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The Current Crisis
Missing Bill
WASHINGTON -- Our nation's capital is filling with nouveau New Dealers, social engineers, men and women with a glint in the eye. All are anticipating the orgies. There is a stimulus bill of $787 billion, an appropriation bill of $410 billion, a housing bailout bill of $275 billion, and the Prophet Obama's colossal budget, promising $3.55 trillion of expenditures (including a $634 billion "down payment" on healthcare reform). My heart goes out to the American taxpayer, of course; but, somewhat to my surprise, I reserve a special sadness for former president Bill Clinton. In his party he is a dinosaur. Today, as the Obamaists swarm through Washington, the centrist from the 1990s must feel forlorn.
For years it has been his boast that he balanced the federal budget and maintained vigorous economic growth. He expanded free trade and working bipartisanly with Republicans reformed welfare. People left the welfare rolls and took remunerative employment. Usually federal spending hovers around 20% of GDP. In the Clinton Administration it dropped to 18.4% -- the lowest level since 1966. Bill said "the era of big government is over," and he meant it.
Today his party has passed him by. Bill, can we now be friends? I apologize for all my past rudeness, even the jokes. It is a matter of public record that you have made friends with Dick Scaife. Allow me to be next. Let us convene a conference. We could explore market solutions to public problems and together we could promulgate a manifesto on free trade. I shall bring some friends from the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution -- Ph.Ds. Perhaps we can plot how to re-reform welfare after the Obama Administration shanghais the poor back into the welfare trap.
Under the Prophet, federal expenditures will soar to 27.7% of GDP. That is the highest rate of expenditure since 1945.The deficit will hit $1.7 trillion this year and after a brief decline rise above $700 billion. His budget contemplates a recovery, but in 2010 spending will still be in the range of 24.1% of GDP. Moreover, he will raise taxes and cut the military back.
Though we are mired in a recession whose recovery is still in doubt, the Obama Administration is going to move on all fronts. As his White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has said, "Never let a serious crisis go to waste." If you are suffering from the recession you might find Emanuel's line callous, but that is just the way Democrats talk nowadays. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton put it this way: "Never waste a good crisis."
Both of these crisisists apparently believe there is something systemic in the United States that needs to be radically changed. Perhaps they think that the past twenty-five years of growth that began with the Reagan Administration and continued through the Administration of Emanuel's former boss, Bill Clinton, was a failure. So working simultaneously the Obama Administration is going to fix the banking crisis, the housing crisis, and the economic slowdown. That is not all. It promises to usher in nationalized healthcare, nationalized education, and a nationalized energy policy abundant with green energy funded and regulated by the government. There is more going on over in the cluttered White House West Wing. Three million jobs are being created while the automobile industry and the housing industry are being saved.
With all of this hurly-burly going on I hope my new friend is not going to suffer the blues. In less than four years his presidency is going to be looked back on fondly by Democrats and even by me. I think it is increasingly evident that Bill's Democratic successor is the most ill-prepared man to serve as president in a long time. My mind goes back to President Abraham Lincoln's abrupt successor, Andrew Johnson. Mr. Obama's problems in staffing his government suggest as much as does the low quality of many of his nominees, at least the nominees who were not dropped for tax irregularities or for being under grand jury investigation. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner looks and sounds like an undergraduate. His colleague Peter Orszag is hardly better. In the months ahead we shall see what other duds the president has brought aboard.
His White House staff seems particularly inept. In a matter of days, led by our novice president, his staff got in a no-win row with Rush Limbaugh. Then the White House offended Prime Minister Gordon Brown with an amateurish reception that roused the ire of the British press, and I should think the prime minister too. The British press was already spreading rumors that Obama is anti-British because of his staff's unceremonious return of a Churchill bust that Prime Minister Tony Blair sent to the White House on loan after 9/11.
So cheer up, Bill. Your legacy is going to look fine, save for that unmentionable run-in with what was her name again? Already things are turning against the Prophet. Just the other day Howard Fineman, writing on the Newsweek website, noted that "the American establishment is taking his [the president's] measure and, with surprising swiftness, they are finding him lacking." Bill, let's have a beer.
Bob Tyrrell is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. His books include the New York Times bestseller Boy Clinton: the Political Biography; The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton; The Liberal Crack-Up; The Conservative Crack-Up; Public Nuisances; The Future that Doesn't Work: Social Democracy's Failure in Britain; Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House; and The Clinton Crack-Up.
