Krauthammer's The Obamaist Manifesto

Krauthammer’s “The Obamaist Manifesto”
In pursuit of the truth – www.cinopsbegone.come – Wednesday, August 27, 2009

A) Excerpts from the Washington Post – Friday, Feb. 27, 2009

Reagan came to office to do something: shrink government, lower taxes, rebuild American defenses. Obama made clear Tuesday night that he intends to be equally transformative. His three goals: Universal health care, universal education and new green energy economy highly funded and regulated by government.

(1) Obama wants to be to universal health care what Lyndon Johnson was to Medicare. Obama has publicly abandoned his once-stated preference for a single-payer system as in Canada and Britain. But that is for practical reasons in America; you can’t get there from here directly.

Instead, Obama will create the middle step that will lead ultimately and inevitably to single-payer. The way to do it is to establish a reformed system that retains a private health-insurance sector but offers a new-government run plan (based on benefits open to members of Congress) thereby starving it. The ultimate result is a system of fully socialized medicine. This will probably not happen until long after Obama leaves office. But he will be rightly recognized as its father.

(2) Beyond cradle-to-grave health care, Obama wants cradle-to-cubicle education. He wants far more government grants, tax credits and other financial guarantees for college education – another way to another universal federal entitlement…

(3) Obama wants to be to green energy what John Kennedy was to the moon shot, its visionary and creator. It starts with the establishment of a government-guided, government-funded green energy sector into which the administration will pour billions of dollars from the stimulus package and billions more from budgets to come.
… the carbon cap-and-and-trade system he proposed Tuesday night will massively restructure American industry and create a highly regulated energy sector.

These revolutions in health care, education and energy are not just abstract hopes. They have already taken life in Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, a huge expansion of social spending constituting a down payment on Obama’s plan for remaking the American social contract.

Obama sees the current economic crisis as an opportunity. He has said so openly. And now we know what opportunity he wants to seize. Just as the Depression created the political and psychological conditions for Franklin Roosevelt’s transformation of America from laissez-faireism to the beginnings of the welfare state, the current crisis gives Obama the political space to move the still (relatively) modest American welfare state toward European-style democracy.

B) Excerpts from the Washington Post – “The Great Non Sequitur” The Sleight of Hand

Behind the Obama’s Agenda – Friday, March 6, 2009.

Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by the president who posed as the scourge of earmarks…This is the run-of –the mill budget trickery…All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of the Obama’s radically transformative economic plan; a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed. The logic of Obama’s address to Congress went like this: “Our economy did not fall into decline overnight,” he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care and education – importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The “day of reckoning” has arrived. And because “it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,” Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing jobless, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession. THIS IS THE PERHAPS THE GREATEST NON SEQUITUR EVER FOISTED UPON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE…Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy – worthy and weighty that they may be – are not the cause of our financial collapse.
George H. Kubeck