Posted on 04/06/2009 8:55:07 AM PDT by Borges
I have been watching an interesting phenomenon on the right, which is beginning to cause me concern. I am referring to the over-the-top hysteria in response to the first months in office of our new president, which distinctly reminds me of the "Bush is Hitler" crowd on the left.
Conservatives, please. Let's not duplicate the manias of the left as we figure out how to deal with President Obama. He is not exactly the antichrist, although a disturbing number of people on the right are convinced he is.
I have recently received commentaries that claim that "Obama's speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history" and "never has a politician in this land had such a quasi-religious impact on so many people" and "Obama is a narcissist," which leads the author to then compare Obama to David Koresh, Charles Manson, Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein. Excuse me while I blow my nose.
This fellow has failed to notice that all politicians are narcissists. So what? Political egos are one of the reasons the Founders put checks and balances on executive power. As for serial lying, is there a politician that cannot be accused of that? And once, a recent president set a pretty high bar in this category, and we survived it. As for Obama's speeches, they are hardly in the Huey Long, Louis Farrakhan, Fidel Castro vein. They are in fact eloquently and cleverly centrist and sober.
So what's the panic? It is true that Obama has shown surprising ineptitude in his first months in office, but he's not a zero with no accomplishments, as many conservatives seem to think -- unless you regard beating the Clinton machine and winning the presidency as nothing. But in doing this, you fall into the "Bush-is-an-idiot" bag of liberal miasmas.
It is also true Obama has ceded his domestic economic agenda to the House Democrats and spent a lot of money in the process. But what's the surprise in this? After all, George W. Bush and John McCain both proposed (and in Bush's case pushed through) massive government giveaways (which amount to government takeovers as well). This is bad, but it doesn't make Obama a closet Mussolini, however deplorable the conservatives among us may regard it. Moreover, he has run into political resistance even within his own party. Charlie Rangel has made it clear that the itemized deduction tax hike is not going through his committee -- and that should tell you the American system is still in place.
Even as astute a conservative thinker as Mark Steyn has been swept up in the tide that thinks Obama is a "transformative" radical. But look again at his approach to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both cases, he is carrying out the Bush policies -- the same that he once joined his fellow Democrats in condemning. And that should be reassuring to anyone concerned about where he is heading as commander in chief.
In other words, while it's reasonable to be unhappy with a Democratic administration and even concerned because the Democrats are now a socialist party in the European sense, we are not witnessing the coming of the antichrist. A good strategy for political conflicts is to understand your opponent first -- not to underestimate him, but not to overestimate him, either.
As we move forward, Obama faces increasingly tough choices in the wars against Islamic fascism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gaza and Iran. Hopefully, he will make the right choices, and should he do so, conservatives will need to be there to support him. If he makes the wrong choices, conservatives will need to be there to oppose him. But neither our support nor our opposition should be based on hysterical responses to policies that we just don't like. Let's leave that kind of behavior to the liberals who invented it.
“Has he got a mouse in his pocket?”
I think the “we” implies that he has a turd in his pocket.
I gotta tell you, hb, you should be writing columns somewhere. Seriously. Ever try that?
RINO apologist.
We’re watching him on Iran & Defense, also. It’s not “either-or”, at least not with me (mr. tinfoil hat)
GM should have been allowed to go bankrupt.
This is one i can agree with you on.
"But I want the private sector to decide" this that and the other. Sure. Well, here is what the private sector has decided - capital entrusted to the US treasury, 2%; capital entrusted to US banks, 12%. Capital entrusted to General Motors, 40% with no volume. The private market *refuses* to hand over allocation decisions to *other* private-market actors. But is entirely willing to let the US treasury do it.
Your approval of that fact, your bare recognition of that fact, is not required for it to be a fact. And the dominant, operative fact at this present moment in US economic affairs.
That being the case, the Federal Reserve and the US treasury are in charge of the survival and the success of capitalism. The private sector *gave it up* six months ago.
The Federal Reserve and the US treasury, yes even under Obama, desires the continued existence of capitalism. Capitalism will survive and in no great span of years it will once again prosper. That is its nature and its genius, that it can rise from the dead and adapt. But no, you cannot ensure that survival by insisting that it has already happened. It hasn't.
It is *normal* that the government support private industry and private finance in the smash. It has been that way since the 1600s, as long as there has been modern finance and modern capitalism. Your ideological utopias being too narrow in time, too limited in historical sense, too formulaic and not empirical enough about the messy practicalities of our true history, are *your* problem.
So no, screaming that socialism is upon us and all is doomed, when the Fed and treasury are in the act of saving capitalism from one of its periodic, self inflicted fits of madness, isn't going to win you anything. It isn't a true diagnosis of what is happening, it counsels all the wrong policies (because entirely unworkable), it refuses to face facts, and it is far too mired in a mere passing episode that will soon be forgotten by everyone other than the hyperventilators peddling right now.
The author is right. You need to *calm*. *Down*.
Don’t worry, Jason, there’s plenty more he’s doing to destabilize the foundations besides just economic assaults. There’s plenty to focus on. Too much. In fact, it often seems overwhelming.
There are important issues involved. We can disagree and move on from here. If you can't get hold of Mark Levin's book, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America by George Nash or Thomas Sowell's book Marxism would also come in handy. Opposition to statism is integral to conservatism. It is not based solely on economic determinism or militarism. Playful political humor is also part of that. The nutjobophobia tangent, while interesting and amusing, will not advance conservatism very far in this cycle. It is important to distinguish between political jokes and the more serious charges of Communism that might arise.
Whatever Disagreements Obama might have had with Edmund Burke and the Marquess of Salisbury perhaps Prof. Strauss's Natural Right and History would be the route to go for those seeking a different kind of debate. Or do you think Rousseau? With the crapstorm and nutjob problem at the basis of this. It would seem like Obama would find some sympathy with Rousseau, particularly with the Third World Banana Republic direction. He could always take that up with Sarkozy the next time he is explaining why he is embarrassed by America. It all boils down to the problem of the will and how they view the claims of the state over the individual.
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