And Democrats have an interest in trying to label these faux republicans as conservatives so that they can dishonestly tie the failings of the Bush Presidency to Conservatism.

Wow.

Those 'X' were not enough pure in their hearts and deeds to be excused their failings... The only pure X are the X who agree with me 100%, nothing else counts.

I think we need a lighter moment.

Live...its the Republican stimulus response

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Li...-open/1018742/

The underlying point - at least to me - is that the Bush years are far from a definitive conviction of conservativism as a whole. In and of itself, that's not an elitist stance. You can't really point to the Bush years and say, "see? this is what happens when small government ideology gets its way" or "see? this is what happens when you greatly curtail government interference in the free market".

And that's not even including a discussion of how many failings were due to poor implementation rather than flawed objectives.

Clearly.

If Obama fails, and we spin further into an economic crevasse (as Rush Limbaugh and various folk of his persuasion seem to hope), then we can take comfort in knowing that Obama only failed out of a lack of commitment to liberal socialism...

I find the Wall Street Journal's recent attacks on Obama for "fear mongering" are richly ironic.

i can understand why conservatives would want to disassociate themselves from the glorious legacy of the bush administration, but it seems more than a little--o i dunno---counterfactual.

whatever....conservative brand triage is not my problem.

more generally, though, i wonder if this thread's reached the point of diminishing returns.

Well, we're going to have to give Obama more time. It hasn't even been a month.

Not this democrat. I fully acknowledge that the neo-cons are not in line with true conservative thought.

That said, they /have/ taken over the Republican party and thus far, the "true Republicans" aren't doing anything about it. So. . . -shrug- If the shoe fits. . .

I do find it funny in a very sad way that those who speak out against Obama and/or the "stimulus" package are being branded and cajoled, meanwhile Bush was called "shrub" from day one and attacked mercilessly the whole f'n time. I was one who did this.

While I do wish Obama the best and seriously doubt the Dems will allow him to fail, they will do whatever they possibly can to make his term successful, I find it less than heartening and more partisan politics when the very people who attacked Bush from day one are not allowing the same to be done to Obama.

Is Obama so weak and fragile that people cannot speak out against him? What happened to the Democrat cry when they were attacking Bush "it's patriotic to criticize the president and we have a right to."?

We do, even Republicans have that right. So what if someone wants to criticize Obama? Last time I checked they had every right to. They do not need to be told "wait, give him time..." or called names, cajoled or not listened to. Just as those of us who criticized Bush had the same right.

I so hoped when the Dems won they would show more grace and class than what they are in this case. But alas, this shows me that they are as guilty as the neo-cons in that they don't give a damn about the people, their rights or the country, all they care about is power and pushing through their agenda.

So much for "change" and truly wanting a better America, eh guys?

Seems to me Obama has done more to include the GOP in the last few weeks then Bush did in his entire eight years. The fact that they've locked arms and shouted "no way, no how" doesn't mean he hasn't tried to get them involved. The GOP is really putting itself in a great position. If the stimulus fails they can say "I told you so." Hell many are publicly stating they hope it does fail. Great! The country's in a economic crisis and they're hoping for failure. Wouldn't want their ideas to turn out to be wrong. I mean tax cuts have really stimulated the economy so far, let's keep adding more. If it succeeds they can claim it did so only slowly and only because they held out and got in some minor points they wanted. Hell, I don't think anyone thinks it's going to succeed quickly. The GOP's main idea seems to be cut taxes and spending. Well, now it's to cut spending, when they had utter and complete control spending was a freaking brilliant idea. Not spending in the USA per se, but spending in Iraq that was always a good idea. How much money has been spent there? How many schools have we (at least tried) to build? Bush's legacy became so tied to Iraq- success at any cost became the plan, with the US tax payers footing the bill. The employment rate is in a nose dive, housing prices have tanked and continue down, the major stock indexes have gone south so far many have lost nearly 50% of their saving and retirement plans. Personally I'd like to start building new schools in the US. But the stimulus bill was trimmed of 14B for new school construction because the Dems refused to even try to be bi-partisan. Oh, wait that was what the GOP wanted.

