"The Establishment--the academic and policy elite, Wall Street, famous sexy people--are more invested in Obama than they've been in any president in decades. If Obama fails, a whole system will go down with him."
-Reihan Salam
"What makes it hard at the moment to write sympathetically of Barack Obama is the loud chorus of approbation arising from his supporters in journalism as they mark the hundred days. Drudge calls it the "Best President Ever" campaign. It is marked by an abandonment of critical thinking among otherwise thoughtful men and women who comprise, roughly speaking, the grown-ups of journalism, the old hands of the MSM who have been through many presidents and should know better. They are insisting too much. If they were utterly confident, they wouldn't be..."
-Peggy Noonan
Any remaining doubt has been removed...From today's Washington Post...
"The networks have given President Obama more coverage than George W.Bush and Bill Clinton combined in their first months--and more positive assessments to boot.
In a study to be released today, the Center for Media and Public Affairs and Chapman University found the nightly newscasts devoting nearly 28 hours to Obama's presidency in the first 50 days. (Bush, by contrast, got nearly eight hours.) Fifty-eight percent of the evaluations of Obama were positive on the ABC, CBS, and NBC broadcasts, compared with 33 percent positive in the comparable period of Bush's tenure and 44 percent positive for Clinton...in the New York Times...73 percent of the assessments in front-page pieces were positive."
-Howard Kurtz
The G.O.P. would like to depict itself as the party of fiscal rectitude. However, after the last eight years of budgetary incontinence, it is manifestly NOT a credible alternative to the impending deluge of spending and programmatic expansion from Obamanon and the Dems.
The perpetual promise of painless tax cuts is not enough. It is not sensible or responsible. In short, the G.O.P. needs to get back to "No."
As George Will once said, "conservatism can be defined in eight words or less...No. Stop. Cut it out. Less of that."
Or as I would put it more crudely...I don't want to pay for your BS...
George F. Will is one of my heroes, and this week's Newsweek features an especially acerbic gem of analysis of Obamanon's First Hundred Days...Here are some of the highlights...
"It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man."
-Calvin Coolidge
"Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in."
-Leonardo Da Vinci
Having spent my spring break poring over two biographies of FDR, both of which contained extremely vivid and detailed descriptions of American life in 1932 and 1933, I feel very comfortable saying that there is NO comparison between then and now in terms of sheer suffering and deprivation. The Depression of the 1930s was several orders of magnitude worse than anything going on in the U.S. today. Anybody who compares our current predicament to that of the Depression simply doesn't know what they're talking about. To assert that today's problems are on par with the 1930s is not merely inaccurate. It's utterly ahistorical.
