PrintMarch 19, 2009
Will Dems go for broke with Obama?
This is the strangest, scariest political season in a long time. The Obama crowd is going for a Great Leap Forward, with socialized medicine, government ownership of the banks, industry-killing carbon taxes, daily scapegoating of the rich, and now depriving wounded veterans of their VA benefits, along with trillion dollar bailouts just for starters.
They can't seem to stop themselves; the impact of bulging deficits forever and ever doesn't seem to scare them. Printing trillions of dollars is bound to trigger enormous inflation and widespread impoverishment -- that's what inflation does -- but that doesn't seem to bother them either. Carteresque stagflation is predictable, and even a devaluation of the dollar, as George Soros has been hoping for all along.
SecDef Robert Gates is now making military cut-back noises, but long before they take effect we will be challenged on half a dozen fronts abroad. The news is already being picked up in Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, Venezuela, and maybe Beijing. As a direct result, Israel may be challenged much more directly than ever before, and Netanyahu may move to forestall the threat from Tehran preemptively.
All the power-hungry tyrannies around the world can recognize a sucker a mile away, and here we have an administration full of Charles Freemans and Jimmy Carters. Freeman himself had to quit because he was dumb enough to say his real feeling out loud. His former DCI boss, Dennis Blair, was all in favor of keeping him, and Blair is still running the show.
Nobody objected to Charles Freeman in Obama's alternate universe, did you notice? By their silence ye shall know them.
And don't think the power-hungry tyrants around the world are missing a move. Those emails from their Washington sources are sizzling.
So we are going to see an even worse series of pratfalls and disasters than the Bamster has committed so far. Proof is that he doesn't even get it when he goes Whoops! on yet another banana peel. What banana? I don't see any banana!
But the world has eyes.
The fact that Treasury is having trouble staffing its upper 14 appointments below Geithner means that people in the know about Obama's economic policies are running scared. They don't want to get involved, even if they have hungered after those plum jobs their whole lives. That tells you what the savviest Democrats are thinking.
Even the Europeans are resisting hyper-deficits, because Europe always has that memory of the 1920s and 30s: hyperinflation, unemployment, crushing poverty and despair, followed by Hitler and Stalin. They are refusing to follow Obama down that road. If the dollar crashes, they don't want the euro to go down with it.
Super-deficits are bad for the country and for the world, but the Obamanites are sleep-walking, hypnotized by an idée fixe, and it's unvarnished socialism. They expect the US to get to socialism in one great leap, guided by the Great One. If it takes even more of a crisis, with real suffering spreading nationwide, so be it. They are ready to see other people go down.
It took Western Europe five decades to get that far down the road to decadence, and they had the US military to protect them while they were doing it. As a result, even today they may not be able to produce a heavy lift military transport aircraft; that's how much they have diverted their resources from self-defense to vote buying.
But Obama wants to do it, oh, about ten times as fast as Europe did, and steal the money from the Veterans Administration to boot. What Obama contemplates doing to the VA tells us everything we need to know about his plans for socialized medicine. He will take the money wherever he can steal it, whether the US government has made solemn commitments to care for wounded vets or not.
The WaPo's resident liberal guru David Broder is openly running scared, and you can bet that behind the scenes lots of Washington Democrats are having panic attacks. They know you can't turn the country on a dime; either you end up shafting the economy and lose the House in 2010, or you get slapped in the face by Putin or Ahmadinejad and also lose the House in 2010.
The American people still haven't quite figured this guy out, probably because they can't believe their eyes and ears. The saner Left is beginning to worry out loud. Yes, Nancy the Eternally Youthful really believes she is "saving the Planet," but her House members are seeing their numbers tanking, and they have to start running this year to get re-elected next year. Harry Reid is one of the nastiest characters in DC, but he is a survivor. Somebody is going to hit the brakes, and then an almighty struggle will break out on the Left.
It will be better for the country if it happens sooner rather than later; but if the Dems are determined to all go down in a Banzai suicide charge, as David Broder has warned out loud, they may bring electoral disaster upon themselves.
When the last great Leftist assault on power took place in the United States, Senator Joe McCarthy became the bearer of bad tidings; he is well-remembered by the contemporary Left as Satan Incarnate, but at the time he was simply saying what everybody knew. Tens of millions of people saw the same danger. One day Uncle Joe Stalin was our good ally in the war against Hitler; the next day Americans were convinced, and rightly so, that he posed the biggest danger after the Nazis. Perhaps the biggest shock to ordinary people was Stalin's first atomic bomb, in 1949.
We are about to experience a very similar shock when Ahmadinejad gets his nukes. Historically, public opinion can turn on a dime if people get scared enough. If the Democrats don't hit the brakes fast, we may see it again.
