And These Are Intellectuals?
By Larry Johnson on March 3, 2009 at 2:05 PM in Current Affairs
My neighbor, Mr. David Brooks (I can see his house from my office window), is a moron. How else do you explain his latest scribblings?
[T]he Obama budget is more than just the sum of its parts. There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. There is evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor — caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it to solve all problems at once…
Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”
Moderates now find themselves betwixt and between. On the left, there is a president who appears to be, as Crook says, “a conviction politician, a bold progressive liberal.” On the right, there are the Rush Limbaugh brigades. The only thing more scary than Obama’s experiment is the thought that it might fail and the political power will swing over to a Republican Party that is currently unfit to wield it.
You conveniently ignored the fact that Barack Obama buddied up with some of the most radical left folk in Chicago–Billy Ayers, Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger–and now express surprise that he is a “transformational” liberal?
You now discover that Barack is not who you thought he was? What the fuck!!?? Where did you go to school? It is one thing to be volunteer blogger who takes time to post their musings on the web–I don’t get paid for this nor is my economic well being dependent on the blog. But good god man!! You are a paid professional pundit. You make a six figure income ostensibly for your keen ability to observe the obscure and now you belatedly realize what tens of thousands of us recognized almost two years ago?
Well, at least you are not alone. Chris Buckley, who also drank the Barry Soetoro kool aid, now has a case of the pukes after waking from his Rumplestilskin state and reading the Obama budget:
Hold on—there’s a typo in that paragraph. “$3.6 trillion budget” can’t be right. The entire national debt is—what—about $11 trillion? He can’t actually be proposing to spend nearly one-third of that in one year, surely. Let me check. Hmm. He did. The Wall Street Journal notes that federal outlays in fiscal 2009 will rise to almost 30 percent of the gross national product. In language that even an innumerate English major such as myself can understand: The US government is now spending annually about one-third of what the entire US economy produces. As George Will would say, “Well.”…
If this is what the American people want, so be it, but they ought to have no illusions about the perils of this approach. Mr. Obama is proposing among everything else $1 trillion in new entitlements, and entitlement programs never go away, or in the oddly poetical bureaucratic jargon, “sunset.” He is proposing $1.4 trillion in new taxes, an appetite for which was largely was whetted by the shameful excesses of American CEO corporate culture. And finally, he has proposed $5 trillion in new debt, one-half the total accumulated national debt in all US history. All in one fell swoop.
Brooks and Buckley. If any of you folks are thinking about shelling out tens of thousands of dollars to send your kids to schools like the University of Chicago or Yale, save your dough. Your spawn can go to a community college and turn out just as clueless as these two elite pundits.
by Ronald Scott
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