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Fear Fear Fear
Topic Started: Feb 27 2009, 04:59 AM (334 Views)
George K
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Finally
It's Obama Spreading Panic

Quote:
 
By Dick Morris
Posted: 02/24/09 03:04 PM [ET]

Ultimately, all recessions and depressions resolve themselves into crises of confidence. The instant, global, 24/7 communications of today make them ever more so. President Obama, in his pursuit of liberal big-government spending, has totally neglected the role of the president of the United States in reversing global panic. To the contrary, his every remark and the constant preoccupation of his Cabinet is to heighten the sense of crisis and to escalate the predictions of doom if we do not do as they tell us and raise spending now and taxes later.

Instead of being a firewall, reassuring Main Street even as Wall Street crashed, he has become a conduit of panic, spreading the mood of desperation from the stock exchange floor to kitchen tables across the world.

There are bad loans, which became bad assets, that lie at the root of the crisis. Through deregulation by the government and the greed of financial institutions, they spread to every portfolio in the world. But these basic facts have metastasized out of all proportion to their real harm into job and financial insecurity for every family on Earth. It is President Obama, not the markets themselves, who has spread this fear. A global Paul Revere, he has not only aroused us, but incited fear and trepidation in his wake.

Previous panics have been global in impact, but local in focus. The world panicked because of developments in Mexico or Argentina or Thailand or South Korea. Now, with Collateralized Debt Obligations spreading the poison of a bunch of bad loans all over the world, infecting every portfolio, the panic is not only global in impact but in focus as well. Modern communications have hastened the spread of the virus of panic throughout the global bloodstream.

In addressing this panic, the president of the United States must truly be the leader of the world — showing the way back to confidence.

Instead, Obama has been instrumental in purveying fear and spreading doubt. It is his pronouncements, reinforced by the developments they kindle and catalyze, that are destroying good businesses, bankrupting responsible people and wiping out even conservative financial institutions. Every time he speaks, he sends the markets down and stocks crashing. He doesn’t seem to realize that the rest of the world takes its cue from him. He forgets that he stands at the epicenter of power, not on the fringes campaigning for office. This ain’t Iowa.

Why does Obama preach gloom and doom? Because he is so anxious to cram through every last spending bill, tax increase on the so-called rich, new government regulation, and expansion of healthcare entitlement that he must preserve the atmosphere of crisis as a political necessity. Only by keeping us in a state of panic can he induce us to vote for trillion-dollar deficits and spending packages that send our national debt soaring.

And then there is the matter of blame. The deeper the mess goes — and the further down his rhetoric drives it — the more imperative it becomes to lay off the blame on Bush. He must perpetually “discover” — to his shock — how deep the crisis that he inherited runs, stoking global fears in the process.

So, having inherited a recession, his words are creating a depression. He entered office amid a disaster and he is transforming it into a catastrophe, all to pass every last bit of government spending and move us a bit further to the left before his political capital dwindles.

But the jig will be up soon. The crash of the stock market in the days since he took power (indeed, from the moment he won the election) can increasingly be attributed to his own failure to lead us in the right direction, his failed policies in addressing the recession and his own spreading of panic and fear. The market collapse makes it evident that it is Obama who is the problem, where he should, instead, be the solution.
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Mikhailoh
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
Whoa... THAT should make some ripples.
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball
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JBryan
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I am the grey one
It's hard not to notice that every time this guy opens his mouth the Dow drops another 200 points.
"Any man who would make an X rated movie should be forced to take his daughter to see it". - John Wayne


There is a line we cross when we go from "I will believe it when I see it" to "I will see it when I believe it".


Henry II: I marvel at you after all these years. Still like a democratic drawbridge: going down for everybody.

Eleanor: At my age there's not much traffic anymore.

