It never stops. They just keep coming. The Loonies on the Right attack everything that isn’t nailed down. Most of the comments were all made BEFORE Obama had finished his first 60 days. All the comments are absurd.
George Will said that “the last time the Treasury Secretary spoke, the market dropped 400 points as he was speaking.” OK. How about this. The market dropped from 14,000 to 7,000 while George W. Bush was apparently asleep at his desk. The economy went in the toilet after the previous Treasury Secretary or the head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan could not find anything wrong with the financial system that was so bloated it looked like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon. So now that the Treasury Secretary has stabilized the financial markets, does Will give him credit for that? Not likely.
Ed Gillespie, former head of the GOP national campaign committee says that “Fox News is more balanced than MSNBC” and at the very same time, on the same program, Bill Sammons, Washington Editor for Fox said that Barack Obama, who reached out to Conservatives and who has numerous exceptional Republicans in his cabinet is using the George Bush-created depression as a “power grab.” So let’s see. Gillespie is right or wrong? And should we now suspect that Obama somehow worked five years ago, having no idea that he might be President, or even Senator, to destroy the economy so that he could acheive a “power grab” in a situation in which he had no idea he would be involved. Good, Bill. Brilliant. And non-partisan? Oh yeah!
Michelle Bachman has so often been told to see a psychiatrist that it seems almost gratuitous to include her. But she said early this year that we should all “suit up” to “fight for our freedom.” Ah…yeah…Michelle…we all got freedom, baby. Except maybe for those citizens of the United States who were picked up inside this country and whisked off to black CIA camps in other countries where they could be tortured. We now have demonstrably nutty GOP Representatives in Congress, trying to make legislation. God only knows what people like Michelle Bachmann are proposing.
A “blonde bimbo” whose name only those dedicated to hot, shallow females on television would know, but a typical Fox news female talkng head, said recently that, as a freshman in high school she was taught “the Big Bang (I’ll bet) and evolution…and I was very upset by it.” Or perhaps any subject that didn’t involve short skirts, a baton, and doing somersaults.
Matthew Dowd–right wing something for Cheney and Bush–said recently with dead seriousness that Obama has “less and less opportunity as he does more and more, quicker and quicker to say that this is not my economy.” No, Mr. Dowd, the disastrous recession that has cost us over a trillion and requires that we spend at least another trillion to keep us out of a full-on depression is not the fault of a President in office less than 90 days. Even your landlord, well perhaps not Mr. Dowd if he is a landlord, gives you more time than that before tossing you out on the street. Oh, and what was that about doing more and more and quicker and quicker. Doesn’t sound like George W. Bush, does it?
Dowd went on: “Now people look at this through a prism of his fixing his own economy as opposed to his fixing a problem that happened in the past. That was March 29, 2009. Obama had hardly unpacked. Yes, he is a dynamic guy and much to stave off the disaster left by Bush has been accomplished. But no one except Mr. Dowd and his ilk think that this horrible mess had anythign at all to do with Barack Obama.
Then there was Tim Pawlenty, Governor of Minnesota, and wannabe-President. In comments just before tax day, April 15, Pawlenty said that “unemployment is at a 25 year high” as if it somehow occurred as the result of something Obama did since the election. He then goes on to say that “according to the non-partisan Tax Foundation, the average American has to work until April 13 just to pay their taxes.”
Well, let’s examine that. First of all the Tax Foundation, according to many groups including the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities say that the Tax Foundations are suspect. For example, the average income of middle-class Americans in the broadest categories have actually gone down and therefore so have their brackets. Since no taxes have been levied in the Bush Administration, people should be doing better. Therefore it is not true that average Americans work longer and longer to pay their taxes. In adddition, some people, like Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, only pay between twenty-one or twenty-two percent of their gross income in taxes. So taxes on their high six-figure incomes are paid by St. Patrick’s Day. And there are others who pay no taxes at all, such as corporations that the GOP allowed to move offshore to the Cayman Islands. These people know exactly when and how much they will pay. They are done on January 1st and the amount: ZERO!