I have to admit that I find President O's governance of the country a little boring. I wonder if he does. I imagine the early thrill of all the job perks is beginning to ebb a little. Has he been to Camp David yet? He doesn't have a ranch, or a seaside compound to escape to, the way the Republican presidents did. No Drama Obama, his campaign staff called him. He just works hard, isn't given to histrionics or nervous fits or Freudian acting-out, like his predecessor.
A big problem is that the main subject matter of his presidency is intensely boring. How much can we talk about this stimulus thing without our eyes glazing over? It's dull. It's a big, messy, incomprehensible hodge-podge of farm subsidies, financial aid to states, FICA tax reductions, medical insurance extensions, blah blah blah. I tried reading some of the Senate version. It's over 750 pages long. I think that's one of the ways the solons protect themselves. No one, not even the legislators themselves, could be forced at gunpoint to read one of those things all the way through. No one at a major newspaper is ever going to read it. A cable news anchor would never waste his time reading so much as the preamble. So no one can tell, in advance, if it's going to work because no one is ever going to have a handle on the thing. It's a simultaneous equation with 750 unknown variables. It's hopeless.
So all O can do is go from conference to conference and talk about the "urgent need" for this perplexing enactment, that is, when he's not deflecting questions about why his latest Cabinet appointee failed to pay $140,000 in taxes. That's what his presidency has been about so far, Cabinet heads who amend their tax returns and this gargantuan spending bill. The glamorous stuff all has to wait, I guess, the brilliant moments when Hamas and the Likud dance the hora, America signs the successor protocol to Kyoto, Guantanamo closes, the solar and wind electricity grid is up and running, everything is all green all the time.
That is, after we raise $4 trillion to recapitalize the banks, get all the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and find the bottom of the real estate market and the top of the unemployment rate. Being realistic about things, just the clean-up operations are going to consume Obama's first four years. This is what happens when a huge, powerful country with many negative trendlines, many financial and economic and environmental disasters waiting to happen, decides to hire someone as President, back in 2000, who is completely incompetent, and whose every initiative tends to exacerbate the degenerative processes underway. And then that country doubles down on its bad choice by rehiring the clown in 2004 so he can finish us off.
No doubt a person as comprehensively perspicacious as the present incumbent is quite aware now of the true depths of the disaster Bush has left him. It is such a clusterf**k that there is simply no time for politics. The blogsters and the conspiracy theorists and the Alexander Cockburn and Ralph Nader types who absolutely must see that all parties and all politicians are essentially alike must read into every little Obama nuance confirmatory proof of their underlying thesis. In fact (and despite my own indulgences in this tendency), there are major differences between the Democrats, the party of the Enlightenment, secularism, science and due process, and the Republicans, the party of theocracy, obscurantism, intolerance and a priori reasoning. The Republican President and that awful Republican Congress between 2001 and 2007 absolutely, totally, and ruinously ran this country into a ditch from which it may not be able to extricate itself.
Obama simply could not be more different from Bush, in every way imaginable.
It's the difference between a person who thinks and a person who spastically twitches instead of thinking. It's the difference between a smart and deliberative person who uses his mind in a systematic way to comprehend complex problems and a brain-damaged clown who lurches from one stupid move to the next. I only wish I could hear what Barack actually says, in private to his advisors or to Michelle at the end of another interminable day, about the true depth of the piles of steaming crap left by Bush for O to handle. And I think I know what that "note" was that Bush left for Obama in the Oval Office: "You're screwed. Hehhehheh."
Little by little President Obama is leaking out the horrible news to us. Such as that $4 trillion number to stabilize the American banking system. To put things in perspective, when America was in comparatively better shape, say in 2004, we were nonetheless borrowing about 65% of all money borrowed by any country in the world. That's how much we ask the world to subsidize our irresponsibility, so we can play GloboCop. If half a trillion represented 65% of all borrowing, how much will $2 trillion, this year's likely deficit, represent?
It doesn't even compute. Prez O is in unchartered territory, a potentially disastrous problem where the solution may not be possible. Well, here's a direction we might look:
"Militarization does not help resolve the problem but only pushes it back, taking from the economy vast financial and material resources that could be used much better elsewhere. I'm confident that reasonable constraints on military spending along with the strengthening of global security will ultimately yield economic dividends."
I think the guy who said that might be on to something. It was Vladimir Putin of Russia, a few days ago at Davos. Maybe he's sincere. Maybe what he's been looking for, like so many other people in the world, is someone leading the United States who doesn't spend his time peering into souls or hearing voices telling him to "attack!" but just wants to have an intelligent conversation about real solutions. When things are this bad, maybe even something that crazy could work.
No comments:
Post a Comment