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- So, if I understand National Review senior editor Rich Lowry correctly, Barack Obama should have gone for a "smaller and shrewder" stimulus which "might have been able to get a dozen or maybe more Senate Republicans," and thus provide "political cover" instead of, I don't know, getting the damn policy right in the first place. Instead, Lowry claims Obama had a "theological belief that a lumpy $800 billion sack of payments to individuals and of random government programs is going to be a magical spur to job creation." So the lesson here is that basing policy on short-term politics is the key to wise statesmanship. Another would be that Lowry is clueless about American politics, despite it being the source of his livelihood.
- Is there any group of privileged people who whine as much as the fine Americans who work on Wall Street? Despite crashing the economy and miring the country in a recession that might never end, they have the nerve, amid their own return to profitability, to complain about how the Obama administration's policies are so very unfair to them that they might have to start supporting Republicans. I say good riddance. Democrats shouldn't have to prostrate themselves before these preening narcissists because they need campaign contributions.
- It's quite pathetic to hear libertarian optimism stretched to the point where the case against federal funding for education gets boiled down to "let money stay with taxpayers and allow them to consume education as they would anything else: according to their individual priorities and abilities, which they know better than anyone else." Needless to say, this brave new world of self-empowerment leads straight to Sharron Angle's dystopia where America churns out generation after generation of poor, ignorant children.
- Remainders: Anyone who tells you our political institutions aren't broken doesn't know what they're talking about; John Boehner gets my vote for the Most Cynical Man in Washington; shockingly, Megan McArdle doesn't know what she's talking about; amazingly, Alan Simpson still has a job; I wonder what color the sky is in Peter Kirsanow's world; maybe if the GOP hadn't let the crazy genie out of the bottle they wouldn't have to deal with "troubled perennial candidates"; and an empirical assessment of Michael Steele's gaffes.
--Mori Dinauer
