JIMENEZ: JASON COLLINS,THE NO 98 AND MATTHEW SHEPHARD
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WITHOUT DEFENDING OBAMA'S FAILED PRESIDENCY for even a second, Republican
obsession with him that includes the assertion that he's "ruining the country"
gives a charitably average politician and thinker way too much credit, is an
insult to Americans for presuming someone so second rate could reduce them to
prostrate supplicants of the State, and it ignores the myriad GOP policy
failures up to 2008 that made Obama's presidency possible in the first place.
Forbes.com.
By John Tamny
To
read, listen to, or watch much Republican commentary today is to be told that
President Obama is ruining the country. About Obama, it should be said up front
that he's very much a failed president.
That
said, for Republicans to say with such certainty that Obama is ruining the U.S.
is for them to pay him quite the compliment. They should be a little bit more
circumspect. The fortunes of countries rise and fall all the time.
China
almost literally committed suicide after World War II with its rush into the
murderous horrors of communism, and then England's post-war lurch toward
socialism tragically impoverished a once great nation. But at present China is
booming, and England too is alive with economic activity.
For
Republicans to say that Obama is doing un-fixable damage to the U.S. is for them
to ascribe otherworldly charisma and powers to him, and that plainly don't
exist. Worse, they're saying that a less than impressive politician can in six
years wreck the richest and most entrepreneurial nation ever formed. That's not
likely, and it's an insult to Americans for Republicans to presume they're so
weak as to let someone of Obama's ilk bring them down. If China can rebound from
Mao, the U.S. can and will surely rebound from Obama.
Part
of the Republican line about Obama is that he's imposed the biggest deficits in
history on the U.S. Actually, he hasn't. Presidents per the Constitution can't
spend money, rather Congress allocates funds. In that case, the Democrats
controlled the purse from 2006 until 2010, but since then the Republican Party
has managed spending. Democrats were notorious for labeling Ronald Reagan's
relatively austere budgets as "Dead on Arrival," so why don't the Republicans do
the same to Obama, only in reverse?
And
while deficits obscure the much bigger economic problem that is spending, the
Republicans have been in control of Congress the majority of the time since
1994, including some years under a Republican president in George W. Bush. Where
was the spending restraint then, and budget "surpluses," when Bush was in
office?
As
for Obamacare, Republicans should be thanking President Obama every night for
foisting this disaster on the nation. It's failing before our eyes due to its
myriad contradictions, and in collapsing it's vividly exposing the fatal conceit
of big government programs to voters. Obamacare is the best thing that ever
happened to the freedom movement, so rather than bemoan this obnoxious bit of
government overreach, Republicans should enjoy its implosion while talking
loudly about how the federal government should have no role in the provision of
healthcare in the first place.
Most
comical of all, Republicans like to claim that Obama wouldn't be president today
if he weren't black. If by that they mean that Americans are generous in spirit,
that's fine. But it doesn't seem to be what many mean. Instead, Republicans seem
to be saying that absent Obama's skin color, the electorate would have put John
McCain into the White House while revealing their preference for a continuation
of Republican policies that had prevailed up to 2008. This is dangerous and
rather foolhardy thinking.
The
Republicans lost big in 2008 because the Party of Growth and entrepreneurial
capitalism in the '80s had by the 2000s morphed into something quite different.
Lest we forget, it was President Bush who signed the business-sapping
Sarbanes-Oxley law (at the time he bragged it was the toughest anti-business
"crime" law since the days of FDR), a McCain-Feingold bill that restricted free
speech, and with a Republican Congress largely in control of the purse, it was
Bush who never vetoed obnoxiously large budgets, not to mention his signing of a
rather expensive prescription drug benefit.
It
was also Bush who foisted on us a brutally cruel economic "blessing" in the form
of Ben Bernanke, imposed tariffs on steel, shrimp and softwood
lumber all the while bashing China, promoted with great gusto an
economy-crushing devaluation of the dollar that authored an economy-strangling
rush into the consumption of housing, and then when the markets revealed the
horrors of Bush's policies with bank failures, rather than allow the capitalist
system to fix his myriad errors, Bush, working with Treasury Secretary Henry
Paulson and Bernanke, decided to blame the markets for not working right such
that they bailed out banks that the free markets had decided were not worth
saving. In committing their egregious bailout errors Bush and Bernanke fostered
a wholly unnecessary "financial crisis" that had nothing to do with capitalism,
and everything to do with them running away from it. And in blocking the
infinite and very curative wonders of the marketplace, they robbed our economy
of a substantial recovery.
We
don't suffer a presidency today that is an affront to good governance because of
President Obama's ethnicity, rather we have a lousy president because the
Republicans proved in the 2000s that they could easily match the Democrats when
it came to obtuse policymaking. Until the Republicans realize this and
acknowledge just how poorly their own party governed while in control, they
won't be credible.
Of
course, that's what's so concerning about their whining about Hillary Clinton. It says here that she won't run for president as
is, and that if she doesrun she won't get the nomination, but it's been
suggested on the right that Clinton will get the nomination, and that the
mainstream media will give her a free pass in terms of coverage all the way to
the White House.
Ok,
it's probably fair to say that the mainstream media will be easier on her
assuming she runs, but so what? As an aged USA Today piece by Peter
Johnson noted about Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1984, coverage of him was over
90 percent negative. Despite this, the electorate wasn't fooled such that Reagan
won 49 states out of 50; his success coming without Fox News,Rush
Limbaugh, and all manner of alternative media sources that we enjoy today,
and that tell us what the mainstream media does not.
To
be blunt, if the Republicans can't field a candidate in 2016 to beat Hillary
Clinton and all her baggage, or another Democratic Party candidate carrying the
heavy weight of President Obama's numerous failings on his or her shoulders,
they'll only have themselves to blame. Logic dictates a Republican victory in
light of Obama's implosion, and if not, a logical answer for why will be the
ongoing failure on the part of the GOP to look in the mirror, and wake up to the
fact that the electorate got it right in firing an aimless, increasinglystatist,
and largely anti-growth party in 2006 and 2008.
The
late great free-market columnist Warren Brookes long ago wrote that envy "is the
single most impoverishing attitude of thought." The Republicans thankfully
aren't the Party of envy as their reliably dense competitors in the Democratic
Party are, but as evidenced by all their wailing about President Obama and
Hillary Clinton, their thinking is similarly impoverishing. Rather than spending
so much time obsessing about their opponents, and elevating them in the process,
they should rejoice in their failures that are discrediting big government with
each passing day, and that will reward the Republicans if they develop a clue
about how economies grow.
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1 comment:
Linked here: http://bobagard.blogspot.com/2014/03/envy-is-getting-us-nowhere.html
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