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Thomas Sowell on Alice in Liberal Land.
“Alice in Wonderland” was written by a professor who also wrote a book on symbolic logic. So it is not surprising that Alice encountered not only strange behavior in Wonderland, but also strange and illogical reasoning — of a sort too often found in the real world, and which a logician would be very much aware of.
If Alice could visit the world of liberal rhetoric and assumptions today, she might find similarly illogical and bizarre thinking. But people suffering in the current economy might not find it nearly as entertaining as “Alice in Wonderland.”
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the world envisioned by today’s liberals is that it is a world where other people just passively accept whatever “change” liberals impose. In the world of Liberal Land, you can just take for granted all the benefits of the existing society, and then simply tack on your new, wonderful ideas that will make things better.
For example, if the economy is going along well and you happen to take a notion that there ought to be more home ownership, especially among the poor and minorities, then you simply have the government decree that lenders have to lend to more low-income people and minorities who want mortgages, ending finicky mortgage standards about down payments, income and credit histories.
That sounds like a fine idea in the world of Liberal Land. Unfortunately, in the ugly world of reality, it turned out to be a financial disaster, from which the economy has still not yet recovered. Nor have the poor and minorities. …
Peter Ferrara says there is no excuse for Obamanomics.
The history of America’s recessions is provided at the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months. Yet here we are 47 months after the last recession started, and we still have no real recovery.
Instead, unemployment has been stuck at 9% or above for the longest period since the Great Depression. Unemployment for blacks has remained over 15% for over 2 years, with Hispanic unemployment stuck well into double digits over that time as well. Teenage unemployment has persisted at nearly 25%, with black teenage unemployment still nearly 40%.
The U6 unemployment rate, reflecting all of the unemployed still wanting work and the underemployed who can’t get full time work, is still 16.2%. That includes an army of the unemployed or underemployed of over 26 million Americans. And that still doesn’t fully count the millions of Americans who have given up and dropped out of the work force altogether.
On September 13 came the Census Bureau report fleshing out the full meaning of no economic recovery under Obama. Median family income has fallen all the way back to 1996 levels. The Wall Street Journal further reported on September 14, “Earnings of the typical man who works full time year round fell, and are lower—adjusted for inflation—than in 1978.”
The poverty rate climbed to 15.1%, higher than in the late 1960s when the War on Poverty was getting underway, $16 trillion ago. The child poverty rate climbed to 22%, nearly a quarter of all American children. The total number of Americans in poverty is higher than at any time in the over 50 years that the Census Bureau has been tallying it. Moreover, the number of Americans ages 25-34 living with their parents has soared by 25%.
Yes, I know NBER declared the recession technically over in June, 2009, still the longest recession on record since the Depression. But the point is next month will be 4 years since the recession started, and there is still no sustained real recovery. Or as economist John Lott has emphasized, Obamanomics has produced the worst recovery since the Great Depression. …
Victor Davis Hanson calls it economic quackery.
Sometimes the wrong medicine can make a struggling patient far sicker than he would have been had he been allowed to recover naturally. Western medicine began with the premise that the physician either must know how to cure the patient or simply leave him alone — but above all not make him worse through harmful treatment.
As 2011 ends, we have discovered how to turn a natural recovery from a near-record recession into a serial slowdown. Almost every haphazard, ad hoc attempt by Barack Obama to jumpstart the economy has only further stalled it. The president has never articulated a diagnosis of why the economy was stalled, never outlined a coherent treatment plan, and so cannot offer a prognosis. If we have a sick budget, a Byzantine tax code, bankrupting entitlements and long-term debt burden, and a costly imported-oil bill, one would never know all that from the president, who has never offered any sort of plan for addressing these crises.
Borrowing over $4 trillion terrified investors and business owners — especially given campaign promises that Obama would not be so “unpatriotic” as to match in three years the debt that Bush had piled up in eight. After all, no one could accuse the Bush administration of having left the economy moribund by slashing government, running balanced or surplus budgets, reducing the national debt, and in tight-fisted fashion denying federal bailouts to reckless banks and Wall Street firms. Apparently, Barack Obama saw the Bush administration’s economic transgressions not as warnings, but as a green light to borrow and spend even more on a predetermined redistributive agenda (“Never let a crisis go to waste”) — as if once a Republican administration had trespassed, conservatives could hardly throw stones at even greater sinners. …
It’s not just the GOP that see he’s a loser, two Dem pollsters say it is time for Hillary.
When Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson accepted the reality that they could not effectively govern the nation if they sought re-election to the White House, both men took the moral high ground and decided against running for a new term as president. President Obama is facing a similar reality—and he must reach the same conclusion.
He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president’s accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Never before has there been such an obvious potential successor—one who has been a loyal and effective member of the president’s administration, who has the stature to take on the office, and who is the only leader capable of uniting the country around a bipartisan economic and foreign policy.
Certainly, Mr. Obama could still win re-election in 2012. Even with his all-time low job approval ratings (and even worse ratings on handling the economy) the president could eke out a victory in November. But the kind of campaign required for the president’s political survival would make it almost impossible for him to govern—not only during the campaign, but throughout a second term. …
Since he feels free to weigh in on just about any topic, Peter Wehner wonders why Obama has nothing to say about Occupy violence.
I’m puzzled.
Given all of the violence, the lawlessness, the bigotry and the ugliness the Occupy Wall Street movement (and its off-spring) represent, why hasn’t the president spoken out –in a clear, forceful voice – against it?
It can’t be because he thinks it’s none of his business. This is a man, after all, who injected his thoughts on the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates and in the process accused the Cambridge police of acting “stupidly.” Obama has spoken out about the location of the Ground Zero mosque and the 2016 Olympic Games; the reaction of Republican audiences at GOP debates; and the Penn State child rape scandal. He’s suggested that racism is a driving force in the Tea Party movement. He gives sermons on civility in public discourse. And he’s made his picks for the NCAA Final Four on ESPN. Obama talks all the time, on llmost every issue under the sun. And yet when it comes to the actions of protesters at the various Occupy movements around America, he suddenly goes practically mute. …
Occupy returns the favor with a member asking for a moment of silence for the White House shooter. Wehner with the story.
Here is a clip, courtesy of The Daily Caller, in which a protester from Occupy San Diego told his fellow protesters, “I think we should have a moment of silence in solidarity for the person they said was from the Washington, D.C. Occupy. Maybe, why did he feel the need to shoot the White House window today? So I think we should have a moment in solidarity for the White House, and for the guy that shot at the White House today. I don’t know if you heard, but someone shot at the White House window today.”
Can you imagine the round-the-clock (negative) media coverage if (a) a person from a Tea Party rally was arrested for shooting at the White House and (b) if a Tea Party member from another city had asked for a “moment of silence in solidarity” with the alleged shooter? It would produce days of front page, above-the-fold coverage in the New York Times? and spawn a thousand editorial and columns from liberals, to say nothing of providing MSNBC and CNN with several months worth of programming, hand-wringing, and sermonizing.
I persist in my belief that the media double standard as it relates to coverage of the Tea Party v. Occupy Wall Street (and its progeny) illustrates, in ways few other recent stories have, the widespread bias that exists in large sectors of the media. As I’ve argued before, many reporters and anchors undoubtedly believe they’re objective, detached, and applying a single standard to both movements, which in some respects makes the problem worse. The layers of delusion and self-delusion are astonishing.
Peter Wehner also laid out the unwatchable Mika Brzezinski in a Contentions post he later apologized for. But, it’s still fun.
If you want to see a revealing look at the emotional, and not simply political, investment liberals have in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, watch Mika Brzezinski and Jeffrey Sachs respond to Newt Gingrich’s comments over the weekend that the protesters should get a job and take a bath. Their rage is uncontained, almost tear-inducing, and comical. The whole crew and conversation, with one liberal egging on the other, is a fantastic window into the dominant mindset of modern-day liberal journalists.
One can see that without Joe Scarborough’s presence, the show is essentially the morning version of the shows hosted by Ed Schultz? and Rachel Maddow (though Maddow is a good deal more intelligent and informed than Brzezinski). Speaking of which: One of her colleagues would do Brzezinski a huge favor if they pulled her aside and explained to her the difference between “literal” and “figurative.” During this short segment Brzezinski claims Gingrich was “literally” standing on his “high horse” and his words “literally made my skin crawl.”
Actually, neither was “literally” true. There was no horse on the stage where Gingrich appeared, and Mika’s skin wasn’t crawling, at least from what we can tell. Then again, what would you expect from a woman who, in mocking Sarah Palin, named Abraham Lincoln as one of her favorite founders?