He makes frequent appearance on national television and is a nationally syndicated columnist, whose articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Washington Times, National Review, Harper's, Commentary, The (London) Spectator, Le Figaro (Paris), and elsewhere.
Bob is also an adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute and a contributing editor to the New York Sun.
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drudge ette obama| 3.12.09 @ 6:46AM
Clever goad, Bob. Do you think that will bring Bill to your happy hour table? When you wrote that Bill's Legacy is ok, did you imagine Bill Clinton would feel relief and comfortable enough to call you up?
As time progresses, I believe the Lewinsky Affair will take on more shocking proportions. We were all too close to it to be truly shocked. Somehow it all seems so bizarre now.
What we may see from Bill is more radical, Jimmy Carter-comments. Then once Jimmy eats the big peanut, swallows his final grit, and puts his last nail into a Habitat House, Bill Clinton can take on the role as the crank ex-president. He still needs his Nobel Prize: what will he choose as his methodology?
Pingback| 3.12.09 @ 7:59AM
Thursday throes | And Still I Persist links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Dave| 3.12.09 @ 8:21AM
"I did not have sexual releations with tha --(uh) -- Ahh, never mind."
stmichrick| 3.12.09 @ 8:23AM
The effect of continued leftist governance can be summed up this way:
What was once outrageous is now mainstream.
The day of the first man-horse wedding and high-level talks with representatives of al-Quaida are on the calendar.
Robert Rosencrans| 3.12.09 @ 9:54AM
The turnover of the U.S. Congress in 1994 as a result of the House Banking Scandal and the House Post Office Scandal to the Republicans did not have the desired long term effect. I knew some of the principal players in both scandals and they too were decent people tempted by the power of their office, not the power handed over to them by the public as a public trust.
Bill Clinton fell into the same trap, believing himself to be able to talk his way out of and into anything. Since leaving office, Bill Clinton has amassed over 100 million dollars. The real question for real journalists is how did he make it and what is expected?
It appears that the word it out that America is for sale and influence peddling is lucrative. I can't understand why anyone would miss Bill Clinton or any other politician.
While preaching goodness they engage in gutting their own countries for their own personal avarice.
Obama is just a teleprompter version of Bill, who likes to spend more, while pretending to spend less, all the while smiling and glibly lying to the American public.
Barack has lied about placing lobbyists in the White House, ethics in his administration, has recruited nothing but tax cheats while lying about that, has staffed government powerhouse agencies with deranged left wing lunatics who will further attempt to derail the economy and yesterday hid in the White House while signing a spending bill paid for with your money. Then he glibly lied about being concerned about earmarks.
Yes, Barack will spend more as percentage of GDP then any other President ever, perhaps more then you envision.
To support this, the Obama White House has an army of flacks, Ken and Barbie robotypes in the media, and half witted economists like Paul Krugman to support their efforts.
In the meantime the family budget is under attack and few in Washington care. The few that do are referred to as quacks, flat earthers or "people who just don't get it."
In the meantime, just for the record, there never was a Clinton surplus or any other type of government surplus.
Government doesn't operate in surplus because it must be a taker, not a giver. The concept of a balanced government budget is synonymous with honest used car sales man.
And that is what Washington, D.C. is full of today. Empty suits and pant suits full of hot air, seeking fiat currency and to what end? Their own aggrandizement is simply another staple to be charged off to the American public.
In the meantime, let them eat cake. The sugar subsidies make it easy, and it's good for this economy.
http://www.artofeurope.com/eliot/eli2.htm
TS Eliot - The Hollow Men
A penny for the Old Guy
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Pingback| 3.12.09 @ 10:20AM
Missing Bill « Depravity links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Michele San Pietro| 3.12.09 @ 10:28AM
Missing Bill? Nobody misses the most disastrous president in the history of the United States.
Son Of Sam| 3.12.09 @ 10:30AM
Compared to Hitler, Mussolini wasn't so bad. I might even be tempted to call him a "moderate" fascist. He was still a demagogue and a tyrant, and both were piles of slime disguised as human beings. Likewise, the ObamaNazis may be more vociferous than their "slick" predecessors, but the evil of both regimes is the same, and has the same source. Liberalism is an attack on the middle class, no matter which warlord is leading the charge.
Son Of Sam
http://www.geocities.com/samadamssos
Bill Hussein O'Staling| 3.12.09 @ 10:32AM
Here's an example of the human waste Clinton left in his wake.
