal regulation and management of the economy as being in the pay of “greedy insurance executives,” “big bankers,” and the like, I don’t see how anyone can argue that he’s not against the free market.
In fact, they don’t. Mr. Obama’s champions respond by citing all the injustices which they believe are wrought by the free market.
Therefore, ipso facto and by their own words, their agenda is anti-freedom.
Their fall-back position appears to be, “OK, we acted like fascists, but it’s all temporary, and it had to be done or things would have gotten much worse.”
But the huge government economic interventions of the past three years — under Bush and Obama both — have done far more harm than good. Angela Merkel in Germany resisted calls for huge government “stimulus” spending on the Bush-Obama-McCain model. Left to their own devices, German employment and modest economic recovery are now doing better than ours.
Every Obama promise about how “stimulus” spending would limit unemployment and other signs of deepening recession has proven wrong. And who would expect otherwise? I doubt there’s been an administration in history whose members have so little cumulative experience running real, for-profit businesses in the free market. And who but a permanent prisoner of the ivory tower would expect any benefit for the private sector from a policy of government soaking up all the nation’s available credit and channeling it to “protect’ existing government bureaucrat jobs?
The leftists cackle that non-Democrats “offer no solution” except to “do nothing.”
Precisely. Faced with a serious depression in 1921 as the American economy corrected from its wartime footing, Warren G. Harding did little to fight the necessary deflation, instead slashing government expenditures while advising that the bankruptcy courts were there for those who needed them. Once it was obvious Washington was not going to step in to prop up wages or prices or anything else, the free market made its adjustments, and the correction of 1921 was over in 18 months, setting the stage for the boom of the 1920s.
More often than not, the best thing government can do ... is nothing.
Well said sir. Great article.
[...] the hell kind of question is that? The Classic Liberal asks: What kind of magic do people think the government can [...]