Obama Press Conference

Nebraska town requests
state’s old electric chair
for tourist attraction.

President Obama gave his second open press conference since taking office 64 days ago. Whatever you may think about Obama’s plan for our future, you have to admire his knowledge of the issues and the straightforward way he speaks to us. Can you even imagine, in your wildest imaginings, George W. Bush giving a press conference like that? Obama is articulate, confident, knowledgeable, obviously on top of what he is doing, completely unlike the bumbling moron we had a year ago who often apparently even wore a secret wire at times. Obama pointed out, rightly, that while the Republicans and others criticize and carp at his plan, they offer no plan of their own. I believe he is also right when he attributes this to the fact that if they did they would have to acknowledge that we can go nowhere unless we do something about health care (and Republicans do not want to see health care reform). I do not find the criticism that Obama is trying to do too much at once very thoughtful or useful. I think Obama is quite right when he says these things are all related to each other: health care, energy, and education. If this is so, it would not make much sense to try to deal with them one at a time, however difficult it may be to face them simultaneously. I regard watching Obama as a genuine pleasure, knowing that he can speak the English language and is in command of the program. The Republican objections are objections with no real basis other than being designed to simply bring down the Obama administration for their own selfish reasons.

As the Republicans are basically impotent and can just be ignored, the real threat to Obama seems to be coming from a few conservative Democrats led by Evan Bayh that are threatening to join with Republicans to force Obama to tailor is plans more to their specifications. It turns out that Bayh has been taking big bucks from some of the companies who want him to swing things their way, in other words, politics as usual. Where was this noble band of Democrats for the past eight years?

I have often found Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa mildly amusing, but I hadn’t realized until just now that he is apparently also brain dead. He has suggested, seriously I fear, that what we need is a moratorium on spending for the next three years! While most everyone else agrees that what we desperately need is to stimulate more spending, Grassley wants no spending. Sometimes I wonder if we are all on the same planet. Walt Minnick, on Lou Dobbs, wasn’t much better. He kept saying that we can’t keep borrowing trillions from the Chinese, as if no one else is aware of that. And he insists that we must cut down on our spending, apparently following the same logic as Grassley. Lou Dobbs seemed to me to be mostly ignoring him while repeating ad nauseam that we are not producing anything and until we do we can’t possibly get anywhere. I guess Dobbs believes that the jobs that Obama is trying to create will be devoted only to more totally unproductive activities like banking and pontificating on TV. And what does he think bailing out the auto industry is supposed to do, just sell insurance? Obviously we have lost lots of productive jobs, except, of course, in the shameless defense industry where we keep on producing tanks and planes and ships, and weapons of all kinds, that we don’t really need.

Whereas Obama keeps insisting we are all in this mess together, Republicans and a few Democrats apparently believe that doesn’t include them. It is unfortunately true that Obama’s stimulus plan is extraordinarily expensive and will certainly put us further into debt. But it is interesting that the Republicans didn’t worry about such things for the past eight years. Remember Cheney’s dictum, “Ronald Reagan showed us that deficits don’t matter.” Remember how they converted a huge budget surplus into the largest deficit in history. They did this with no plan other that to snatch up all the money they possibly could from the taxpayers and hand it over to their corporate masters and the already obscenely wealthy. At least Obama’s plan has a more noble purpose and is not being proposed merely on a whim. We are in big trouble. Obama has a plan to save us. No one else does. Like I say, “if you can’t beat it, don’t knock it.”

LKBIQ:
“It grieves me deeply to find out how frequently and how violently wrong I can be—it doesn’t seem reasonable, somehow.”
Dorothy Parker

TILT:
The Lascaux cave paintings are believed to be 16,000 years old.