'Swindle of the year goes to Obama'

[Number23]

"Swindle of the year goes to Obama"
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
Washington Post

"Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 — and House Democrats don’t have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years — which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat?

...No, cries the left: Obama violated a sacred principle. A 39.6 percent tax rate versus 35 percent is a principle? “This is the public option debate all over again,” said Obama at his Tuesday news conference. He is right. The left never understood that to nationalize health care there is no need for a public option because Obamacare turns the private insurers into public utilities. The left is similarly clueless on the tax cut deal: In exchange for temporarily forgoing a small rise in upper-income rates, Obama pulled out of a hat a massive new stimulus — what the left has been begging for since the failure of Stimulus I, but was heretofore politically unattainable.

...No, says the current buzz, the left will instead challenge Obama for the Democratic nomination. Really now? For decades, African-Americans have been this party’s most loyal constituency. They vote 9-1 Democratic through hell and high water, through impeachment and recession, through everything. After four centuries of enduring much, African-Americans finally see one of their own achieve the presidency. And their own party is going to deny him a shot at his own re-election?

Not even Democrats are that stupid. The remaining question is whether they are just stupid enough to not understand — and therefore vote down — the swindle of the year just pulled off by their own president."

Here is YET ANOTHER conservative beating Republicans in Congress up for the recent tax "giveaway" while getting in some jabs at clueless Dems in the process. It terrifies me that Krauthammer gets the extent of Obama's commitment and desire to help the lower and middle class while so many supposed liberals do not. I don't know what the hell this means, but this means something.

[nofurylike]

1. K&spiritR! great piece! thank you for posting it, Number23!! and

i share this feeling:
"It terrifies me that Krauthammer gets the extent of Obama's commitment and desire to help the lower and middle class while so many supposed liberals do not. I don't know what the hell this means, but this means something."

i know there's much to that *supposed* in "supposed liberals."

[Number23]

3. "i know there's much to that *supposed* in "supposed liberals."

You know it! And lets be real -- Krauthammer is not nearly as subtle with his criticism as he thinks. Calling health care "Obamacare" and calling the first stimulus a "failure" when damn near every economist/financier said that it staved off a second Depression.

But it's obvious that he is absolutely flabbergasted by the political naivete and, dare I say, stupidity of far too many on the left. He's not the only one.

Edit: If people were concerned that we are only adding to our debt to the Chinese or if only the wealthy were the ones that were going to benefit from what the President is proposing, I would completely understand and support the outrage.

But since the first point is not a bone of contention with supposed liberals and the second point is not even close to reality, I genuinely have no idea what the hell the problem is.

[nofurylike]

4. it is true that they are not really liberals, but a far left that wants

the failure of Obama as much as the far right does. the problem, maybe ours to deal with before the next election, is to define a line between true liberals/progressives and them. i'm thinking we're going to have to educate media on that difference.

idealistic - 'purist' - leftists tend to be people who can afford to be. they are privileged enough that holding out for 'perfection' does not endanger them as it will the most vulnerable. they don't even imagine that we WANT (as President Obama does too) the ideal and the pure as much as they ever could, it's just that we understand process, and we know we MUST keep sight of how every change will affect the most vulnerable.
any more vulnerable liberal, or any liberal who truly cares about others, is, simply, a democrat, and understands process. pragmatism AS the most ideal we can be.

i know you know. i've just been thinking a lot about this, about how media is misdefining "the base," and letting extremists speak as if they speak for us.

[treestar]

2. Interesting; a right winger sees how stupid the left is being