In a recent column, he whales away mightily at President Obama’s Second Inaugural, accusing the President of “clinging zealously to the increasingly obsolete structures of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” which in fact are much healthier than Charlie likes to pretend.* But when Charlie takes after the President for reviving his “green dream” plans for a new America, I have to agree with him. I’m sorry, Barack, but this is the lamest kind of Hyde Park cocktail party chatter. All your green fantasies are job killers, not job creators. In Krauthammer’s paraphrase of Czech president Václav Klaus’s diagnosis, “environmentalism is the successor to failed socialism as justification for all-pervasive rule by a politburo of experts. Only now, it acts in the name of not the proletariat but the planet.” Really, Barack, small is beautiful. I mean, a smaller government, not a bigger one.
Republicans have complained fiercely that the President’s address was “too partisan.” Welcome to the world you created, guys. You spent the last four years trying to destroy the President, and now when he beats you it’s his job to make nice. As a skeptical liberal, I can believe, or, at least, I can hope, that the President’s talk of gun control and environmentalism was mostly done to encourage his supporters on the left, whom he neglected pretty severely in his first term. I think the President would be foolish to press hard on gun control. If it’s an emotional issue with him, and it may be, it will cost him. Environmentalism is a less emotional issue, but a more costly one. Enacting the liberal gun control package won’t help the nation, but it won’t hurt it either. Environmentalism wastes money and inhibits economic growth on virtually a dollar for dollar basis. Stand strong, House Republicans, you unscrupulous shits!
Afterwords
However unwise portions of the President’s package may be, I can’t help continuing to chortle at the Republicans’ disarray. Ross Douthat has an unintentionally revealing post “The Liberal Hour”—meaning that the Democrats will only be around for another hour. Funny, Ross, funny! Among other things, Ross sneers at the President’s “negative, joyless re-election campaign.” Joyless for you, maybe, Ross. But some of us had a ball!
*“We don’t have a spending problem, we have a health care spending problem,” the Prez likes to say, and, as Ramesh Ponnuru points out, he’s right. Not only are Medicare costs going through the roof, so are the costs of “regular” health insurance. If you have a good job but haven’t gotten a real raise in ten years, well, you did get a raise, you just didn’t see it. It went to cover the massive increases in health insurance costs. The major players in the health care industry—doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, and drug companies—all hate competition and have worked out a variety of deals to ensure that they don’t have to deal with it. And how are the Republicans going to take on the forces of private enterprise?
