Freedom Line Blog

The New Republic is out with a new interview with BHO, the man in the Oval Office. It pains me too much even just to copy and paste the worst parts of it… so I won’t. But please read it yourself. The whole thrust of it is that he — yes, Mr. Obama — is the one always going the extra mile for compromise; that he and Nancy Pelosi (!) and Harry Reid (!) again and again have taken the “tough” steps toward compromise that the country needs, but that the Republicans are just so darned intransigent and a lot of them don’t even really care about what’s good for the country.

The man is either delusional or despicable dishonest, or both. Either way, his attitude is as disastrous for the country as his performance has been. He’s so sanctimonious, so solipsistic, so self-aggrandizing that it’s sickening. What a godawful creature he is.

Regular readers of the blog know that there is a small gallery of Washington pundits that I simply cannot abide; not because I disagree with their views, but because I despise the predictability of their positions, the ballast of their prose, and the intellectual laziness of their work.

That’s a group that includes Tom Friedman, Joe Klein, and E.J. Dionne, amongst others. But there’s a special place in pundit hell for the professional joiner: the columnist who always has to march in lockstep with Beltway fashion. That’s why it’s so delightful to see the once-respectable Fareed Zakaria get noted in the New Republic’s list of over-rated DC thinkers. The précis is priceless:

Fareed Zakaria is enormously important to an understanding of many things, because he provides a one-stop example of conventional thinking about them all. He is a barometer in a good suit, a creature of establishment consensus, an exemplary spokesman for the always-evolving middle. He was for the Iraq war when almost everybody was for it, criticized it when almost everybody criticized it, and now is an active member of the ubiquitous “declining American power” chorus. When Obama wanted to trust the Iranians, Zakaria agreed (“They May Not Want the Bomb,” was a story he did for Newsweek); and, when Obama learned different, Zakaria thought differently. There’s something suspicious about a thinker always so perfectly in tune with the moment.

Indeed. Fareed Zakaria is a man who writes Gallup polls in paragraph form. Nice to see the media take notice.

On Tuesday, we told you about the potent case for cutting federal spending being made by Nick Gillespie and Veronique De Rugy over at Reason. Because, as the new omnibus spending bill makes clear, Democrats are congenitally incapable of entertaining the idea of reigning in expenditures, the plan has become the target of criticism for The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait. His response is worth reading, as is Gillespie’s comprehensive rejoinder, but one of his central arguments stands out for its unseriousness:

Another way of putting this [the budget situation] is that, to maintain the current level of services in the federal budget, we would need to spend $5.5 trillion. Gillespie and de Rugy would propose instead to spend $4.2 trillion in 2020. That’s their prerogative. I’m sure they could find at least $1.3 trillion in spending that they don’t like. But the point is that you would have to eliminate a lot of functions of the federal government, and/or reduce a lot of social benefits.

The definition of modern liberalism may be to believe that it would be a hardship for the federal government to get by on over $4 trillion a year. And if budget cuts are a non-starter under this rationale, it’s hard to see when they would be palatable to liberals (how much do you want to bet that national defense is the exception?)

Are we to believe that Mr. Chait is convinced that such bracing austerity would rip the national safety net asunder? And that every activity currently undertaken by the federal government is too sacrosanct to be pruned? There’s a mathematical equation for such worship of the state … and its product is Nancy Pelosi’s approval rating.