The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson (via Real Clear Politics) makes a startling, completely wrong but ultimately revealing comparison between the feckless Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization that challenged President Reagan’s resolve by openly defying him with an illegal strike, and today’s Republican Party and their unanimous opposition to the Obama Stimulus package in the House. I kid you not. Here’s Mr. Robinson.
Reagan declared the strike a “peril to national safety” and gave the more than 13,000 air traffic controllers 48 hours to return to work. A few complied. When the deadline expired, Reagan fired the 11,345 controllers who had defied him. Two months later, the union was decertified. Years passed before any of the strikers were allowed to work as controllers again. controllers might well have won their strike. Under Reagan, they had no chance — not just because of his stubborn resolve, but because American voters had given him a sweeping mandate for change.
The point isn’t to revisit the merits of the strike or the wisdom of Reagan’s hard-line stance. The point is that the controllers’ union failed to realize that the dawn of the Reagan administration represented a rare fundamental shift in American politics. Under Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford or even Richard Nixon, the Under Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford or even Richard Nixon, the controllers might well have won their strike. Under Reagan, they had no chance — not only because of his stubborn resolve but also because American voters had given him a broad mandate for change.
Wow. So it wasn’t the illegality of the strike, or President Reagan’s character that dictated the events to come, it was the mandate? It was because people liked him that he acted so decisively? What an embarrassingly shallow analysis. Even more startling is that Mr. Robinson seems to be comparing the blatantly illegal PATCO strike with Republicans opposing a bloated Obama pork bill. Don’t you just wish that opposing Obama was illegal?
Oh, and of course, Mr. Robinson is comparing Obama to Reagan; mostly because President Reagan is dead and cannot refute the charge. But I wouldn’t sleep so soundly, Mr. Robinson; that Reagan was one crazy, unstable, semi-senile cowboy and I wouldn’t put it past him to rise up from the grave, drift over and kick your ass. I love how the left has now tried to appropriate President Reagan as one of their own. They sure hated him when he was alive; a senile cowboy who could barely act was how they regarded him; I remember, I was there.
Eugene Robinson, like so many others in the press, have taken the Republican opposition as dogma-driven, and their opposition to mean that they hate President Obama, want the country to fail and are overall, just plain mean for not falling in line behind President Obama. Especially since he’s the cool kid and was nice to them. They’ve basically reduced themselves to doing half baked, infantile analysis in order to support their hero; it’s as if we were all back in high school, and all the popular kid had to do was smile and pat their back, and kids like Al Roker, Chris Matthews and Eugene Robinson would wet themselves with delight, and follow him into the fires of hell, as long as he kept telling him how they were cool like him.
If Republicans hadn’t broken the bank with drunken-sailorish spending during most of George W. Bush’s time in the White House, their complaints about the cost of the stimulus package and its impact on future deficits would be more credible. As things stand, we have to let actions speak: absolute solidarity among House Republicans in voting no.
It was a triumph of discipline over reason, of doctrine over observation. There is abundant evidence suggesting that we are in a new political era with new rules and a new lexicon. Those who ignore that evidence will have only themselves to blame if, like the air traffic controllers, they end up losing their jobs.
Oh brother.
But what was in that bill that the Republicans “reflexively” opposed? Michelle Malkin points out that the bill carried a very pointed pay off of up to five billion dollars ($5,000,000,000.00) for ACORN, and other left-wing groups.
The stimulus slush fund for these housing entitlement thugs is innocuously dubbed the “Community Development Fund” in the House version of the stimulus bill. Some $4.19 billion would be “used for neighborhood stabilization activities related to emergency assistance for the redevelopment of abandoned and foreclosed homes.” The legislation changes the way the fund would be disbursed and loosens lobbying restrictions.
