The Strange Thing About Nemesis…
…is that the deity picks its victims on the basis of irony and arrogance. For every media-frenzy about ethical lapses of columnist Armstrong Williams taking Bush administration money for hawking No Child Left Behind, there is a Jonathan Gruber, the MIT go-to pundit on health care, who raked in $400,000 from the Obama administration for … hawking ObamaCare.
For every racially insensitive Trent Lott, Senate party leader, there is a racially insensitive Harry Reid, Senate party leader. For every illegitimacy story about Levi Johnston and Sarah Palin’s daughter, there is a John Edwards’ love child. For every supposed Bush fabrication, there is Barack Obama on You Tube swearing he will air all the health care debate on C-SPAN (sort of like his old public campaign financing promises, or closing Gitmo within a year, or getting out of Iraq by March, 2008, or …).
But, of course, by now you readers protest!— why haven’t we heard of Gruber, why did the media go easy for so long on Edwards (and his complicit wife), why is Harry Reid still majority leader?
The answer is that those on the left are moralists, smarter people who pass up their own personal agendas to help the community. They think of society, not self, and so when they err, they do it under stress, in accidental fashion, and with no lasting significance — not like their selfish Neanderthal cousin conservatives, for whom transgression is a valuable window into their flawed souls. Bushisms became a media pastime, but no one suggests that a president who says Cinco de Quatro, or 57 states, or references the “Austrian” language is a Dan Quayle wrestling with potato.
That Enigmatic Joblessness?
We are still at double-digit unemployment in December. But I am relieved that it was not 15% thanks to Obama’s various stimuli programs, bailouts and health care initiatives that saved us.
Is this Ivy League brilliance? For three years as candidate and now as president, Obama targeted the productive small business and entrepreneur class. They should be “patriotic,” “pay their fair share,” and “spread the wealth” to the more deserving. If they made over $250, 200, or was it 150K?, they should pay higher state, federal, payroll, inheritance and now health care taxes. From time to time, Obamians, like Anita Dunn, and Van Jones, referenced the great redistributist and killer Mao, or the greed of “white people.”
I could go way on, but you get the picture. Somehow in such a landscape, the family dentist, small trucking operator, and insurance agency owner were supposed to go out and hire more people, buy equipment, and work a little harder, when they a) don’t know how high their taxes will climb, and b) accept that they are targeted by this president and so expect that any new health-care, energy, or education initiative will come at their expense.
Jobs, you see, are largely instead made by the federal government, which borrows about $100,000 per employed in some grand new “millions of green jobs” or “remaking America” plan that puts more of us on the unfireable, always promoted federal payroll.