From The Lion in Winter.
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Mikhailoh
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
Just posted it across the pond. It wil be interesting to see what reactions may be.
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball
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TomK
HOLY CARP!!!
JBryan
Feb 27 2009, 05:12 AM
It's hard not to notice that every time this guy opens his mouth the Dow drops another 200 points.
He can tax the rich all he wants when this Obama thing is over--the rich will be richer and the poor willbe poorer.
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John D'Oh
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MAMIL
Mikhailoh
Feb 27 2009, 05:13 AM
Just posted it across the pond. It wil be interesting to see what reactions may be.
I suspect the English are a lot less interested in what you have to say than you might suppose.
What do you mean "we", have you got a mouse in your pocket?
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Pianolicious
Senior Carp


As long as you convince yourself that black people are the cause of our problems or that liberals or conservatives or whatever are, you are postponing your own economic recovery because in your mind you can't do it until THEY change, which of course will be never.

If you are staking your bets on the Dow's recovery, there are many others who are counting on you staying distracted, and fearful, and angry, and are moving way ahead of you as a result.

Sit tibi vita longa et omnia bona!!! -- Dr. Spock
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George K
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Finally
Is Obama Telling Us the Truth About the Economy? Not If You Believe His Budget…

By Noel Sheppard

Despite the incessant gloom and doom coming from the White House – just like what we heard from the president-elect before he even moved there -– the economic assumptions presented in the administration’s just-released 2010 budget proposal indicate conditions in America are actually far better than advertised.

Sadly, one wouldn’t know this from the President’s depressing message at the beginning of what he and his team hysterically titled “A New Era of Responsibility”:

Quote:
 
We start 2009 in the midst of a crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetimes. Our economy is in a deep recession that threatens to be deeper and longer than any since the Great Depression. More than three and a half million jobs were lost over the past 13 months, more jobs than at any time since World War II. In addition, another 8.8 million Americans who want and need full-time work have had to settle for part-time jobs. Manufacturing employment has hit a 60-year low. Our capital markets are virtually frozen, making it difficult for businesses to grow and for families to borrow money to afford a home, car, or college education for their kids. Many families cannot pay their bills or their mortgage payments. Trillions of dollars of wealth have been wiped out, leaving many workers with little or nothing as they approach retirement. And millions of Americans are unsure about the future-if their job will be there tomorrow, if their children will be able to go to college, and if their grandchildren will be able to realize the full promise of America.


Sounds pretty horrible, doesn’t it?

Well, cheer up because on page 138 of this 142 page document — talk about burying the lede!!! — you find the administration has based all of its revenue projections — code for taxes, of course! — on the Gross Domestic Product shrinking by only 1.2 percent this year, and growing by a whopping 3.2 percent next year.

Yes, 3.2 percent!

Call me cynical, but this suggests only two logical conclusions: either the economy is in far better shape than the administration is claiming, or they’re painting such a rose-colored picture of the future so that they can overstate tax receipts and hide what the real deficit will be in years to come.

At the same time they project unemployment, which is currently 7.6 percent, will average 8.1 percent this year and 7.9 percent in 2010.

Sound like we’re in a depression to you?

Consider that from 1929 to 1933 the GDP declined by almost half and unemployment jumped from 3.3 percent to 24.9 percent.

Now that’s a depression.

And, despite a tripling in government spending from 1929 to 1940, the unemployment rate was still almost 15 percent, and the GDP was still lower than before the Great Depression began.

Yet, in this budget proposal, Team Obama is claiming that a 32 percent increase in spending this year will make 2010 the strongest economic year in history when measured exclusively by the size of the GDP, and the best since 2004 when measured by year-over-year growth.

Call me cynical, but this suggests only two logical conclusions: either the economy is in far better shape than the administration is claiming, or they’re painting such a rose-colored picture of the future so that they can overstate tax receipts and hide what the real deficit will be in years to come.

Whichever the answer, it certainly doesn’t represent a new era of responsibility.

=-=-=-=-=-=
(emphasis in original)
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... "
- Mik, 6/14/08


Nothing is as effective as homeopathy.

