Humble Pie

This was the week of my personal comeuppance. I had predicted that the Bush tax cuts (sic) would not be extended. I was happily wrong. My reasoning, I thought, was solid: Democrats still held a majority and they would never capitulate to yet another signature issue from the hated Bush administration. There was a lot of grousing, to be sure. But, in the end, it marked a defeat for the Left that I had not foreseen. Also, I had consistently written that the Left actually wants the economy to fail. This may still be true, but I now concede that Obama may not be playing on that particular team.

It may turn out to be a pyrrhic victory. If the economy does not improve - and, God knows, we’ve saddled the poor thing with so many sinkers - the Left will blame these tax cuts (sic) once again. The template of blame is already pretty much set in stone: if a policy doesn’t work, it’s never wrong; there just wasn’t enough of it. In this way, no side is ever wrong. Whereas it was clear sailing for Republicans for the first two years of Obama’s term (because they had effectively been shut out), now they will have a stake in what happens. They share accountibility no matter what.

I still say that it appears that Democrats have the political side of it much more in hand than Republicans do. Republicans always seem to be in the position of fighting back. Rightly or wrongly, they have been feminized by the media and portrayed as weak, irrational and whining.

Still, Republican wins last week point to the fact that even in countries where women appear most oppressed, it is said it is they who essentially for run the house.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Blame-Shifting

I propose that ‘blame-shifting’ be included as a legitimate sport in the next Olympic Games. It has been endlessly practiced for decades by the Arabs who have sought to excuse their own failed leaderships and blame Israel and the United States for any and all their problems. In addition, it has been routinely used by South American dictatorships to justify their corruption and brutality.

‘Blame-shifting’ did not become popular in U.S. politics until the Clinton-Gore Administration. Before that, it had generally been understood that “the buck stops here” (meaning, ‘at the President’s desk’), along with now such quaint and outdated notions like “politics stops at the water’s edge”.

Clinton was the first to introduce the sport to the political leagues. Every former president and every founding father was smeared in order to show that what Bubba did wasn’t so bad. Then, during the George W. Bush administration every human failing was dropped on the White House. To his credit, Bush seldom responded. In fact, I cannot remember a single time Bush bothered to deflect or counter a single criticism or accusation.

The Obama administration brought ‘blame-shifting’ back into vogue big time. Nothing is this president’s fault. Most domestic and foreign policy failings still remain the previous administration’s fault, while the balance can be blamed on America and its racist Constitution in general.

Maybe the Olympic committee, in its infinite wisdom can take a cue from the Nobel committee and award Barrack Hussein Obama the gold medal in ‘blame-shifting’ before the fact. It’s difficult to imagine anyone who has ever lived or is yet to be born being more adept at negotiating the intricacies of this particular exercise.

Blame-Shifting

It's one of the most popular forms of amusement in Washington these days. It's called 'blame-shifting'. But, strictly speaking, this is a misnomer, as Batchelor himself suggests. The point of the exercise is to give the illusion that those at fault are not at fault. (If one were to tie 'blame-shifting' to its obvious nomenclature, somebody would actually have to be at fault, and suffer the consequences of being at fault: go to prison; go to the gallows, etc. But since nobody is actually in prison and nobody is likely to be executed, I guess, nobody is at fault ...and the crimes continue.)

Friedman, like Krugman among others, has consistently soiled himself in defending the indefensible. Designated by academe and liberal media as a high intellect, he has had to hold his nose and swallow hard in trying to defend the Left’s faulty logic, its broad disregard of historical precedent and its blatant double standard. It is not clear to me whether or not he knows that he has prostituted himself or if he actually believes the stuff he writes. No doubt, he’s made a good living among the like-minded. But even their never robust ranks are thinning, leaving behind only the most seriously hobbled. How long Friedman can continue (assuming he’s reasonably sane) doing his stick before packing away his writing tools and sending them off to permanent storage is anybody’s guess.

Is Friedman deliberately lying or is he just plain stupid. It’s the same question in essence we could pose regarding President Obama. Both men are likely to keep the answer close to the vest. In the final analysis it’s not about them; it’s about us. How we ourselves answer these questions will determine whether we are on the road to better health or locked into a death spiral.