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March 6, 2009

Krauthammer: 'Deception at Core of Obama Plans'

As Charles Krauthammer puts it, few presidents undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few have noticed. According to Krauthammer, Obama's deceptions are clever politics indeed, but are intellectually dishonest to the core:

[...] the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

Unless and until America wakes up to those "brazen deceptions" at "the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan," with an equally radical and deceptive Democratic majority in Congress we are likely to see a Socialist, if not communist, government that America is likely never to recover from. I find it hard to believe that this is the kind of "change" America "hoped" for, nonetheless it's what we've got in an Obama administration.

Posted by Hyscience at March 6, 2009 9:34 AM

• Krauthammer: 'Deception at Core of Obama Plans' - Mar 06, 2009