Not So Fast - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Not So Fast
by

WALK THE WALK
Re: Russ Ferguson’s Accelerate Yourself:

Russ Ferguson needs a hobby.
Arnold Ahlert
Boca Raton, Florida

To the law student who complains that people walk too slowly, I have a piece of advice: “Stop and smell the roses.”
Tod Frye

From your article, I assume you must not be a native of D.C.. I also assume you are a Yankee, from the boreal regions of either New York or New England. Am I correct?

Reason I make these assumptions is that I was home grown Yankee who went to college in New Orleans. I quickly learned I had to slow my New York pace or I’d soon overheat and explode. Also, the lifestyle of New Orleanians will not tolerate a New York minute.

D.C. is a Southern town. It’s slow paced in many ways, not just in its walking habits. Although I’ve lived in a D.C. suburb for years, I hear they still walk fast on the sidewalks of Manhattan.
Paul Doolittle

Ah, but what if someone doesn’t want to walk faster? Window shopping…scenery gawking…taking pleasure in what’s going on around you as you walk. Transportation, walking or otherwise, is more than just getting from Point A to Point B, you know…
Robert Nowall
Cape Coral, Florida

NERO WAS A RINO
Re: Jeremy Lott’s Quibbling Over Principle, Robert Stacy McCain’s Libertarian Populism, John Berlau’s Doing Something? et al.:

We have all heard of some RINO Republicans. Now we Republicans have become something even worse: Nero Republicans. Two-thirds of our U.S. House Members were and are mindlessly willing to fiddle while Rome burns. All the while, Conservative writers such as Jeremy Lott, Philip Klein, Robert Stacy McCain, John Berlau, et al., along with thousands of mindless Republican phone-callers and emailers, thoughtlessly and self-righteously cajoled House Republicans to cast one of the blindest House votes ever.

Granted that Secretary Paulson was arrogant in his grudging presentation to House Republicans; granted that Speaker Pelosi gave an inane and insulting House speech. But Republican focus from the beginning was never where it should have been: Paulson was only asking for the same authority given to the Resolution Trust Corporation in 1989 which ultimately cost the taxpayers scarcely a penny. All of the Republican smokescreen about free-market mechanisms and principles was mindless grandstanding, for it was wholly beside the point. American and world markets needed reassurance. Main Street absolutely needs Wall Street if we are to preserve and enhance our massive retirement systems. Bashing Wall Street by voting blindly NO was totally irresponsible. Even if Republican writers, phone-callers and emailers refuse to be grownups, please, can’t House Republicans stop playing Nero and read a little 1989 history?
Darrel Hansen
Alamo, Nevada

TOLD YOU SO
Re: The Prowler’s Democrat Leaders Played to Lose:

What I wrote last Wednesday in response to the Prowler column of last Tuesday, “Democratic Delay Game,” has turned out to be grimly prophetic. It bears repeating in light of the bailout’s failure Wednesday. In the Prowler of last Tuesday, it was reported that Democrat legislative aides know a delay in passing a bailout will help the Obama campaign. We are watching the Dems’ script for winning the election play out. Act One was completed with the 300+ point dive in the Dow ten days ago. With yesterday’s further 700+ point plunge following the failure of the bailout, the curtain rose on Act Two. The script is being followed by the clueless independents and fence sitters of both parties, who are buying into it, blaming the Republicans hook line and sinker. Pelosi’s ugly speech before the bailout vote calculated to destroy the bill was the main scene of this act and succeeded beyond even her wildest expectations. Act Two of the destruction of McCain/Palin is well underway.

Because of the Dems’ quick spin machine abetted by the lapdog media, the Republicans now own the defeat and the likely recession. With consummate hubris, Barney Frank succeeds in covering his dirty trail and even capturing sympathy for (unsuccessfully) trying to fix the mess of his own creation. The Perfect Storm! Barack Hussein Obama is licking his chops while not a single prominent voice is raised by the Republicans to expose this cynical ploy.

The opportunity to reverse this tactical Dem victory is rapidly slipping through Republican fingers as they stand like a confused, demoralized football team in the 4th quarter in utter paralysis watching the opposing team run up the score as the clock runs down. They will deservedly lose this election, lacking the cojones to fight this Machiavellian plot to its death.

The remainder of my comments from last Tuesday’s Reader Mail is quoted verbatim:

We are watching the October surprise unfold in slow motion. The Dems merely need to delay passage of the bailout until Nov 4th! The market will have crashed by then and Obama’s election will be a certainty. Even some Republicans like Richard Shelby are playing into this suicidal scheme, clueless to what’s really going on here.

Sunday House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “Democrats will act responsibly to insulate Main Street from Wall Street.” What she really is saying is, “Democrats will act in any way necessary to insulate Obama from defeat.” She has crafted the perfect storm to achieve this end. She and her cabal like Barney Frank, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and Richard Durbin and their Democrat predecessors with their compliant media lapdogs, are bringing off the supreme hat trick: in one fell swoop covering their role in creating this crisis by having passed the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977, abolishing redlining and coercing banks to make loans to people incapable of repaying them. Instead of reaping blame and shame for this sham legislation, they are turning it to their candidate’s favor, using the CRA’s destruction of prudent lending practices by banks to create the crisis whose solution is the socialization of banking in the US on their opponent’s watch. Easy then to link the crisis to McCain. Ergo, Obama wins the election.

This is their strategy, and — because they control Congress — there isn’t a damn thing the Republicans nor McCain can do about it. Unless, that is, this shameful scheme is exposed for what it is NOW! There still is time to reveal this monstrous coup d’etat in the making.

