A Response

In the comments to my last post, my friend at Pave The Whales took me to task for insinuating that Democrats are mindless idiots. My post was simply to point out that despite all the rhetoric that Dear Leader read from on high during the campaign was just that- rhetoric. Yet, the public ate it up like manna from heaven, believing in Obama, to the point of this woman claiming that Obama will pay her rent and put gas in her car.

My criticism of Obama's rhetoric is that either he's simply feeding lines to the public to get them to vote for him and has no intention of following through on it; or he does mean what he says, and how could the public knowingly vote for someone who is positioned to repeat the same failed policies from the 30s. Instead, it appears that all the american public digested was hope and change, hope and change, hope and change. I argued that hope is not a strategy and his change is something we cannot afford. Based on these initial picks, plus the belief that Secretary of Defense Gates is likely to stay through this first several months, the only change that's apparent is that Obama is looking to rewind the clocks to 1992. I will retain the hope that Obama does not attempt to recreate a New New Deal and the disaster that accompanied those policies (As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said- "A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years."); instead, he will realize that increasing taxes in a panic or recession is bad policy.

Do I think the public made the wrong choice- that's pretty apparent by my defense of John McCain. I also do think that the public fell in love with a voice and an image- I mean, this country gave Paris Hilton 3 years of The Simple Life, plus another show where she is looking for a new best friend. We have short attention spans and are wowed by shiny objects. So, my posts aren't necessarily directed at Democrats, per se; there are plenty of policy arguments where both sides have reasonable positions. My posts, rather, are directed at the folly of Obama supporters who believed in his rhetoric; Obama is nothing more than a politician, an extremely calculating politician who knew what to say to get elected, and appears to realize that he can't govern from his prior positions. Further, my posts should be a relief to Obama supporters. While I may characterize the supporters one way, I am beginning to come around to the belief, shared by both Instapundit and Knowledge Problem, that is best summed up by The Who line- Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Instead, my biggest concern continues to lay with Congressional Democrats, and I will make my concerns and opposition known.

Anyway, I will make no apologies for the tenor of my posts- the right has every bit the ability and right to take on the left and make pointed remarks. This ability is not the sole domain of Huffington Post or DailyKos or TPM.