Monday, August 17, 2009

Leadership VACUUM

Perhaps the tip-off on just where the Obama administration stands was given the other day by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This is from CNSNews.com - “In a television interview Monday [10 August] in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that it would be a good thing for the government to take an ownership interest in industry.” In a part of the world where corruption actually defines government, it’s simply amazing that she could say something indicating such a lack of knowledge of world affairs.

That just about says it all, however, especially since it reflects precisely the apparent approach to governance of her boss, the president. He has just overseen the U.S. government take over the major financial institutions, half the auto-manufacturing industry and the building-loan apparatus. His House of Representatives, driven by him and his hacks, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Hoyer, recently passed what is perhaps the worst legislation since the 1930s – the Cap-and-Trade mishmash – designed to further wreck U.S. industry and deliver it into the hands of government, an obvious goal. The credible earth-scientists have shot down the climate-change nonsense, making the legislation simply an attack upon the industrial machinery of this country and taking it out of world competition, thus occasioning even greater loss of jobs, with an unemployment rate nearing 10 percent.

Obama’s minions have totally failed to police the “bank bailout” of last fall, perhaps suffering from a collective egotism to the extent that they actually believed they could outsmart the bankers, who took the money, firmed their bottom lines, paid their usual humongous bonuses, and laughed all the way to their vaults. Obama stood helplessly by, wrung his hands, and declared that the bonuses were perfectly legal. The banks are sitting on the money, as they should, until they can discover to what financial depths this country is headed. The lending institutions were virtually forced by Congress to make millions of bad loans, and these bankers (okay…through sheer greed) got stuck with them. Why go down that road again?

The messiah has announced publicly – and his press-person, Robert Gibbs, has corroborated publicly – that he hasn’t read and does not plan to read the health-care legislation now wadded up in such murky bureaucratic verbosity that no one knows what it means. That, of course, was the objective of the hacks who wrote it, namely, that after its passage it will mean whatever some “czar” says it means. Obama has finally understood that the public is catching-on to its main intent, the destruction of all private health-insurance plans, with the secondary intent of making all health decisions the preserve of the government.

Now, the president is flying in campaign mode all over the country on Air Force One trying to con the public into buying into a plan about which, by his own admission, he knows virtually nothing. He just knows that he wants the government to run everyone’s life. Imagine paying people $4,500 to buy cars, with the mandate that the trade-ins will be destroyed, the very cars that low-income people need on the market since they couldn’t afford to finance a new car even with that $4,500 gift. This is stupidity carried to a ridiculous degree. The notion that this operation will save the earth is so laughable as to make the White House into a collective buffoon.

Henry Morgenthau was Treasury Secretary 1934-45 during the Great Depression of the 1930s and said this in 1939: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong…somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises…I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started…And an enormous debt to boot!” The unemployment rate in 1939 stood at 17.2%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Morgenthau didn’t lose his job. The spending, with the Congress and presidency both democrat-controlled, would have gone on driving the country into oblivion; however, WWII came along, after which the free-market economy took off.

Another world war is not likely – hopefully never again to happen – so the president and Congress need to suck it up right now and not make decisions based on their chances in the next election(s). If they can’t understand the history of the 30s, they’re too dumb to be leading this nation, and “voting the bums out” should be the war-cry of the citizens next year.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

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