Well, the real tragedy is, for the last 8+ years, they're the ones claiming to be "true Republicans". They've so tainted the whole notion of True Republicanhood, it's almost impossible to hear it as anything but "Support our war in Iraq! Waterboard some towelheads! 9/11!!" Which is a shame, because a true meeting of diverse political minds is exactly what America needs.

It's also what Obama tried to have happen on the Stimulus bill, and was roundly rebuffed by the Republicans. I think he learned a lesson on that--he said about it, roughly, "I'm an optimist, but I'm not a sap." Guy's got the political will and the public mandate to take action, and I think those who would oppose it on flat political grounds will be utterly marginalized and irrelevant, no matter how histrionic Fox News gets about it.

What is needed is the return of confidence and a capital market through which credit will flow in the thousand rills with its result of employment and increased prices. That confidence will be only destroyed by action in these directions. These channels will continue clogged by fears if we continue attempts to issue large amounts of Government bonds for purposes of non-productive works.

Such a program as these huge Federal loans for “public works” is a fearful price to pay in putting a few thousand men temporarily at work and dismissing many more thousands of others from their present employment. There is vivid proof of this since these proposals of public works financed by Government bonds were seriously advanced a few days ago. Since then United States Government bonds have shown marked weakness on the mere threat. And it is followed at once by curtailment of the ability of states, municipalities and industry to issue bonds and thus a curtailment of activities which translate themselves into decreased employment.

It will serve no good purpose and will fool no one to try to cover appearances by resorting to a so-called “extraordinary budget.” That device is well known. It brought the governments of certain foreign countries to the brink of financial disaster. It means a breach of faith to holders of all Government securities, an unsound financial program and a severe blow to returning confidence and further contraction of economic activities in the country.

What you want and what I want is to restore normal employment. I am confident that if the program I have proposed to the Congress is expeditiously completed and we have the cooperation of the whole community, we will attain the objective for which we have been searching so long.

Yours faithfully,
Herbert Hoover

I did not say it was his fault, however, there has been a clear acceleration in job loss since his election. In my opinion Obama's rhetoric may play a role. Since I shared my opinion on this I have noticed more and more are picking up on the possible impact and errors in Obama's words. Here is an article in today's WSJ:

Bradley Schiller Says Barack Obama Should Stop Comparing Our Financial Crisis With the Great Depression - WSJ.com

I think a President can have an impact on behavior through his words.
-----Added 16/2/2009 at 11 : 18 : 57-----
Republican's are unified on the facts that the stimulus bill is "snake oil", was rushed, and full of pet projects. Many reasonable people disagree on what is best to do and some feel Washington doing nothing is better than the stimulus bill.

Small business owners are not laughing today, and won't be anytime soon.

what the right is arguing is a return to systematic denial of reality.
if "confidence" in markets can be collapsed into "confidence" that you look like a movie star today so head out there into the world and be perky, then this brilliant piece of logic follows:
if the latter is lying to yourself on a small scale, then the former is lying to yourself on a big scale.
so the important "idea" that the right is floating amounts to: lie to us so we can feel better.


as if that was not stupid enough, they have the audacity to tack on these fatuous claims of "fearmongering"---that obama is "fearmongering"----this from the same people who supported the bush people's "war on terror."


how on earth do they expect anyone to take this seriously?

what kind of degenerate condition is conservativeland in these days?
i think they'd be better off tearing it down rather than trying to rebuild on top of ruins.

Laissez faillir = Andrew Mellon's hugely successful response to the crash of 1929.

Mellon's tuff-luv leadership saved the country from depression.

Don't let the Dems scare you, everything is OK = Herbert Hoover's take.

People were so enthusiastic about Hoover's response to the crisis that they showered him with fruit and vegetables on the campaign trail in 1932. And they named everything from blankets to boxcars after him! If it had not been for fear-mongering by FDR, groovy Hoovy probably would have won by a landslide.

I'll take all the "pet projects" that spend money domestically over all the money being sent overseas right now. Cutting school construction spending in half in this bill while spending millions to build schools in Iraq makes zero sense to me.

That is because of the crash on september 15th. To try to make the Obama election the culprit when the situation was deteriorating rapidly since september is at least dishonest.

Especially since the way unemployment is calculated, and the time it takes for someone to be fired, mean that a lot of what went on on the november figure actually took place in october.

ace...I agree that business community is not laughing......it does appear that they are applauding a good first step.

