Tag: reagan

The reported resort to astrology in the White House has occasioned much merriment.  It is not funny.  Astrological gibberish, which means astrology generally, has no place in a newspaper, let alone government.  Unlike comics, which are part of a newspaper’s harmless pleasure and make no truth claims, astrology is a fraud.  The idea that it gets a hearing in government is dismaying.

George Will, noted Serious Person, writing in 1988. What I wouldn’t give for an astrologer and a Serious Person that noticed.

History’s Greatest Monster

Reince Priebus (Chairman of the RNC): [Obama is] the king of golf and vacations!
Sad Reality: Obama would have to take off the next 2.5 years in order to catch up with President George W. Bush’s vacation record. By this time, Bush had taken 349 days off, Obama has taken 96. Even Saint Reagan took 180 days off, about twice Obama’s current tally. The GOP controlled House is out for 5 weeks. Obama is taking 8 days. Move over Jimmy Carter, we’ve truly found History’s Greatest Monster.

The 51%

Bloomberg is reporting that Obama is the first President since Ike to win two elections by a 51%+ popular vote margin. Yes, not even Saint Reagan, he of stayin’ up late and workin’ cross the aisle with ole Tip, managed the feat. And if we hear anything about that era, we hear about Reagan crushing History’s Greatest Monster and Son of History’s Greatest Monster. Steve Benen at the Maddow blog points out that Obama now joins a list of six Presidents with 51% or more in two elections: Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, William McKinley, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the aforementioned Eisenhower, and now, Barack Obama.

But, of course, the GOP in the House must be allowed to set policy for the country. Obama has achieved no mandate; not in 2008, not in 2012. Whatever in the hell it is that happened in November is certainly not a mandate to govern. Any serious person realizes this implicitly. If anything, he should look for GOP goodwill by moving quickly to eliminate Social Security and Medicare. Then I’m sure they’ll come right around to his way of thinking.

Trickle Down

Timothy Noah nails it:

You still can’t say [publicly] that Fortune 500 chairmen need to maximize their incomes, but it’s now perfectly OK to say that real estate speculators and day traders who pay taxes as S-Corporations to dodge Social Security and Medicare payments need to maximize their incomes. By God, they built this country!

Yep. Twenty years of message discipline gets you places. The Democrat could learn something from this sort of thing but never does.

Trickle Down

…first a Keynesian observes that fiscal stimulus can increase growth in a depressed economy. Second, as an attempted reductio, a conservative says “if that was true, then you could increase growth by breaking a bunch of windows.” Third, the Keynesian accurately points out that you could, in fact, increase growth by breaking windows. Fourth, the conservative accuses Keynesians of wanting to break windows or believing that window-breaking increases wealth. But nobody ever said that! The point is that we have very good reasons to think smashing windows would be a bad idea—there’s more to life than full employment—and that’s why Keynesians generally want to boost employment by having people do something useful like renovate schools or repair bridges.

Matt Yglesias, leaving out the next line in the exchange; the one where the conservative screams “that’s socialism,” makes a lot of unfounded claims about runaway spending, and then says government initiated stimulus has never worked, and most especially never worked in the guise of the colossal stimulatory effect of government spending to fight WWII. That recovery was the either “power of the markets” or “the markets anticipating Reagan and ‘morning in America.’” As usual.

Academic books pack about 600 words to a page. Normal books clock in around 400. Large-print books — you know, the ones for kids or the visually impaired — fit about 250. The House GOP’s jobs plan, however, gets about 200 words to a page. The typeface is fit for giants, and the document’s 10 pages are mostly taken up by pictures. It looks like the staffer in charge forgot the assignment was due on Thursday rather than Friday, and so cranked the font up to 24 and began dumping clip art to pad out the plan.

Ezra Klein reflecting on the GOP “jobs plan.”

I think every one of these Republican candidates running for the House is going to have a Democratic opponent who’s going to run an ad you can write today. It’s going to start [with] “even conservative Newt Gingrich, the former leader of the Republicans in the House, says ‘It’s radical, it’s social engineering.’”

[…]

Reagan had the 11th commandment, ‘Thou shalt not attack fellow Republicans.’ This is a capital offense against the 11th commandment. He won’t recover.

Charles Krauthammer, making some sense on disgraced former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Broken clock, blind pig, and etc…
Disgraced former Speaker Gingrich never had much of a chance to begin with, but taking at least four positions on the individual mandate and the Ryan plan, many of those positions within one day and all easily available on the television would seem to cap it.
However, I don’t believe for one second that The Democrat would actually use disgraced former Speaker Gingrich in this way for messaging purposes. Shrill. Better to assume that voters know all about the GOP plan to destroy Medicare and but also leave a program in existence called Medicare. Talking about that sort of thing is just rank demagoguery. Any Serious Person will tell you so.

CBS almost reported Reagan was mentally unfit in 1986 | Raw Story

Good Lord:

CBS’ Leslie Stahl recalled in her 2000 book, “Reporting Live,” that she was instructed not to ask then-President Reagan any questions during a 1986 meeting.

“Reagan didn’t seem to know who I was. He gave me a distant look with those milky eyes and shook my hand weakly,” she wrote. “Oh, my, he’s gonzo, I thought. I have to go out on the lawn tonight and tell my countrymen that the president of the United States is a doddering space cadet. My heart began to hammer with the import…I was aware of the delicacy with which I would have to write my script. But I was quite sure of my diagnosis.”

[…]

“Because Reagan seemed to ‘recover’ – I decided I could not go out on the White House lawn and tell the public what his behavior meant,” she wrote. “Was it what I had assumed at first: senility? Was it an ‘act’ – a way to avoid answering my questions? Was it some form of dementia (maybe not Alzheimer’s)? I decided I couldn’t report on my observations at all that night.”

Nothing is ever quite as breathtaking as the list of things reporters knew, but then decided on their own that the public at large would be better off just not knowing about. Inevitably they dump it out 20 years after it could have ever mattered and then soberly assess how tough it was to abrogate their entire purpose for being on the basis of some asinine logical fallacy they usually invented ex post facto.
Honestly, Leslie, the President of the United States seems totally disoriented, but recovers enough to talk vaguely about screenwriting and you decide that’s just not interesting or important enough to mention? Even if he was faking, this is major fucking news.

Your Liberal Media. All hail the fourth estate: keeping us safe.

CBS almost reported Reagan was mentally unfit in 1986 | Raw Story

I think the hug lacked dignity. It did not send a message of American power and forcefulness. So I fret about the reaction around the world to this kind of fraternity-like emotionalism in full public view.
Why not just a dignified, stand-up, serious handshake? That’s what Reagan would have done. A strong handshake shows friendship, respect, and even affection. But a big fat hug seems to go over the line.

Larry Kudlow, reacting to the Obama-Rahm-a hug. No, I am not kidding.