Apparently, just minutes before 9/11, James Carville told a group of Washington reporters he hoped Bush didn't succeed. Where's all the reports in the MSM about that?
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/03/11/carville-wanted-bush-fail/
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just minutes before learning of the terrorist attacks on America, Democratic strategist James Carville was hoping for President Bush to fail, telling a group of Washington reporters: "I certainly hope he doesn't succeed."
Carville was joined by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who seemed encouraged by a survey he had just completed that revealed public misgivings about the newly minted president.
"We rush into these focus groups with these doubts that people have about him, and I'm wanting them to turn against him," Greenberg admitted.
The pollster added with a chuckle of disbelief: "They don't want him to fail. I mean, they think it matters if the president of the United States fails."
Minutes later, as news of the terrorist attacks reached the hotel conference room where the Democrats were having breakfast with the reporters, Carville announced: "Disregard everything we just said! This changes everything!"
The press followed Carville's orders, never reporting his or Greenberg's desire for Bush to fail. The omission was understandable at first, as reporters were consumed with chronicling the new war on terror. But months and even years later, the mainstream media chose to never resurrect those controversial sentiments, voiced by the Democratic Party's top strategists, that Bush should fail.
That omission stands in stark contrast to the feeding frenzy that ensued when radio host Rush Limbaugh recently said he wanted President Obama to fail. The press devoted wall-to-wall coverage to the remark, suggesting that Limbaugh and, by extension, conservative Republicans, were unpatriotic.
"The most influential Republican in the United States today, Mr. Rush Limbaugh, said he did not want President Obama to succeed," Carville railed on CNN recently. "He is the daddy of this Republican Congress."
Limbaugh, a staunch conservative, emphasized that he is rooting for the failure of Obama's liberal policies.
"The difference between Carville and his ilk and me is that I care about what happens to my country," Limbaugh told Fox on Wednesday. "I am not saying what I say for political advantage. I oppose actions, such as Obama's socialist agenda, that hurt my country.
"I deal in principles, not polls," Limbaugh added. "Carville and people like him live and breathe political exploitation. This is all a game to them. It's not a game to me. I am concerned about the well-being and survival of our nation. When has Carville ever advocated anything that would benefit the country at the expense of his party?"
Carville told Politico that focusing on Limbaugh is a deliberate strategy aimed at undermining Republicans.
"The television cameras just can't stay away from him," he said. "Our strategy depends on him keeping talking, and I think we're going to succeed."
Greenberg added: "He's driving the Republican reluctance to deal with Obama, which Americans want."
Pingback| 3.12.09 @ 10:44AM
Real Clear Politics - News - Elections 2008 - Opinion - Commentary - TIME links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Robert| 3.12.09 @ 10:59AM
I miss a conservative congress bent on reducing government. Bring those days back.
JP| 3.12.09 @ 12:00PM
Adding to the Obama staffing woes is the newly minted Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra. This morning the former DC CIO's offices were raided and he was arrested by the FBI and being arraigned on federal bribery charges. Since November he was advised Obama on IT issues. Will it ever end? Who is running the WH?
drudge ette obama| 3.12.09 @ 12:57PM
Bill O'Hussein O'Stalin g: Fabulous breakdown. I saw that Greenberg on Fox and Friends this morning. Talk about an idealogue. He couldn't pause in his overtalking of the panel, as if you prevent people from speaking and thereby win the debate. I was repulsed enough (particularly of his voice: whinng- highpitched) to resarch this progressive socialist. He would never report true poll results if it disagreed with his fanatical views. He has written some books, some are on sale on Amazon for a penny. Greenberg is a loser. Why would anyone hire him?
Pingback| 3.12.09 @ 3:04PM
Time » Blog Archive » Bill’s New Friend links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Bram| 3.12.09 @ 4:14PM
Bill Clinton was a brilliant politician, first, last, always. He surrounded himself with liberals like his wife – but he was never a hard-core leftist. When the liberals proved to be a political liability in 1994, he unceremoniously dumped them and hired Dick Morris.
Obama is much more of an ideologue. I get the impression that he is moving as far and fast as possible in order to make it all irreversible – even if it costs him his presidency.
ruth| 3.12.09 @ 5:58PM
Imagine that: RET and Bill Clinton could be BFF. Truth is stranger than fiction.
Mary| 3.12.09 @ 7:37PM
This really gladdened by petty little heart.