The US Chamber of Commerce (more than 96% of U.S. Chamber members are small businesses with 100 employees or fewer) while noting that the bill is not perfect, supports it.
Many, including Obama, agree its not a perfect bill and that the "whole is more important than the individual parts."

The National Association of Manufactures supports the bill as well....as does the Business Roundtable.

Reasonable people dont expect perfection....they expect an honest and sincere effort to address a national problem.

I do appreciate the Governor of my state, going out of his way to criticize the stimulus bill on national television, and then deciding that despite all the "pork", and the fact that the bill isn't going to work because it doesn't cut enough taxes, he's going to go ahead and take the money on behalf of all Minnesotans to help out with our budget deficit.

What a douchebag.

There isn't going to be an easy way out of this economic mess. Just think of the huge public works initiative called WWII whereby the government spent its way out of the last depression.

There is no magic solution. It is going to take time, money and everyone changing their attitudes on saving, spending and perceived ideas of wealth (and their entitlement to it) to get out of this.

OMG! There has also been a clear acceleration in job losses since the Lions lost to the Bears in week 9 of the 2008 football season. I think there's something there.

that's the main issue, really--that this is a very large-scale multi-variate crisis.
folk seem to want a single magic bullet, a simple solution because they're used to being told that capitalism is a single simple machine that operates on the basis of a single type of simple motivation. this has the effect of reducing a complex social system to a matter of lots of individuals wishing the same thing at the same time. that's infantile--what they call magical thinking.

fact is that there are systemic changes that have to happen and that it is not at all clear that the administration has it's collective head (if you like) around what exactly those changes should be. and they're being covered by a media apparatus with the attention span of a gnat, with the memory of a gnat which is in no way able in its present form to assemble longer trajectories of activity into a coherent narrative--everything that's real in television land is happening now and reality as a whole is little more than a sequence of disconnected now now now points that unfold against a context that is entirely naturalized. this is a real fucking problem because it is not obvious how systemic change can possibly be presented as such unless you can talk about the rationale behind that change in the space of a series of disconnected now now now points. such is the problem with the ideological relay apparatus and one of the central reasons why, no matter what the right says, the medium is in itself conservative--the naturalizing of context is conservative--the disconnecting of trajectories into sequences of instants plays to an ideology that operates on the same assumptions (context=nature, action-instantanious decision such that the state is reduced to the figure of the leader and history to individual memory and action to individual attention spans)....

so not only is there a problem of working out what policy directions make sense given an actual analysis of the empirical state of the economy (not something that has mattered terribly to the neoliberal set, which understood basic statistical indices as an extension of ideology) but also how to present those directions to a media apparatus that atomizes everything it touches.

you can't blame the administration for being circumspect.
and i am not entirely a fan of the administration so far, simply because i don't think they're going far enough fast enough in leaving consigning neoliberalism to the ash-heap of history.
but i have a sense of the constraints at play.
this is difficult--and it is so without even starting to consider the actual socio-economic environment that neoliberalism has left behind in the united states.
i shudder to think of what's there once the dreamscapes neoliberals preferred to traffic in are stripped away.
you should too.

I find it less than heartening that you don't understand what we're saying. We aren't saying you can't criticize the President. We're saying it's pretty ironic/amusing/sad/pathetic that these idiots are criticizing Obama when THEY are the ones who so fervently informed us that we were traitorous and un-American for criticizing the President. If one is going to inform me that I am a bad and immoral person who wants our troops to die because I criticize the President, then I would expect one to stifle one's own criticism of the President.


Well. . . No shit!

The economy tanked 2 months before his election. Of course job losses are going to accelerate after the economy tanks. What exactly did you think would normally happen when the economy crashes and burns? Unemployment would drop to 0?



This.

whatever the WSJ may say on it, history has shown us that any changeover in the executive branch inevitably leads to 'uncertainty' in the job market. It happened with bush sr., clinton, bush jr, and now obama. it's almost natural until big business gets to see where policy is going to lead them.

Question: is there any hotlist where I can see a list of actions Obama has taken? It's been rather difficult to find a simple listing of actions he's done to the news-uninformed like myself at college >.< (I'm much better about it at home, I swear). I'm just curious as to what he's done. Please and thanks!

