Evil or Stupid

Krugman:

The Obama-Keynes Mystery - NYTimes.com:

"I’m not alone in marveling at the extent to which Obama has thrown his rhetorical weight behind anti-Keynesian economics; Ryan Avent is equally amazed, as are many others. And now he’s endorsing the structural unemployment story too.

To those defending Obama on the grounds that he’s saying what he has to politically, I have two answers. First, words matter — as people who rallied around Obama in the first place because of his eloquence should know. Yes, he has to make compromises on policy grounds — but that doesn’t mean he has to adopt the right’s rhetoric and arguments. The effect of his intellectual capitulation is that we now have only one side in the national argument.

Second, since Obama keeps talking nonsense about economics, at what point do we stop giving him credit for actually knowing better? Maybe at some point we have to accept that he believes what he’s saying."

No, We Can’t? Or Won’t? - NYTimes.com

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Digby

Hullabaloo:

"Everyone's always trying to figure out what Barack Obama really wants. But it's not a mystery. He's been clear about it from the very beginning. What people have to face is the fact that he is a rigid leader who refuses to change course in the face of changing circumstances. Perhaps that's a strength at times. But in this one, it's a tragic weakness. We have over 9% official unemployment and probably double that in reality. The housing sector is still dead. Growth is anemic and very possibly about to go south. His grand bargain vision from 2009 was always anathema to the liberal project. Today it is destructive on an entirely different level."

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Richard (RJ) Eskow: A President On the Verge of a Political Breakdown:

"Yet instead of pushing for the spending that's needed, the President keeps reinforcing Republican arguments instead. According to the AP he told reporters in the Rose Garden that 'uncertainty over whether lawmakers will raise the nation's debt limit is keeping businesses from hiring.' (What was keeping them from hiring before that?) Economic advisor Austan Goolsbee evaded the issue of badly-needed stimulus funding as well as anyone could - that is, not very well at all - while repeating that ill-advised 'business confidence' mantra."

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Daily Kos: President Obama and the New Deal:

"In the past week, we witnessed the truly astonishing spectacle of a wide array of Democratic Congressional leaders feeling it necessary to stand up to a Democratic President in order to defend the programs and values that have defined the Democratic Party since the Great Depression. Just think about that. And now some consider it a victory that there probably won't be any immediate cuts to Social Security, even though there will be a trillion or more in overall budget cuts, without any major increases in revenue. And cutting Social Security is now safe to discuss on both sides of the aisle. To use digby's own comparison, only Nixon could go to China; and while Reagan and the Bushes did not even seriously try, a Democratic president may be opening the door to the dismantling of the New Deal."

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With Entitlements on the Table, Obama Plans to Go Big on a Budget Deal | The Nation:

"Even still, it’s extremely disheartening; it demonstrates that, as always, Obama is willing to cater to the center-right in a huge way (entitlement cuts) for the sake of a small political advantage.

Moreover, this proposal is further evidence that the debt ceiling negotiations were an intentional decision on Obama’s part. The president genuinely believes in deficit reduction, and chose to use the debt ceiling as an opportunity to cut spending with significant bipartisan cover. Obama hasn’t been fooled into these negotiations, nor is he playing rope-a-dope or a complex game of 11-dimensional chess. This is what he wants."

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Obama's Political, Economic Advisers Say Jobless Rate Won't Matter in 2012 | MyFDL:

"Now the people who helped Obama defraud voters by channeling everyone’s hope for change have convinced themselves he won the election because they’re political geniuses.

The lastest example of this delusion is Obama’s senior campaign adviser, David Plouffe, who confidently told Bloomberg that going into the 2012 elections with over 8 percent unemployment and no meaningful jobs programs will not hurt Obama’s chances for reelection:"

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If the drinking game is 'How many Bush/Rove talking points can the Obama administration parrot and enact' then our country is headed towards alcohol poisoning.

Panetta makes 9/11 gaffe in Iraq | The Raw Story

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