Other Voices
I feel as though I am in the proper Obamanian mode of getting beyond the old politics, but the old politics side of me has to agree with David Sanger of the NYT, and even MoDo, that the part of the speech where Obama got in Bush’s face right in front of his face must be appreciated.
A couple of civilian (non-historian) friends also chimed in with their thoughts on Obama’s speech, through the magic of Facebook. My more positive friend C says:
One of the lines that struck me was “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” I thought that was a great way to say that he’s going to approach problems from a very different perspective than we’ve seen recently. I feel like we’ve been dealing with Reagan’s world view for 20+ years, and we finally have someone that can move us past that.
My snarkier friend B emphasizes a line I should have:
Hey Jeff – you know, I look forward to 8 years of being disappointed in a president I thought could be better versus 8 years of being outraged at a president I didn’t think could be any worse. Obama as the great orator is almost as much a myth manufactured by his political adversaries as the notion that he is a radical liberal or socialist – he’ll never live up to the McCain hype. Yet I shed more than one or two tears when Aretha was singing – something real was going on today. You know, with Bush and the president (Cheney) sitting there on the same stage, I was reminded of Colbert’s roast from a few years ago more than once today as Obama spoke. One of those moments for me was the section that started:
“As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”
Hey Hey Goodbye
Cute quote the first one, but one flaw. The answer to his question is that it doesn’t work and will never work. It doesn’t even work on a basic economic basis – the cost of government delivering a dollar worth of services is simply prohibitive. According to the lead article in today’s NYT, Obama’s current proposal more than doubles the size of the Department of Education. Setting aside whether we can afford to be doubling the size of ANYTHING in this economic climate, and setting aside the issue of political payoff to the teachers unions (yes, The Great One is just a regular politician), how can you justify this kind of funding to an organization that at best does no harm and more likely hurts the educational effort in this country? This is but one example of the systemic failure of our government.
Those of you in the Obama cult will eventually have the scales fall from your eyes and realize that beyond the lofty rhetoric this is business as usual, just from the other side of the aisle. Have you looked at the pork-laden “stimulus” package now on the table? The Republicans learned the true stripes of their party when they had control of congress and the presidency for six years – it was a corrupt and abysmal failure. You Obama devotees will soon find out the same thing now that your crowd controls all the levers. Me? Won’t get fooled again.
Comment by DP — January 28, 2009 @ 12:00 pm
India is bordered on the n by the disputed area of Jammu and Kashmir (west of the Karakoram Pass), China, Nepal, and Bhutan; on the e by Myanmar, Bangladesh, and the Bay of Bengal; on the s by the Indian Ocean; on the w by the Arabian Sea; and on the nw by Pakistan. The total boundary length is 21,103 km (13,113 mi), of which 7,000 km (4,340 mi) is coastline.
India’s capital city, New Delhi, is located in the north central part of the country.
Comment by dini videolar — August 20, 2011 @ 7:53 pm