Robert Deutsch
New Jersey

Of course, a lot of us already knew the Dems wanted the Republicans to pass this bill for them, Prowler. It was that obvious. This whole “Chicken Little” financial fiasco, from the push by the Clinton administration to get the lenders to make the politically correct loans in the first place, to the Fannie/Freddie bailout, and all the ‘derivatives’ failures, just shows you how sick these people really are, especially “Blarney” Frank. Anything — anything — for power! And hey, if it brings down Western Civilization, so what? After all, you can always blame the Republicans. When, I say, when, are the Republicans going to learn? Never mind, I already know!
Mike Showalter
Austin, Texas

TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Re: Jeffrey Lord’s Paradigms Lost:

Jeffery Lord had me until this sentence: “Never again will the media be able to pronounce judgment on others while conveniently avoiding a similar self-examination.” The media has been so successful in being able to pronounce judgment on others that Americans know virtually nothing about the Community Reinvestment Act, Barack Obama’s extensive relationship with ACORN, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or Barney Frank and Chris Dodd’s overwhelming incompetence and corruption.

When Nancy Pelosi can say Republicans “killed the bailout” despite the fact that 95 members of her own party voted against it, it’s because she has absolute confidence that the media will perpetrate that lie until it becomes the “truth.”

Never lose track of what all of these media machinations are about: getting Barack Obama elected–period.
Arnold Ahlert
Boca Raton, Florida

Distort, ignore, conceal, fabricate — four skills essential to journalists (and, not coincidentally, lawyers).

Since media messengers now fancy themselves the message, Americans are fortunate to have access to the flood of disintermediated news available on the Internet (which, not coincidentally, was developed by the very people charged with protecting us Americans: the Department of Defense).

Good news, indeed.
David Govett
Davis, California

DON’T STOP WITH HAWAII
Re: Joseph Lawler’s Trouble in Paradise:

So Hawaii has a separatist movement. Well, I have a dream. How about California volunteering to succeed from the union or, better yet, being outright kicked out? Then California can have its green, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, high tax, high regulation, left wing lunatic society and not be able to send me the bill. I guess we can throw in Hawaii to sweeten the deal. Perhaps in an orgy of liberal compassion and white guilt, California can surrender to Mexico.

Then again after McCain loses his polite, suck up to the left, inept, tepid, and typical Gelding Old Party play within the rules style campaign, perhaps Sarah Palin can make the rumors of an Alaska separatist movement come true and a place of refuge for those of us who believe in freedom, low taxes, cheap plentiful energy with ANWR drilling, and logic based thinking and policies.
Eric Stessman
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Re: Robert Stacy McCain’s Libertarian Populism:

The unintended consequence of the failure of the bailout deal is that we might finally have a comprehensive immigration bill. The illegals will soon be heading back to their own third world country!
Jack Hughes
Chicago, Illinois

WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT
Re: Jeremy Lott’s Quibbling Over Principle:

What the pompous ignorant so-and-so’s in Washington, D.C. don’t realize is that amongst us clingers to our guns and religion there is an American ideological revolution going on. “Us’ns ‘taint taking no mo’.”
Mike DeVita
Fly-over country

DEMOCRATIC DISASTER
Re: John Berlau’s Doing Something?

This latest financial crisis, like the one Reagan inherited with the Savings and Loan debacle, is a shining example why the Founders of this nation feared a democracy form of government vs. a Constitutional Republican one. They tried to put in place checks and balances to temper what had happened countless times before in history when the masses vote their emotions. Lest I forget the obvious, but we haven’t been that latter form of government for a long time, decades in fact.

While everyone has their favorite scapegoat and some will point to the spending spree we’ve been on for the last eight years or even the other fiction about Clinton having a balanced budget and “surplus” in fact, the painful truth is that we’ve been running a deficit on paper since Social Security went into effect. Everything that has followed has just piled on to that be it Medicare/Medicaid or Prescription Drug programs. The latter are just extensions to Social Security since before these programs your Social Security and “other” retirement income had to cover your medical bills. By whatever name you wish to call these programs, no amount of lipstick is going to change what is underneath the makeup, a cradle to grave welfare program that I’ve been paying 50% more into since my parents’ rate highest and all these programs are going bankrupt in time. If you doubt that you haven’t looked at the actuary math and all the times the first two programs have been bailed out with tax rate and range increases, etc. The next two-three generations are going to have to pay 50% higher rates also to pay me my minimum wage existence just like all those that have come before….

At this junction, the current crisis is probably smaller than the S&L bailout adjusted for inflation but the average tax burden is much higher in real terms. Both Reagan and Bush 43 have tried to “grow” us out of this. There are limits to that in the real business world and when half your population has an inexhaustible desire for more and more socialism, domestic spending always outstrips growth. Always.

This is how great societies die. They first start living a lie and believing they can invent their own financial rules and repeal the Law of Diminishing Return. Then they stop being the people who built the Nation in the first place and forget why that is important. I don’t know if this is our last “party,” as the fool Nancy Pelosi says, but it is another brick or two added to our weight while trying to tread some really deep water. I can’t predict the future and I don’t know of anyone that can either but the past is a pretty good indication of where we are headed if FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) runs amok in the next few months. Wall Street financials have some blame in this situation but the ultimate responsibility and accountability rests with the foolish people that took out ridiculous mortgages on inflated property values with severely discounted rates that were enabled by moron government policies going back to the late seventies. Of course this is exactly why democracies die. No one is ever held accountable for their decisions and thus society at large bears a greater and greater burden until the Nation collapses.
Thom Bateman
Newport News, Virginia

FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE
Re: Mike Dooley’s letter (under “Right Into My Trap”) in Reader Mail’s Greenlight Special:

I offer this difference between liberals and conservatives:

Conservatives think that liberals have terrible ideas.

Liberals feel that conservatives are terrible people.
David Gonzalez
Wheeling, Illinois

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