Free Barack!Read the whole thing here.
Yes, free the president from his flacks, fixers and goons - his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes, who were shrewd enough to beat the slow, pompous Clintons in the mano-a-mano primaries but who seem like dazed lost lambs in the brave new world of federal legislation and global statesmanship.
A picture of Ms. Paglia is here (accompanied by a flirting reference to Paglia's Rule 5 possiblities).
How about Elizabeth Drew? Is she Rule 5 material? I ask because Ms. Drew's got a new essay up at the New York Review, "The Thirty Days of Barack Obama." She's liberal, but I always enjoy reading her essays. This passage on the early GOP opposition to the administration is worth quoting:
The House Republicans, greatly reduced by the 2006 and 2008 elections, were now as a whole more conservative than they've been in a generation—moderate Republicans having been reduced to a mere dozen or so. There were signs from the outset that the Republicans had no intention of cooperating with Obama. Lacking the leverage to affect policy, or the votes sufficient to defeat Obama's stimulus plan, they could do what they wanted, however short-sighted, without being saddled with responsibility for killing it. Moreover, they concluded from their losses in 2008 that they hadn't been conservative enough; they had come under a great deal of criticism for having presided over too much spending. The House has been particularly polarized for decades: when each party gains the majority, it takes revenge for having been, as they see it, mistreated by the other. Since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was rushing the bill through the House, it was easy for Republican leaders to get their followers worked up against it. Emotion —over issues, over procedure—plays a larger part in parliamentary politics than people may realize.Drew's the ultimate Washington insider, and she provides a glimpse into the inner workings of West Wing (President Obama "restlessly roams" the White House, checking in with staffers to see how things are going; and he's a delegator, which means "the boys" are running the place, like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Senior Advisor David Axelrod).
Almost all the House Republicans come from conservative districts and hold safe seats. And in the House and the Senate, Republicans could, and did, resort to the often successful ruse of saying that they voted against the bill not because they were against what it's trying to do—heavens no—but because it wasn't good enough. The Republicans believed that they were taking no great gamble in opposing the stimulus bill: they figured—perhaps mistakenly—that since the 2010 election was far off, their votes would likely be forgotten. (The Democrats are already running ads against some of them.) They also figured that if the economy began to recover by then, Obama would get all the credit anyway. So, two hours before the new president was to go to the exceptional length of traveling to Capitol Hill to meet with the House Republicans to discuss the stimulus bill, Minority Leader John Boehner sent word to his ranks to oppose it.
I'll have more later ...
Thank you for an interesting post. It does seem like Mr. Obama didn't have a very good pick on his advisers. From all the mistakes they made and all the confusion around the white house they sure don't make Mr. Obama look very good. But, like Ms. Paglia, I too still believe in Mr. Obama, not just because of his book sales, but because he has some great ideas and made some very good decisions already in his very short time at the White House, for example as the most recent stem cell research funding. It's actions like these that'll make him undo all the mistakes of his advisers.
ReplyDeleteTake care, Elli
Uh, Toronto Realtor,
ReplyDeleteYour obvious disregard for human life aside, just where exactly in the United States Constitution does the federal government derive the authority to confiscate part of my income in order to fund scientific research?
I have a framed copy of said document affixed to the wall, and have read it in its entirety many times.
Strange, but I do not recall such a provision within it.
-Dave
Dave, I shall cite the constitution:
ReplyDelete"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."
--Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
By your logic, all taxes would be considered confiscated illegally. It's taxes that pay for this research, yes, but it's definitely not wasted money. I wonder if decades ago people agreed to put money in researching heart diseases. I'm sure it involved actual tests on hear disease patient and I'm 100% positive some of these patients died as a result of those tests but yet here we are decades later doing heart transplants and saving lives each day. And I'm sorry but we may have different definitions of a human life. I hope I didn't cause any conflicts, just stating my opinion on this.
Take care, Elli