Quote of the Day

Is He Doing It On Purpose?, Powerline Blog, Mar. 5, 2009.

More likely [than that his policies are to intentionally damage the economy — jdw] the explanation is that Obama is an economic illiterate, and subscribes to the idea — which I think is rather common among Democrats — that what the government does has little impact on the economy. Obama likely believes that the economy will recover on its own, and in the meantime — in Rahm Emanuel's immortal words — he shouldn't let the crisis go to waste. So he enacts every left-wing measure that he wanted to do anyway, expecting that when the economy eventually recovers he can take credit for it, even though his policies, if anything, retarded and weakened the recovery.

Aynn Rand, despite her literary failings, truly understood the fundamental nature of leftist economic thinking — they are simply looters and levelers [i.e., populist thieves], who believe that the productive elements of society will find some way to succeed despite whatever onerous measures they impose. The One™ suffers from the even more primitive superstition of "word magic", i.e., that simply saying the proper words, chanting the right spell or incantation, magically transforms reality. This is understandable, since he has b*llsh*tted his way to the highest office in the world without ever accomplishing anything of real substance. What is truly pathetic is that he can't even invoke the proper spells without the assistance of a teleprompter.

Clarity, Powerline Blog, Mar. 1, 2009.

We shouldn't be surprised by the radicalism of Obama's domestic agenda. He was, after all, the most liberal member of the Senate. And he found congenial both the preaching of Rev. Wright and the educational agenda of William Ayers. There was a chance that Obama would grow in office but, as many of us argued, this was always a long-shot.

Obama's unwillingness, as a formal matter, to take Republican views on domestic issues seriously should not be surprising either. There is no room for meaningful discussion between radicals and non-radicals. It is true that Obama has a reputation for listening to conservatives. Supposedly, as head of the law review at Harvard, he took conservatives seriously. And it is said that in the Illinois legislature, he would sometimes tweak legislation to accommodate Republican concerns.