“Mr. President, Time to Rein in the Chaos,” reads the headline on
Andrew Grove’s obtuse
op-ed. Grove attributes the chaos not to the
intrinsically disordered character of Obama’s liberalism but to
the speed and manner of its application.
Applying a bad idea gradually doesn’t make it any less bad. But
it might save the Buffetts and Groves billions of dollars. Go
ahead and break a lot of eggs in your grand experiment at some
point, Barack, just not ours now. That’s essentially their advice
to him.
Wall Street’s second thoughts about Obama are tiresome. Cowed by
their pro-abort trophy wives, View-watching mistresses,
and PC philanthropic peers, financiers and CEOs helped elect a
class-warfare-using president and now have the gall to whine
about him.
The “revolutionary” over whom they once cooed is suddenly
reckless and oblivious to the existing order of things.
Says Buffett: “you can’t expect people to unite behind you if you
are trying to jam a whole bunch of things down their throat.”
A little more gingerly, Grove says the same: “Our health-care
system may well be ripe for a major overhaul, as are our energy
and environmental policies. Widespread recognition that all of
these reforms are overdue contributed to Barack Obama’s victory
in November. But if the chaos that resulted from initiating such
an overhaul were piled on top of the unresolved status of the
financial system, society and government would become exhausted.”
No global warming tax and socialized health care just yet!
Apparently, Obama’s glibness is grating on dilettantish
moneybags. Clearing their throats at inaugural cocktail parties,
they called it “idealism”; today, they call it imprudence. How
dare he compare our bouncing stock prices to political polls, a
few have been heard to say.
The liberalism of the Groves and Buffetts is basically parasitic;
it feeds off the lingering order of conservatism. Were Obama to
devour the conservative host whole, they’d have to close up shop.
One would think this parasitic arrangement might stimulate deeper
thoughts in them about the nature of liberalism. But it never
does. As soon as the crisis that makes them cling to conservatism
passes, they resume their ideological intoxications.
The full-blown, pure application of liberalism would expose the
country’s reliance on this parasitic arrangement and discredit
liberalism politically. Obama, in his own way, grasps this point,
making sure to weaken the existing host but never kill it.
For example, he nationalizes banks (in the sense of majority
government ownership of stocks in them) but doesn’t run them, not
because he thinks that undesirable but because he thinks it
impractical. For now. But what if he had a more robust federal
government and prepared proletariat? That glorious day in his
mind is coming.
Grove quotes Machiavelli at Obama — prefacing his column with
“There is nothing more difficult… than to take the lead in the
introduction of a new order of things” — but Obama seems plenty
Machiavellian already.
Look at the outright lying disguised as thoughtfulness in his
presentation earlier in the week about embryo-destructive stem
cell research. At it he called cloning “dangerous” and
“profoundly wrong,” which a dutiful media blasted to readers
uncritically, even as he locked in place a policy that guarantees
it.
After all, many of the extracted cells will come from clones. For
those scoring at home, the “moderate,” science-over-politics
position in the debate, according to the fine print in the
administration’s policy, isn’t to oppose cloning but to oppose
“reproductive” cloning; “therapeutic” cloning, then killing the
clones, is just fine.
It is no wonder that even a studiously nonpolemical columnist
like Robert Samuelson has taken to calling Obama a “great
pretender.”