Have you ever been in a position where you did any business planning? Business owners have short, intermediate, and long-term plans. Businesses that manage inventory and people have to make judgments based on the information available today regarding the future. If it is going to take 6 months to a year to hire and train an employee you have to make a hiring decision 6 months to a year before the need or have an alternative plan. If you anticipate revenue will be lower in 6 to twelve months, not only do you stop hiring, but you start planning to lay people off.

One of the inputs in your decision is going to be subjective. A president can influence this subjective component. Stop the pretense, that a President can not have an impact on employment. Stop the pretense that anyone is arguing that is the only factor.


For the record I supported the war in Iraq and the "war on terror", if you revist the many threads on the subject you will find that I ready acknowledged that Bush "sold" the case for war. In order to "sell" the case he used rhetoric to make people fearful of inaction. I understood this, and I think most others did as well. Even Democrats used fear rhetoric when they gave speeches in advance of their votes supporting military action in Iraq. The Bush strategy was clear, he did not have a hidden agenda. Anyone who supported the war simply because of Bush's words did not do their homework.

In this situation what is Obama doing? What is the value? Can you be honest about it?


I don't. I know where most posters stand and I know that most don't have an open mind.

I am predicting that liberalland will collapse before any more deterioration in conservativeland. The seeds of the liberal collapse have been sown. Enjoy the next couple of years while you can, if you can. Obama will be a one term President.
-----Added 17/2/2009 at 11 : 28 : 08-----
Pretty funny.

But on the other hand there has been the TARP legislation (Democratic Party legislation), designed to do something. There has been the Auto industry bailout (Democratic Part legislation. And there has been the Bailout (Democratic Party legislation). Not to mention the numerous hearings and investigation (Democratic Party control) We have people actively trying to fix things, spending billions and the net result has been an acceleration in job loss. The only quarter of negative GDP growth was the fourth quarter.

If my theory is wrong what is yours?

the only place where we agree, ace, is that there is not enough of a plan in the "stimulus package" and in the announcements concerning the banking sector.
we agree on that statement alone, but from entirely opposed positions.
i think obama has to break harder and faster with the outmoded logic of neoliberalism and formulate a clearer vision of exactly what the state is now going to do, how it is going to go about it, how the process is going to be benchmarked, etc.
and i think that the time is passing during which it makes any sense to waste time thinking and speaking in neoliberal terms--simply because those terms tend to preclude exactly the directions the administration needs to move in, and quickly.

maybe that explains the growing impatience in my posts with respect to the american right--i have never been a fan--but i see it now as not only incoherent but also ineffectual--and this at a point where the shit that's hitting the fan is such that there's no more time to waste on incoherence and ineffectualness.

i'll agree that Obama is likely to be a 1 term president. Americans are by and large conditioned to expect a happy ending within 30 minutes. . . 2 hours tops, if they're watching a movie. They're gonna be mad that Obama can't fix things in 4 years, even though it took over 30 years to break it to this degree.

That said, I find it . . Cute. . that the republicans, who not only failed to grow the economy, but who caused it to implode, have the chutzpah to bitch about Obama's plan. Your plan failed. Spectacularly. You clearly don't know what you're doing, so why not sit down, shut up, and let someone else have a go?

They're posturing for their base. They're all going to take the money, because despite the way that they like to portray themselves, they're just as inclined to suck at the government's teat as the most cadillac drivinest welfare queen. They're a party that favors words over action.

Let's be clear on a couple of things. First, recessions are normal, they are a part of our normal business cycle. During periods of accelerated economic growth excesses develop and the excesses need to be removed, hence in simple terms, you will get a recession. Also you can get a recession after a period of above normal innovation, when innovation goes back to normal or below normal, this can trigger a recession. The bottom line is that the causes of a normal recession does not have to be related to government actions although it could.

Second, government actions during a normal recession can make the recession worse or last longer. I think this is the case we have now and I think the rhetoric from the President is not helping and most likely is having a negative impact.