You know, one of the reasons I gave up my subscription to AS was because it seemed nothing else mattered but getting Clinton, and I couldn't stand him. He made my Mom into a Republican: disgusting, she said and says. To this day, she calls Bill, Mr. Arkansas. :)
I'm sorry to see Bill 'gild the lily' as Senator Thompson said today, when speaking about the Nation's health care. But, there you go.
It was hard not to feel moved by the election of Obama, though I never thought him exceptionally bright or suited for the presidency. I see him as Vivisector-In-Chief.
As it stands right now, Governor Palin, with no staff at all, couldn't have made as much a hash of the first 50 days as he has.
I want his Total Society to fail and fail spectacularly.
I can't get that picture out of my head of President Bush giving President Obama that bear hug on inauguration day.
My take on President Bush is changing too, but I miss him.
Lastly, this whole fiasco with Rush has put me in Rush's corner in a way I never was.
Per an old boss, I landed a job once, because my answer to a question he posed involving critical employee qualities, was loyalty.
I'm with VDH and his take on Rush and his detractors, and that is that it's better to forgo the acquisition of power than transmogrify conservatism to meet the needs or requirements of Frum and the like minded.
By the way, does Frum wear a piece? His hairline begins at the middle part of the top of his head. He looks like a mortician. And so do Brooks and Buckley, for that matter.
A triumvirate of stuffers.
stmichrick| 3.12.09 @ 7:42PM
Right Bram;
The main problem with Bill (and the missus) was more about petty corruption. The magnitude of what Obama's doing to the nation makes you kind of sentimental for bait shops and cigars.
Anthony| 3.12.09 @ 8:02PM
Ah yes nostalgia. You know Bob, you're right. I miss the big lug myself. I confess, our Slick Willie, as Uncle Willie from that great movie "Philadelphia Story" (isn't that a perfect name to invoke when discussing Clinton) could do "weird and wonderful things" ...only with cigars. Unfortunately Bob, my wife, who loves "Philadelphia Story" didn't think it the least bit funny when I slyly hinted at cigar foreplay. After all I pleaded, we must emulate our President whenever possible. No dice, as they say; so much for doing your patriotic duty. Oh well, I guess I should take this up with Oprah or Dr. Phil. But I still love my cigars.
stmichrick| 3.12.09 @ 10:58PM
Don't feel bad Anthony; my wife won't smoke the White Owl either.
Angel| 3.12.09 @ 11:35PM
Men are pigs; even Conservative men.
Jeremy Davis| 3.13.09 @ 12:08AM
Great stuff RET! It really is amazing how good Bill looks right about now ...
CH| 3.13.09 @ 12:39AM
What are you smokin'?
john galt| 3.13.09 @ 5:47AM
LBJ -- no president could be worse!
Wait, Jimmy Carter -- no president could be worse!
Wait, Slick Willie -- no president could be more corrupt!
Wait...
S.L. Toddard| 3.13.09 @ 12:01PM
JEREMIAH AND BOB: FYI - I haven't been posting here in over a month, since maybe Feb 2nd. There is a troll here who adopts other people's names and posts as them. I never called Bob "blow-bob" or whatever. I saw you also got into some scraps with him, Jeremiah. None of it was me. I don't use terms like "lib" or whatever else this clown said.
Imagine doing that - being that pathetic? Logging on and pretending to be someone else you only know through the internet? It's sad and the sort of thing one would expect of a stalker.
Anyway, none of the posts under my name - S.L. Toddard - have actually been me since the first couple days of February. It's been that same, sad, lonely troll.
stmichrick| 3.13.09 @ 12:32PM
Thank you Angel; for asserting 'le difference.'
Angel| 3.13.09 @ 2:21PM
Pigs are pigs, regardless of their ideological persuasion.
stmichrick| 3.13.09 @ 7:24PM
Angel,
I'm glad we agree on SOMETHING.
It was about perjury and obstruction of justice.
Angel| 3.13.09 @ 7:56PM
A distinction without a difference? LOL
stmichrick| 3.14.09 @ 9:43AM
oink
Angel| 3.14.09 @ 11:39AM
You crack me up. I bet you drive your wife nuts.
Pingback| 3.15.09 @ 7:21AM
Oklahoma Mesothelioma Law professional, OK , mesothelioma cancer, OK Law practice links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Michele San Pietro| 3.15.09 @ 1:49PM
That Bill Clinton made 9/11 possible is a fact. No 9/11 would have ever been possible under President Reagan.
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