Krauthammer on Obama's 'sorry excuses for a failing economy and a flailing presidency' :: Political News and commentaries

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August 19, 2011

Krauthammer on Obama's 'sorry excuses for a failing economy and a flailing presidency'

Topics: Political News and commentaries

"We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, got the economy moving again. ... But over the last six months, we've had a run of bad luck." -- President Obama - Decorah, Iowa, Aug. 15.

Krauthammer is having none of this:

[...] A troubled nation wonders: How did we get mired in 9.1 percent unemployment, 0.9 percent growth and an economic outlook so bad that the Federal Reserve pledges to keep interest rates at zero through mid-2013 -- an admission that it sees little hope on the horizon?
Bad luck, explains our president. Out of nowhere came Japan and its supply-chain disruptions, Europe and its debt problems, the Arab Spring and those oil spikes. Kicked off, presumably, by various acts of God (should He not be held accountable too?): earthquake and tsunami. (Tomorrow: pestilence and famine. Maybe frogs.)

Well, yes, but what leader is not subject to external events? Were the minor disruptions of the current Arab Spring remotely as damaging as the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74? Were the supply disruptions of Japan 2011 anything like the Asian financial collapse of 1997-98? Events happen. Leaders are elected to lead (from the front, incidentally). That means dealing with events, not plaintively claiming to be their victim.

Moreover, luck is the residue of design, as Branch Rickey immortally observed. And Obama's design for the economy was a near-$1 trillion stimulus that left not a trace, the heavy hand of Obamacare and a flurry of regulatory zeal that seeks to stifle everything from domestic energy production to Boeing's manufacturing expansion into South Carolina.

He sowed, he reaps.

[...] For weeks, these calumnies have been Obama staples. Calumnies, because they give not an iota of credit to the opposition for trying to promote the public good, as presumably Obama does, but from different premises and principles. Calumnies, because they deny the legitimacy to those on the other side of the great national debate about the size and scope and reach of government.

Charging one's opponents with bad faith is the ultimate political ad hominem. It obviates argument, fact, logic, history. Conservatives resist Obama's social-democratic, avowedly transformational agenda not just on principle but on empirical grounds, as well -- the economic and moral unraveling of Europe's social-democratic experiment, on display today from Athens to the streets of London.

[...] Obama's answer? He doesn't even engage. That's the point of these ugly accusations of bad faith. They are the equivalent of branding Republicans enemies of the people. ...