A must read …
If you read nothing else this weekend, I encourage you to read two things: First on Sunday I'll be ranting about President Obama's bald hypocrisy on earmarks. It think you will find it informative and entertaining. You can find my columns here. And second, curl up and read this piece by Charles Krauthammer on the "deception" of the Obama Administration (this same column by Krauthammer will be in Sunday's Review-Journal). I think Krauthammer has it right. And, I am sorry to tell Nevadans that our senator, Harry Reid, is a co-conspirator in it. Here's a sample:
"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," (Obama) averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.
"The 'day of reckoning' has now arrived. And because 'it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,' Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.
"Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.
"At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.
"The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of over-educated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place."
