I don’t know what we’d do without him. How we’d cope. How we’d heal. How we’d survive.
Keith Koffler explains one of the reasons I am just so goddamned grateful to Heroic Obama right now.
In a move that is rich in irony, President Obama agreed Tuesday night to sign an emergency deficit reduction bill that does almost nothing to rein in spending and then jetted out to Hawaii to resume his vacation at an extra cost of more than $3 million to taxpayers.
The price tag is in addition to more than $4 million that is already being spent on the Obamas’ Hawaii idyll, bringing the total cost of the excursion to well over $7 million.
The added cost was incurred because by the time the Obamas return from Hawaii – whenever that is – the president will have used Air Force One to travel to Honolulu and back twice.
Obama was forced to return from Hawaii just after Christmas to complete negotiations to avoid the Fiscal Cliff, talks resulting in the bill that was passed by Congress last night. Obama resisted significant spending cuts throughout the negotiations, and the final legislation relies almost solely a new taxes to reduce the deficit.
Air Force One is known to cost about $180,000 an hour to fly. Based on an estimated 18 hours roundtrip flying time for the jet between Washington and Honolulu, the travel cost alone of Obama’s decision to return to Hawaii amounts to around $3.24 million. And that doesn’t include the price tag for the massive security operation required to move the president or the cost of the cargo plane that follows Air Force One around.
The Obamas could have saved taxpayers millions by returning from Hawaii together after Christmas and then resuming their vacation at one of the many ritzy resorts that lie outside of Washington. If the beach is a must, even a trip to Florida would have been far less expensive.
Or they could have simply stayed at the White House or Camp David, each a luxurious government-run installation, billing taxpayers a relative pittance.
They could have, if they were Little People, or possessed a fraction of the self-awareness or shame of even some of the 7-year-olds of my acquaintance, or most importantly if they did not have the entire mainstream press heeling like eager-to-please trained dogs, not daring to be skeptical of any of Master’s odd, unpleasant behaviors.
Must please Master. Mustn’t question Master.
Image may be NSFW.
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Anyway, about this “fiscal cliff” bill that has been passed by the most useless Congress fathomable and that I’ve spent the day reading about, and about which I’m still not sure if I should be furious, relieved, or just drunk because what is the fucking difference anymore? What have we hired these fools to do? Why do we blame them when they’re just kabuki-dancing like the performance clowns we knew they were when we elected them?
Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner says there is good, bad, and ugly about the deal, and he’d “rate the deal as objectively bad, but relatively good”, with which Mary Katherine Ham, someone I usually am completely on board with, agrees (and she does call the deal a “crap sandwich”). I understand the point. It’s an awful bill, but there really weren’t any other realistic options. But that is exactly the problem, and is the reason for despair. And, frankly, it pisses me off that half the country will get another delay in their long-overdue reckoning that elections have consequences.
DrewM at Ace’s place:
When the Team Happy GOP starts telling you how great this is, remember Obama got $600 billion in taxes for free but they want you to believe in two months the GOP will get a trillion plus in cuts for no additional taxes. This is a fairy tale.
And while not getting a tax hike is good personally for a lot of people, shielding 98% of Americans from the fiscal reality of their big government votes is going to kill the country.
Sure, most taxpayers will actually feel something because of expiration of the payroll-tax holiday and some new Obamacare-related taxes, but they’ll pretend they don’t feel it for a while longer because denial feels so goddamned good, and every inch further the can gets kicked down the road, the heavier and denser and more unkickable it becomes, until…there is no good ending to this story.
I sometimes wonder if the worst thing I’ve ever done for my own mental health is to have minored in WWII History in college and spent years before and after studying in too much detail how events in Europe played out between the world wars, economic and fiscal and governmental. I can’t recite all those details now and never pretend I can, but the impression that was left on my psyche almost socially cripples me sometimes. When I encounter people in conversation who acknowledge the set of facts about what’s happening in the Western world right now and then say, “Meh, bah, blah blah, there’s nothing I can do about it, I’m just going to enjoy my life,” I literally – I do mean literally - almost burst into tears because it feels so hopeless and frustrating if even the most reasonable of us flat-out do not give a shit. I actually have burst into tears when certain people very close to me have offered those rhetorical shoulder-shrugs.
Sorry to be so pessimistic. Last thing I want is for this blog to become depressing for anyone who likes it. It’s just that I read all that insanity about the fiscal cliff “deal” today, and then a trainload of terrifying anti-2nd Amendment rhetoric by fascists dressed in sheep’s clothing, and then two pieces by the excellent historian and writer Victor Hanson Davis, and I’m ready to offer a cash reward for anyone who can convince me that America as we’ve known it is not irretrievably gone.
The first VDH piece, at NRO and about the clown-college tryouts in Washington this week:
It is an academic point whether Obama’s aim in the vast borrowing of $5 trillion in four years was to grow a political constituency reliant on entitlements or to create enough pressure to hike taxes on the suspect affluent — or both.
