Obama '08?

Wow, this thread has really bottomed out, and is now nothing but a losers' love feast.

People would have been virtually insane to vote for McCain and Palin, whose entire platform amounted to attacks on Obama and his ideas. The former had no program of their own, and gave the impression to any thinking person that they would merely continue the failed Bush policies.

The country is quickly sinking, and Obama has the guts to administer strong medicine. For one thing, he is avoiding the failed FDR policies of letting the major banks sink and being niggardly in public spending. Jobs are disappearing at a high rate, and O's policies are the only chance of stopping this.

I believe the Obama supporters are nervous. They are not ready to admit anything, but hidden in their cycs is the knowledge that Obama truly may be a total bust, as us conservatives always believed he was and is, and getting worse. While the economy tanks and he tells the car companies not to fly anywhere, he is out playing golf and partying in New York, or Michelle shopping in Paris. And while he was supposed to make the world love us, things are icy with Israel, Germany, France, etc. He did manage to get a leftist book given to him by Hugo Chavez, at least he likes him. Problems not only abound, but are threatening to totally spin out of control since Bush left office. He is finding out that playing nice with North Korea or terrorist states simply does not work.

Maybe we need another concert to sing "We are the world" to Obama, and all will be okay again.

I agree that many Obama supporters are nervous. Just as we did when our candidate won the elections, they are attempting to put the best possible face on what they instinctively know is problematic. We did much the same. I honestly did try to support President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" initiative and it did yield some good things, but in the end I had to admit that the negatives outweighed the positives, and I remain convinced that education should not be managed at the Federal level. We do not want those with great power to have the power to control the content of curriculum or claim the minds of the children.

don't think any of us approved of his prescription drug initiative and deplored the idea that a Republican would advocate another costly entitlement program. And as the flaws became more and more obvious, many of us were willing to criticize President Bush for an incompetent prosecution of the war in Iraq even as we continued to rebutt the accusations that the USA was the 'bad guy' there.

So I hope we can continue to identify what our President then and now got right, and what our President then and now gets wrong. Our worst enemy is apathy and not supporting that which should be supported and not resisting that which should be resisted.

I believe the Obama supporters are nervous.

We can't just accept that the 'messiah' is infallible and therefore must be followed in blind faith, no questions asked.

One another thread I reposted one of my favorite Thomas Sowell quotations this morning that went along the lines that sooner or later anybody who cricizes a program or initiative will be asked "Well what would you replace it with?" His answer is: "When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?"

The task of the opposition at this time is to put out the fire. We need to stop initiatives that won't produce the promised or even hoped for results. We need to stop irresponsible spending of money that we don't have that is estimated to produce $11 trillion deficits within a short time. We need to just stop, regroup, rethink, and go forward with what WILL work to begin creating jobs instead of making them go away, what will bring up consumer confidence and increase productivity and begin rebuilding the GDP. We can't just accept that the 'messiah' is infallible and therefore must be followed in blind faith, no questions asked.

Foxfyre wrote:
We can't just accept that the 'messiah' is infallible and therefore must be followed in blind faith, no questions asked.

Sounds reasonably legitimate & self consistent. However, you don't address the potential for a truly catastrophic collapse in credit markets and truly worse consequences. Perhaps you don't believe they could occur. Though, evidently George Bush & Tom Paulson thought the prospect real enough.

I'm not sure what you mean by. "Congress could have stepped up legitimate federal infrastructure projects, etc. that the feds are obligated to do ..."? What constitutes an "obligation"? The Feds are "obliged" by enabling legilation to do many things they routinely avoid or delay doing. Besides, one man's "legitimate infrastructure project" is another's wasteful pork. There's really no general agreement on this. The stimulus package passed by the Congress did include huge grants to state governments to keep their highway and other programs going in a period during which their tax receipts were low and they no longer had access to commercial credit on tax futures.

Apart from lowering the scale of the deficit spending and focusing it more narrowly on avoiding a catastrophic collapse of credit markets, while, at the same time adding to unemployment benefits & eligibility (hard to rationalize doing the first without also doing the second), I don't see much real difference here.

3. Congress could have lowered taxes on businesses with a guarantee that they would be kept low for a reasonable period and perhaps relaxed some restrictive regulations to encourage production, expansion and calculated risk taking to stimulate the economy. That might have necessitated some cuts in individual income tax rates as well to provide money for customers to consume the increased production. Any short term hit to the treasury would have been much less than those hundreds of billions authorized for 'make work' projects, would have stimulated the entire economy instead of small pockets of it, and would have lessened the drain on the treasury for unemployment benefits, etc.