Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Responsibility

The administration's stimulus program has failed. Growth is slow and unemployment remains high. The president, his friends and advisers talk endlessly about the circumstances they inherited as a way of avoiding responsibility for the 18 months for which they are responsible. link

Lefties also conveniently forget that Democrats have run both houses of Congress since 2006.

Now I've never been one to lay "responsibility" or "fault" for natural or cyclical crises at the fault of the president. The president doesn't have a panel of buttons that he can push to make the economy improve, gas prices go down, etc. How I judge our governmental leaders is their response to crises. Do they help, do they hinder, or do they prolong? On that scale, the president does not score well. At all.

But they want new stimulus measures—which is convincing evidence that they too recognize that the earlier measures failed.

Doing the same thing and expecting a different result? Hm. He may not be insane (although some of his ideas are), but he's certainly not the pragmatist that his fellow-travelers on the left try to make him out to be. He's the very definition of a partisan ideologue.

5 comments:

Ellen K said...

Wouldn't you say it was at least irresponsible, at most fraudulent, for the Democrats to submit the healthcare bill to the CBO omitting key expenditures that they knew would be necessary? If you tried to do that with a mortgage, you would have it yanked. If you made a contract for a car and the dealers said after the ink was dry that tires were extra, you would walk away. So why is it okay for this administration to cook the books, get a "deficit neutral" score and then come back after the fact for more? Is that not enough evidence to demand repeal?

Darren said...

It would be if we weren't living in the original Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action".

Ellen K said...

In a similar vein, why is nobody investigating the involvement of BP in the White House advisory capacity? I think this has driven dithering the Olympic levels. When I heard that the San Francisco mayor has stock in Transocean and his wife has stock in BP, then it makes me wonder how many other people of power in the DNC have a vested interest in seeing them survive? In short, do you think they would have dithered so much if this had been an Exxon rig or if it had been on the California coast?

Darren said...

I'm not sure I follow what you're saying. Wouldn't those in charge want to act more quickly and limit damage if they own stock in the company?

neko said...

Come on Ellen, you know the answer: no one is investigating this because the people in question have a (D) after their names.