Less celebrated is the profound misunderstanding inherent in Powell’s ideas which betray a thinly veiled liberal mind. Powell asserts that in order to appeal to liberals, the Republican party must stop listening to Rush, and it goes without saying, all others of his ilk.
What Powell clearly does not understand as a liberal, inexplicably pretending to be a conservative, is that in the market economy of ideas, supply meets demand; this is in contrast to the centrally planned economy of ideas which liberals fantasize where ideas are handed down to workers from the central committee.
Rush, Medved, Hewitt and Hannity have millions more patrons than Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews because they meet demand not create it. Sarah Palin did not push the party to the right in the waning days of the campaign. Conservatives reacted to seeing an actual conservative on the stage. You can put all the conservative talkers in the gulag and there will be new ones tomorrow. Legislate them off the AM dial and they will move to the satellite.
Governor Paterson’s suggested beverage tax in New York, proves the point about the liberal desire to over-reach. The proposed tax revives the nagging discussion about how Americans have become obese victims of fast food advertising and a complete lack of regulation controlling our ability to eat unrestricted quantities of pizza and donuts. Only the government can save us from our own gluttony?
Consider the efficacy of intrusive and regulations in the mortgage market. In order to ensure that no hapless borrowers are victimized while getting a home loan, the process includes about 3,000 impenetrable documents your lawyer couldn’t read in a week. Thanks to this shield of regulation, only half of your neighbors now claim they were the victims of mortgage fraud and bad mortgages are sinking our economy.
Principles made the Republican party great; limited government, lower taxes and a strong national defense. Many Americans still understand their power. If they are now a minority so be it. Powell describes these principles as our “baser instincts.” If only the party of Lincoln could could elevate their thinking to something truly noble and extra-constitutional like dictating the American diet, we would really be on the road to recovery.
Talk about defining deviancy down. If the incessant “rock star” tenor of the presidential campaign was not syrupy enough to trigger your gag reflex, today’s school girl euphoria over shirtless Obama photos may be the thing. I hope someone has revived Chris Matthews.
Yes, this does reflect poorly on Obama’s supporters in the media because it lays bare, so to speak, the depth of their thinking about Obama. While the President elect is being questioned in connection with the potentially criminal behavior of his closest political advisors, so called journalists are swooning over his physique. How do we rate the relative merits of Obama against say Stephen Harper? It’s hard to say. Most people don’t know who Stephen Harper is because his staff hasn’t arranged for him to appear shirtless on a beach. So there really isn’t much to talk about.
This is further evidence of genius in the Obama camp however. When the dialogue about the President centers on his next quote in Men’s Health, there is little room to be disappointed in his handling of trade policy. All the Obama team has to do is toss their lapdogs in the press a little beef stick and their short term memory is reset.
Obama is now backing away from his plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts. His campaign promise to pay for $4 trillion in new spending by squeezing the filthy rich (aka those making more than $250k a year) and repealing Bush’s modest tax cuts to the rest of us seemed sound. Astonishingly though, It turns out that raising taxes on anyone in the middle of a recession is not such a hot idea. Reality intrudes and the tax cuts stay.
This actually seems to be part of a larger pattern as Obama transitions into office and, as a conservative, I couldn’t be more pleased. As he fills out his cabinet and makes other appointments, I get the distinct feeling that we could possibly have done worse in some ways if McCain had won. Don’t get me wrong: I fully expect my conservative sensibilities to be deeply offended before long. But it’s interesting that the guy who ran around the world talking about bankrupting the coal industry, raising a civilian army (?), closing Gauntanamo, and causing the oceans to recede appears to be preparing to govern from the center. Funny how things change when you actually have to make the decisions that effect 300 million people’s lives.
Which brings me to President Bush. Liberals love to pronounce him the “Worst President In The History Of Our Country.” And possibly in the history of the universe! Of course history will be the judge of that. And history’s judgment will be based in part on the fact that our country hasn’t been attacked in more than seven years. I was thinking of this as I was reading Mark Steyn’s excellent column on the intricately planned terrorist attack in India this week.
As Steyn points out, there is a reason why this hasn’t happened in America recently. And it’s because when he’s not shredding copies of the constitution and listening in on my phone calls, President Bush is making the hard decisions that are necessary to protect our country. Obama will have to decide if he is going to honor every promise he’s made to those on his far-left flank, or if he’s going to make the same difficult decisions that President Bush has made in order to keep us safe.
It’s probably too much to expect Obama to keep Guantanamo open, but I look forward to the reaction from his multitudes of liberal fans when they discover that his foreign policy is not the ”change” they were hoping for. Faced with out current reality, liberal dreams of “hope” and “change” will likely be dashed. And many of President Bush’s decisions will be validated as Obama decides he has no choice but to continue with the status quo.
It is difficult to see the revival of The Fairness Doctrine as something other than an attempt finally limit the ability of conservatives to air their point of view.
How many times have you heard the “man on the street” manifest his intention to vote for Barack Obama because, well, he just sounds Presidential. They get a kind of vacant glassy eyed look and mumble something about how he looks the part of a President.
There is a lot more to Barack Obama than meets the eye and apparently, the mind, of the swing voter who estimates the duties of the president to be somewhere between Game Show host and News Anchor.
Senator Obama and the DNC have a well articulated plan and it looks something like this . . .
The widening probe of insider trading on Wall Street is expected to examine transactions at Steven A. Cohen's SAC, one of America's largest and most successful hedge funds.
Traditionally, the super-rich didn't bother with mortgages, but that changed in the boom years -- and it is still going on. Recent big-time borrowers include hedge-fund titans and baseball magnates.
Obama will face new friction in China over his choice to limit Chinese imports to the U.S. and views that he hasn't done enough to overhaul the financial system.
PELOSI’S HEALTH MONSTER: As senators remained in the dark late last week about the details of the huge committee-approved Senate healthcare bill, over on the House side of Capitol Hill, Speaker Pelosi last Friday unveiled a 1,990-page bill that, not surprisingly, is loaded with mandates, tax increases and a government-run public option and. . .
