Showing posts with label David Brooks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Brooks. Show all posts

Thursday, March 05, 2009

For Some Obamaniacs, Chickens Are Roosting

If the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama "Twittered" - Image Credit: DC Examiner/Beeler

For Some Obamaniacs, Chickens Are Roosting

Way back in November 3, 2008, when the net worth of all people who had money in the stock market was worth about 100% more than it is today, many people voted for Barack Obama because he represented a new way. Hope and Change were the bywords of the new insider and euphoria was in the air.

Then the reality of an Obama Presidency hit them smack in the face and in six short weeks he has been in office, the “Chickens Have Come Home To Roost”.

Many good meaning liberal, independent, and moderate voices in the media are now beginning to voice their disappointment in the direction this Presidency is taking our country and they are seeing that the fantasy is a lot better feeling than the reality of this 44th Presidency.

FIASCO - The one word that will describe the 44th Presidency of the United States - Image Credit: Edmund Jenks (2008)

This excerpted and edited from Pajamas Media –

‘I’m Maureen Dowd, and I’ve Been Had’

A support group for bitter pundits disappointed in Obama is quickly becoming necessary.

March 4, 2009 - by Jennifer Rubin


They may need a support group before the month is out. They could gather in New York or Washington where many victims reside. The meetings would start: “I’m Maureen [or David]. I’m a duped Barack voter. And I’m mad.”

The ranks indeed are filling with the disaffected and the disappointed — Chris Buckley, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, David Gergen, and even that gynecological sleuth and blogger Andrew Sullivan.
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Their complaints are varied but expressed with equal amounts of remorse and bitterness. They all have been done wrong by Barack.

Chris Buckley is in mourning over the loss of fiscal sobriety and the sense he has enabled a spend-aholic:

Mr. Obama is proposing among everything else $1 trillion in new entitlements, and entitlement programs never go away, or in the oddly poetic bureaucratic jargon, “sunset.” He is proposing $1.4 trillion in new taxes, an appetite for which was largely 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 U.S. history. All in one fell swoop.

He tells us that all this is going to work because the economy is going to be growing by 3.2 percent a year from now. Do you believe that? Would you take out a loan based on that? And in the three years following, he predicts that our economy will grow by 4 percent a year.


Maureen Dowd has multiple complaints. She’s miffed that the post-racial president’s attorney general is playing the race card and she too has had it on the spending and business-as-usual fronts:

In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.
He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He was slated to make a speech on “wasteful spending” on Wednesday.

“You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation,” he said recently about the “hard choices” we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget.
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Team Obama sounds hollow, chanting that “the status quo is not acceptable,” even while conceding that the president is accepting the status quo by signing a budget festooned with pork.

Obama spinners insist it was “a leftover budget.”
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This is the first pork-filled budget from a new president who promised to go through the budget “line by line” and cut pork.
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But given how angry Americans are, watching their future go up in smoke, the bloated bill counts as this year’s business.

It includes $38.4 million of earmarks sponsored or co-sponsored by President Obama’s labor secretary, Hilda Solis; $109 million Hillary Clinton signed on to; and $31.2 million in earmarks sought by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood with colleagues.

(Even Barack Obama was listed as one of the co-sponsors of a $7.7 million pet project for Tribally Controlled Postsecondary Vocational Institutions until he got his name taken off last week.)

And then there are the 16 earmarks worth $8.5 million that Emanuel put into the bill when he was a congressman, including money for streets in Chicago suburbs and a Chicago planetarium.


Then there’s David Brooks who like Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction, sounds like he is quite remorseful to have chosen the wrong date. Looking for a moderate, he wound up with a crazed leftist:

You wouldn’t know it some days, but there are moderates in this country — moderate conservatives, moderate liberals, just plain moderates. We sympathize with a lot of the things that President Obama is trying to do. We like his investments in education and energy innovation. We support health care reform that expands coverage while reducing costs.
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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.

So programs are piled on top of each other and we wind up with a gargantuan $3.6 trillion budget. We end up with deficits that, when considered realistically, are $1 trillion a year and stretch as far as the eye can see.
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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.


And then there’s David Gergen who frets that not enough time is being spent on the economy (oh, that) and too much on an overly ambitious agenda. So he calls for a “course correction.”

Andrew Sullivan, back from his investigative work on the Sarah Palin pregnancy, has now discovered the fiscal conservatives have been had. Alas, his hopes for fiscal sobriety are being washed away in a spending spree worthy of a drunken sailor:

We are being presented with what can only be described as a massive increase in government spending and power with the only fiscal balance being wringing much more money from the successful. The president predicted a tight budget and spending control in his non-SOTU, and he appealed to fiscal conservatives by promising a long-term attack on entitlement spending. I see nothing here yet that fulfills that promise.
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All in all it is one dismayed and bitter group, filled with recriminations and a bit of self-flagellation.


They and the rest of the country are figuring out the bitter truth: Obama bears little resemblance to the moderate and soothing figure who tied up John McCain in knots. He bears even less resemblance to the Agent of Change. Rather he’s pretty much the Chicago pol who went to the Senate to be its most liberal member.

And for the wounded Obama supporters, we can offer just one bit of counsel: you have lots of company. There are trading floors filled with sympathetic souls and businesses filled with stunned executives. They didn’t get what they bargained for either. Just ask Jim Cramer. Oh yes, please do invite him to your sessions when he’s not busy with the “I lost my life’s savings” support group.
Reference Here>>

Even Chris Matthews of MSNBC is loosing that feeling he felt "running up and down his leg" and is taken aback at the level of spending this Presidency is putting forward and his lack of a commitment to a line by line review.

A proposed budget spending $3.6 Trillion dollars against a country that is running a total debt of between $10 and $11 Trillion dollars … a budget that is one-third of what we already owe ourselves and the world may actually begin to kill the chickens we wish to eat!

Our recovery from Obamamania is going to take way more ... than just “Twelve Steps”.

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