Previously, affordable housing groups applying for the grants would be vetted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development or state and local government agencies. Under the stimulus bill, as nonprofit watchdog Matthew Vadum points out, the middlemen would be eliminated — “making it easier to get Uncle Sam’s largess directly into the hands of the same people who run ACORN’s various vote fraud and extortion rackets.” Moreover, Vadum reports, “the legislative package provides these funds without the usual prohibition on using government money for lobbying or political activities.”
If not ACORN, then who? Next in line for the stimulus windfall is the Massachusetts-based Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA). Founder Bruce Marks proudly calls himself a “bank terrorist.” As I reported last spring, Marks threatened to march into the neighborhoods of bank executives and bully their children. He’s done it for years, all under the guise of “social justice” and “neighborhood stabilization.”
Marks’ agenda is blatantly political and personally lucrative. NACA — with dozens of offices across the country — has a no down payment, no closing costs, low interest rate policy for low-income minority borrowers and takes a hefty fee for each transaction. NACA loan applicants are then required to attend workshops that indoctrinate them in the group’s protest thuggery.
The NACA recruits serve on, you guessed it, “Neighborhood Stabilization Committees.” Those whose loans are approved must then pledge to assist the stabilization committees in five “actions” (like the spring 2008 mob protest at Bear Stearns’ New York headquarters) per year. It’s an endless cycle of demonstrations on the front end (to get the loans) and the back end (to prevent foreclosures on bad loan risks) and back again in an endless loop. These shakedowns have yielded nearly $10 billion in payoffs from capitulating corporate giants Citigroup and Bank of America.
Regardless of how Eugene Robinson and his ilk want to play it, the stimulus package was not a slam dunk; it is a wasteful, fundamentally flawed pork package, in which experts estimate that only .12 cents of every dollar spent would actually be stimulative. The Wall Street Journal:
We’ve looked it over, and even we can’t quite believe it. There’s $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn’t turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects. There’s even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons.
And this is the package that Eugene Robinson thought that the Republicans should fall in line to support? Here are some great visuals from Suitably Flip
You absolutely, positively have to visit Suitably Flip and poke around. His work on covering the stimulus
Stimulus Illustrated, from Suitably Flip
package is amazing. Enough to buy every American household a Macbook Air! Note the size of Wall Street bonus’ compared to the Wealth Distribution portion of the stimulus package. Remember this as President Obama tries to divert attention from the real issues by railing on about Wall Street arrogance and greed.
Unpatriotic for opposing the stimulus package? Hey, what can I say. I know I’m going to hell for quoting Lyndon LaRouche, and believe me, I do not espouse this man’s views, but this comment regarding Eugene Robinson’s column seems right on target.
The problem which Robinson’s blunder exposes for today, is the same problem against which the Egyptians warned Solon of Athens and Plato, back then: we have too few really old men who can remember three millennia of those crucial points of the continuing, living history of today’s globally extended European civilization, issues which, in their recurring, present incarnation, are still shaping the issues of current history today.
In these days, for most politicians, as for the contributing authors for most leading news agencies, as for Robinson, history plainly “ended” in 1989-1991. We live in a time when trivial people today exchange even more trivial opinions as billiard balls might do; everything must be explained by what they chance to have chosen to remember from the gossip they swapped, percussively, at the preceding weekend’s social event.
UPDATE:
Michelle Malkin reports on another huge piece of meat being thrown to another left-wing activist group.
Sphere: Related ContentErick Erickson at RedState shines light on a $90 million set-aside in the “stimulus” for the left-wing Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which is buried in the larger Boob Tube bailout for digital TV:
The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (”LCCR”) is a far left interest group.
The group opposed conservative judges. The group agitates for card check. The group is in favor of the Fairness Doctrine. It is chiefly an agitator for affirmative action programs and tries to pressure banks into giving high risk loans like those that caused the housing crisis. If you oppose them, they label you a racist.
LCCR operates like ACORN. And the Senate Democrats are about to give the $90 million of your money.
Under the cover of the digital television conversion delay, the Senate Democrats want to give the LCCR $90 million.
Post a Comment