Yet in almost every unguarded moment over the last decade, Obama, quite apart from compiling the most partisan voting record in the Senate, made his redistributionist intentions quite clear — lamenting the Supreme Court’s failure to take up forced redistribution, the sloppy spread-the-wealth riff, the no-time-to-profit warning, the failure of the rich to know when it was time to stop making money, the “you didn’t build your own business” snarl, and the gratuitous slurs such as fat-cat, corporate-jet-owners, the Vegas junketeering, and demonization of those who make $250,000 as the vulture rich.
So it is odd — especially after Mitt Romney was destroyed by being reduced to an car-elevator-owning, unkind to the garbage man, outsourcing, greedy felon, whose callousness killed people — that the Republican leadership does not fully comprehend the Obama modus operandi of waging a vicious ad hominem class war, only to step back at opportune moments and lament the growing acrimony and incivility. They better wake up in the next two years to the fact that they are dealing with a Nixonian mind with a folksy Reaganesque veneer.
The second VDH article is at his PJMedia blog and which made my blood run cold and then made me get the whiskey:
These are the most foreboding times in my 59 years. The reelection of Barack Obama has released a surge of rare honesty among the Left about its intentions, coupled with a sense of triumphalism that the country is now on board for still greater redistributionist change.
There is no historical appreciation among the new progressive technocracy that central state planning, whether the toxic communist brand or supposedly benevolent socialism, has only left millions of corpses in its wake, or abject poverty and misery. Add up the Soviet Union and Mao’s China and the sum is 80 million murdered or starved to death. Add up North Korea, Cuba, and the former Eastern Europe, and the tally is egalitarian poverty and hopelessness. The EU sacrificed democratic institutions for coerced utopianism and still failed, leaving its Mediterranean shore bankrupt and despondent.
Nor is there much philosophical worry that giving people massive subsidies destroys individualism, the work ethic, and the personal sense of accomplishment. There is rarely worry expressed that a profligate nation that borrows from others abroad and those not born has no moral compass. There is scant political appreciation that the materialist Marxist argument — that justice is found only through making sure that everyone has the same slice of stuff from the zero-sum pie — was supposed to end up on the ash heap of history.
In that same piece, he talks about some recent mainstream op-eds that are evidence of that disturbing but helpfully loin-girding new tendency of liberals/progressives to say what they really mean over the last few months.
You may have already heard about these but if not, feast your eyes on what a well-known journalist named Donald Kaul wrote in the Des Moines Register (via Instapundit):
Repeal the Second Amendment, the part about guns anyway. It’s badly written, confusing and more trouble than it’s worth…
Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. Hey! We did it to the Communist Party, and the NRA has led to the deaths of more of us than American Commies ever did…
Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control.
Bolding mine, to make sure you get the requisite foamy face-full of that “new civil tone” with which the Left keeps insisting we subliterate cavepeople must comport ourselves.
Another piece VDH mentions is one that’s been linked everywhere, a New York Times op-ed written by a Georgetown constitutional law professor named Louis Michael Seidman. Professor Seidman, Expert on the Constitution, is not a fan of the Constitution, for it is evil.
As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.
Consider, for example, the assertion by the Senate minority leader last week that the House could not take up a plan by Senate Democrats to extend tax cuts on households making $250,000 or less because the Constitution requires that revenue measures originate in the lower chamber. Why should anyone care? Why should a lame-duck House, 27 members of which were defeated for re-election, have a stranglehold on our economy? Why does a grotesquely malapportioned Senate get to decide the nation’s fate?
Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.
As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is. Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?
That last part, bolded, I’ve read 10 times now and each time I get a little bit more shaky with the creepers. The person who wrote those sentences teaches the Constitution at one of the best universities in the world, and he cannot imagine that it may be rational that a lone government official – “say, the president” – should be subject to checks and balances.
He also does not want to share with the reader that not all those “white propertied men” thought it was “fine to own slaves”. He definitely does want the reader to view all those men as elitist racists, because that furthers the agenda.
Many others have commented on this NYT op-ed. Volokh. Reynolds.
And Jeff Goldstein:
So argues Louis Michael Seidman, who, as is routine with progressives from Woodrow Wilson onward, is gracious enough to keep the parts of the Constitution he likes, but bemoans the very checks and balances that serve to protect individuals from the government, and deny temporary demagogues the power to affect enormous sudden systemic change. He also (predictably) ignores that the Constitution contains an amendment process, a strategic rhetorical bracketing on Seidman’s part, presumably because that process is too slow and cumbersome and doesn’t allow progressives to capitalize immediately on the latest ginned up crisis to savage the framework for our constitutional republic…
I’m tired of such treachery, disguised as it always is in appeals to “getting things done” and decrying having to answer to dead white propertied slave owners. So I’ll say only this (yet again): go find a state or set of states with people who agree with you, Mr Seidman, and secede. Declare your independence from the tyranny of the Constitution. Declare your independence from our founders and framers, with their dogged insistence on keeping government constrained and the individual empowered. Declare your independence from independence, and be content that you’ve salved your psychic wounds and political conscience.
Happy New Year.