Third, I know what has an impact on me and my business. Government regulation, taxation, along with the threats of more taxation and regulation has an impact on the decisions I make. Again, if I am the only one, there is no concern - if I am one of millions or ten's of millions of small business owners, it should be a concern for you and the President.

acee....I'm curious why you think the US Chamber of Commerce supported the bill on behalf of its members (96% of which are small business of less than 100 employees) as a "good first step but not enough"...rather than "hey..its just a normal recession, stay the fuck of our lives!"

I know exactly what you are saying, I just do not agree with it. It is far more gracious and less hypocritical to just shake your head and walk away when they spout what ever they want.

Yeah, Pan, that's the typical democratic response, while the typical republican response is to rub the Dem's faces in everything they said (or that the Republicans made up that they said) back to the dawn of time. And in general, the republicans win elections because of it. Only after the Republicans have been in office for awhile and have screwed everything up royally do people get pissed enough to elect a democrat.

Pan...IMO, the recent Republican hypocrisy is just one element of a larger, well conceived, misinformation campaign.

When you walk away from lies and misrepresentations that are not just honest differences of opinion, you enable them to be perpetuated.

One only need look at the Obama's Seven Broken Campaign Promises thread. A right wing attack page, completely false or at the very least, a gross misrepresentation of the facts, makes its way here (and probably dozens of political discussion boards) with the hope of the person who created it initially of spreading it further.

Do you believe the best response is to ignore it and walk away? I dont see how you separate the hypocrisy from the other bullshit.

How does being "more gracious" contribute to honest discourse?

I don't know. I don't belong to the US Chamber of Commerce. I don't know much about who does belong. I have given my reasons why I don't support the Stimulus Legislation.

Also, here are comments from an ad endorsed by some of those "economists" that Obama referenced:

Here is a link to the full ad, showing the long list of names.

http://www.cato.org/special/stimulus...o_stimulus.pdf
-----Added 18/2/2009 at 02 : 57 : 38-----
A wonderful opportunity to set the record straight.

Was the Stimulus legislation bill read by members of Congress before they voted for it?
Did Obama read the legislation before he signed it?
Who wrote most of the legislation?
Were lobbyist involved in writing some of the legislation? If so, how much?
Did Obama violate any of his campaign promises as this legislation was drafted and passed?

Yeah, and Lincoln didn't sign the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Revolutionary War never happened - England just gave up their claim on us. Oh, and Kennedy was never shot, and Nixon didn't do it.

As long as we're rewriting history, why not do it in more than just economic areas?

Lets talk about misrespresentations. When Shakran says that he was informed that he was:

"a bad and immoral person who wants our troops to die because I criticize the President"

I would like to know who told him that, and what he said that elicited that reaction. Certainly it wasn't the quote that had no context posted by DC_dux, from some noname congresswoman in 2007 or 8 (notice whatever she was reacting to wasn't included). If you are a liberal who engages in anything close to the behaviors I had referenced earlier, I'll go one step further - not only are you a bad and immoral person who wants our troops (and former president) to die, you are a rabid ideological lunatic.

So if you're gonna suggest that republicans have said that it is unpatriotic (or slightly more dramatic "a bad and immoral person") to simply criticize the president......prove it. Don't misrepresent reaction to your everyday juvenile liberal behavior as some sort of overall republican conspiracy to quiet the opposition.

I'm gonna say you're just playing the victim...agian.

matthew, i really don't see the utility of these posts of yours. your claim that conservatives did not claim that criticism of the bush administration was treasonous is simply false...think about 2003 for example, in the early phases of the iraq debacle.

the claim that conservatives have not argued that criticism of the office of the president is treasonous is so vague as to be meaningless in any event--we all know from long experience that when a republican is in office, there's one set of standards, but when a democrat is in office, there's an entirely different set of standards. on this, of late, the right has been true to form.

there's been clips that refute your claims posted by dc above.
there's been more than ample information posted elsewhere that refutes your claim.
so i don't see you have a leg to stand on as a point of fact.

but then there's the slightly broader question of what exactly you're hoping to accomplish by sticking with this line of argumentation, even if you put aside the fact that it's already been shown repeatedly to be false.

Matthew, aren't you the same guy who previously claimed that people who act overtly racist are just liberals trying to make conservatives look bad? Because if you are that same guy, I'm impressed by how quickly you've transitioned into the kind of guy who calls people out for seeing conspiracies where they don't exist.