Obama’s Blame Game

[Geee]

National Review:


We are told there are lots of reasons why borrowing $5 trillion in less than three years and federalizing health care have not yet restored prosperity.

The residents of George Orwell’s Oceania daily screamed at the infamous visage of arch-enemy of the people Emmanuel Goldstein. In the same way, almost every week for the last 140, Americans have been reminded just how nefarious and lasting was the work of George W. Bush. Now ensconced somewhere in Texas, Bush, in insidious ways, somehow still blocks our collective recovery.

Wall Street likewise continues to conspire to thwart Americans. “Fat-cat bankers,” “millionaires and billionaires,” people who fly in “corporate jets,” and those who “don’t pay their fair share” and who junket to Las Vegas or jet to the Super Bowl “on the taxpayers’ dime” have all ignored the president’s warnings. Did they not hear that “now is not the time for profit” and “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money”?

There are other guilty parties. The president also reminded us that there are fewer bank-teller jobs because of ATMs. And he added that online ticketing has meant that there is likewise far less employment for travel agents. Such accelerated automation after January 2009 apparently helps explain why unemployment is still over 9 percent.

And if technologically induced instability were not enough, there is the culpable Republican-controlled House. Until November 2010, a considerable Democratic majority in the House and a super-majority in the Senate were supposedly allowing the president to make headway. But then, for still poorly understood reasons, the people foolishly voted in a Republican majority in the House. The new Congress that was seated in January stopped the Obama success of the prior 24 months in its tracks. Since then, for the last nine months, the president has had to “fight Congress” in a way he had apparently not had to in his first two years of triumph. “They need to do their job,” the president remarked of the mysterious congressional ennui that started in January of this year.