BDBoop
Platinum Member
- Banned
- #1
I'm going to go have some fun, so thought I'd leave some neocon kitty toys to play with.
Obama Is Too Good for Us: Charles Fried on the Debt Fiasco - The Daily Beast
"Politics these days is no occupation for an educated man, a man of character. Ignorance and total lousiness are better. Dont jettison such god-given advantages.
Obama Is Too Good for Us: Charles Fried on the Debt Fiasco - The Daily Beast
"Politics these days is no occupation for an educated man, a man of character. Ignorance and total lousiness are better. Dont jettison such god-given advantages.
Barack Obama is not a skillful strategist like Bill Clinton. He is not a gifted rhetorician like Ronald Reagan. Nor is he a bold and inspiring leader like Abraham Lincoln. And he cant seem to shake himself loose from the strings that attach him to the trial lawyers, to big labor, and, surprisingly, to the standard banker-economists who got us into the mess we are in now. But he is an honest man. He is intelligent, analytical, and knowledgeable. And he tries hard to think through the dilemmas which confront us and to tell us clearly and straightforwardly what he wants to do and why he wants to do it.
But it doesnt seem to work.
Contrast this to the politicians he is up against. When John Boehner at the height of the debt ceiling crisis answered him on the national media he simply did not tell the truth. He said that the president would not compromise, would not take yes for an answer, and wanted it all his own way. But he cannot have forgotten that he had negotiated Obama into far more cuts than Obama and his caucus had wanted, thought wise or even palatable in return for a modest increase in revenue to be achieved by closing egregious and unfair loopholes in personal and corporate taxes. This is the same compromise recommended by the Gang of Six, which included the extremely conservative and admirably patriotic Senator Tom Coburn, by the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson group, and by Republican economists like Martin Feldstein. It was the Speaker who, Arafat-like, walked away from that deal because he concluded he lacked the skill or the muscle or the spine to sell it to his own caucus. Let it be said that this compromise included recalculating the cost of living formula for social securitya change every responsible economist recommendsbut the equally rigid Nancy Pelosi rejected.