Posted by
john on Saturday, November 22, 2008 6:30:16 PM
Yesterday, Rush did us all the favor of playing the tape of Rahm Emmanuel's pronouncement that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Rush surely gets the message. He's been hammering this theme concerning the essential "character" of the Democrat party for years: they can never let you know what they're really up to, since that would make them unelectable. Or, as he put it during the Clinton years, "these people wake up every morning asking themselves, 'how can we trick 'em today'."
Well, Rahm Emmanuel was a part of that administration, and he's still asking himself that same question. He knows full well that the American people, in "normal" times, would never knowingly adopt the true agenda of today's radical Dems, who are nothing but a lot of aging '60s radicals, and younger '60s radical wannabees, selling themselves fraudulently as Harry Truman or John Kennedy. Thus it is somewhat surprising that Mr. Emmanuel is so up front about his intent to, in essence, trick America into adopting a radical socialist agenda, while it's still vulnerable, disoriented, and panicky as a result of financial turmoil. In other words, get them to fall for, while in a vulnerable state, a program of vastly expanding central government power at massive cost to the nation's working men and women, which they would never approve while thinking rationally. When he admits that the financial crisis is, for him, an opportunity in just this sense, what other conclusion can we draw?
Friends, if this isn't the very definition of fascism I don't know what is. It is a subversion of democracy to foment panic in the hope that disoriented voters will approve their own undoing. Moreover, it makes me harbor serious doubt as to whether this crowd is anxious at all for the panic to abate and an economic recovery to ensue. As I alluded to previously, Barry O has options available to him which would do a much better job of restoring confidence than the dog-and-pony shows surrounding the Detroit automakers, or nominating as Treasury Secretary one of the same crowd that has been leading the charge for ever greater central government intervention (I say yesterday's stock market rally was much more about options expirations, and perhaps some small sense of relief, than a vote of confidence in Mr. Geithner).
For starters, he could simply pledge no new taxes - the understanding since 11/06 that the Bush tax cuts would almost
certainly expire has been ruinous to confidence. Another great step would be to scrap CAFE standards. Unfortunately, we know that will never happen, thus the sense that we are governed by nothing but free-spending clowns grows ever greater. The failure of the incoming administration to address our nation's problems seriously, rather than pandering to ancient interest groups and bowing to nonsensical political dogma, leads me to a sad conclusion: this crowd is much less interested in solving problems than in exploiting them. As FDR said, this isn't about a recovery, "this is politics." Please, dear readers, don't forget this.