In America, one of the great liberal documents of the world is the Declaration of Independence. One of the great conservative documents of the world is the Constitution of the United States. We need both documents to build a country. One to get it started liberal. And the other to help maintain the structure over the years conservative.
Jim Rohn
Nostalgia for Hillary Clinton? Give Me a Break
I'm not going to embed the video here, although Hillary Clinton seems to be one of those Democrats (along with Blago) that Fox News seems strangely obsessed with: I've seen this Chicago dentist William DeJean interviewed at least twice on the brief occasions I watched Fox over the past week. I'm not sure why, except some media conservatives, e.g., Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin have inexplicably expressed admiration for her.
I never had Hillary Clinton derangement syndrome, but there is not a single substantive political issue with which we share a common standpoint. If you go by American Conservative Union ratings, Hillary has a rating of roughly 8%--even below Obama's 10%; she, like Obama, had no executive experience prior to the Obama Administration. Hillary Clinton has no natural leadership skills or charisma and despite the natural advantage of being First Lady, beat Lazio by a margin of 12%, in a heavily Democratic state. I dislike her stridency and polarizing rhetoric (who can forget the paranoid "vast right-wing conspiracy"?), her uncivil Bush-bashing which was only second to Obama's, and the bizarre disproved Bosnia visit claim of having to dodge sniper fire.
DeJean buys into Hillary Clinton's patently absurd campaign hype claiming executive experience from being the wife of an Arkansas governor and the US President, and he buys into a fantasy that Bill Clinton's economic policies were responsible for 22 million jobs and/or balanced budgets. This ignores a number of facts: a GOP-controlled Congress holding down spending for 6 of Clinton's 8 years, decreases of military spending after the end of the Cold War, massive infusions of liquidity into the economy by the Fed (Y2K fears et al.), driving stock and real estate bubbles. But even more to the point, the Obama Administration itself has a huge contingent of Clinton Administration veterans (including the economic team, e.g., Larry Summers).
Bill Clinton may have fumed about Obama's "biggest fairy tale I've ever seen", but DeJean is buying into an even bigger fairy tale: the Clintonian Camelot.
Obama Labor Day Speech: An Initial Reflection
Obama just doesn't get it on so many levels, one hardly knows where to start, and I don't want to bore the reader by repeating myself. If you read yesterday's post, I provided a number of thought-provoking quotations. But first of all, I dislike red meat politics, whether it's from the right or the left. I do realize that negative ads sometimes work. But the negative attacks turn off voters; what initially won people to Obama was his personal style: they thought Obama was a fresh face, a post-partisan whom could unite people together. What do the American voters see? They see a President whom has 59 votes in the Senate and an overwhelming majority in the House, and the President is so partisan in his approach he has failed to attract even a handful of Republicans on both houses of Congress. They see a Senate health bill which is so compelling that Majority Leader Reid has to cut special deals to pass it. The same bill barely wins in the House as dozens of Democrats bail and the President has to cut a deal with an executive order to keep even more Democrats from defecting. Now you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. There is no way you can explain corrupt deal making necessary to pass a clean bill. Obama makes gimmicky efforts to try to convince people he's open to negotiation: making a brief appearance at a House GOP retreat and a one-day bipartisan summit. After that, he'll unilaterally decide what kind of concessions he'll accept, typically weakened versions. A classic example was broadening offshore oil and gas after the 2008 oil bubble; the west coast was off limits, and even new wells in the Gulf have to be miles away from the nearest beach.
Well, anyone who thinks we can move this economy forward with a few doing well at the top, hoping it'll trickle down to working folks running faster and faster just to keep up - they just haven't studied our history. We didn't become the most prosperous country in the world by rewarding greed and recklessness. We didn't come this far by letting special interests run wild. We didn't do it by just gambling and chasing paper profits on Wall Street. We did it by producing goods we could sell; we did it with sweat and effort and innovation. We did it by investing in the people who built this country from the ground up - workers, and middle-class families, and small business owners. We did it by out-working, out-educating, and out-competing everyone else.You've got to admit the guy has chutzpah. Notice how he tries to get you to buy into his vision of a manufacturing-centric America; over the past 2 to 3 decades, we've seen the tertiary sector of the economy (i.e., the service sector) become the largest and fastest-growing over the primary (e.g., agricultural) and secondary (manufacturing), not just in America. He refers to banking (part of the service industry) in terms of "greed and recklessness", "gambling and chasing paper products". He says more positive things about the secondary industry ("producing goods we could sell").
We do it by "out-working"? With rigid union-negotiated work rules and opposition to merit pay? With years of unemployment insurance benefits? "Out-competing" when Obama has failed to enact multiple trade pacts with American allies (e.g., South Korea and Colombia) years after the Bush Administration negotiated them? When Obama continues to maintain among the highest business income tax brackets among the developed economies? "Out-educating"? I thought that was part of the tertiary sector. But why is it that public charter schools, with randomly chosen students, operating at a fraction of the budget of other public schools, staffed by teacher unions, perform better?
You want innovation? You don't get it by punishing economic success by taxing more of it away. You don't get it by refusing to reform legal immigration, giving more opportunities to entrepreneurial-minded or technically-proficient immigrants, not giving recent high-degreed foreign students the right to a green card to stay and work in America.
Talk about clueless; Obama wants to lecture us about history, while he pursues policies consistent with European countries with low economic growth and high unemployment? Where was he this year while Greece, Spain and Italy (among other countries) were fighting for an economic future and agreed to slash spending, and raise the retirement eligibility age?
I have only begun to rebut.
Political Humor
More originals:
- Where do you always find Barack Obama when he plays hide-and-go-seek? He always hides behind the Bush.
- What's Obama the Magician's favorite trick? Making money disappear while men are sitting on their wallets.
Musical Interlude: The American Songbook Series
Mills Brothers, "Paper Doll"