I'd rather listen to an hour of Abba than an hour of The Beatles.
- Klaus, 4/29/18
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JBryan
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I am the grey one
Quote:
 
The Politics of Fear And the mother of all bait-and-switches.

By Jonah Goldberg


This week, former Vice President Al Gore was forced to withdraw a slide from his PowerPoint presentation.

Admittedly, on the surface that sounds only marginally more exciting than the news that Dan Quayle had wheat toast instead of rye with breakfast this week. But hold on a minute.

The slide in question was part of Gore’s peripatetic minstrel show of environmental doom, made famous in his Oscar-winning horror-documentary An Inconvenient Truth. After a montage of images of people suffering from famines, floods, fires, and other biblical plagues across the globe, the slide purported to show data demonstrating that global warming “is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented.”

The problem: The source of the data — the Belgium-based Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters — explicitly warned against using the data the way Gore did, because there’s no way to attribute all of these disasters to climate change. Caught fudging the facts, again, the former vice president had no choice but to drop the graph.

It’s a small thing, in and of itself, but it illustrates something much bigger.

Democrats take understandable pride in FDR’s famous declaration, made during the Great Depression, that “all we have to fear is fear itself.” More recently Democrats, led by none other than Al Gore, have been fixated on the evils of the “politics of fear” — politics, allegedly, only Republicans are guilty of practicing.

Ever since the Iraq War turned decidedly unpopular, Gore has been demonizing George W. Bush and the GOP as fearmongers. “He betrayed this country!” Gore fumed of President Bush, in a famous splenetic diatribe at a 2004 Democratic Party event in Tennessee. “He played on our fears!” Gore went on to rail against the “politics of fear” going all the way back to Nixon. In 2008, when Gore endorsed Barack Obama it was in part because the Illinois senator represented a break with the “politics of fear.”

What’s hilarious about this is that Gore is, without question, the most successful fearmonger in America, if not the whole world. He is constantly spinning climate change in the most horrifying terms possible. He asserts global warming as the author of nearly every calamity, inflating threats in order to bully people into agreeing with him. There’s no time to argue, do what I say or we’re all doomed, is the central message of Al Gore’s environmental shtick. And it works for him. It’s made him both hugely wealthy and popular in the circles he cares about and it has advanced his agenda farther than fair-minded persuasion would.

Of course, in the process he’s fueled paranoia among an entire generation of young people who think we’re seconds from an environmental Armageddon.

Gore also seems to have taught Barack Obama a thing or two. President Obama, whose whole campaign was about hope over fear, has been scaring the dickens out of people lately. He has certainly terrified the stock market. He’s warned of “catastrophe” and economic “disaster” from which we may never recover.

What’s particularly odious about Obama’s scare tactics is that he’s using them for the mother of all bait-and-switches. He justifiably scares people about the magnitude of the financial crisis, but uses that fear not to sell them on a solution to the crisis but to trick them into signing up for a new Great Society. It’s like convincing someone he’s got cancer and then telling him that’s why he needs to buy a new car.

But beyond the hypocrisy and the undemocratic nature of using panic to cram through policies you couldn’t get through debate and persuasion, what I find fascinating is the psychological projection. Liberals have been using fear to demonize their opponents for generations. FDR did it all the time. Harry Truman claimed his 1948 opponent, Thomas Dewey, was the front man for a fascist cabal. LBJ tried to link Barry Goldwater with the Klan and the (fictionally right-wing) forces who assassinated Kennedy. Bill Clinton was a master of conjuring fears about angry white men and other hobgoblins. Al Gore campaigned in 2000 by decrying every idea he didn’t like as a “risky scheme.” Liberal activists groups stir up panics over food, children, power lines, polar bears, and a thousand other things every day.

I’ve long been convinced that one of the chief sources of rage in politics is when the enemy steals your shtick. Republicans loathed Bill Clinton in part because he ran on issues like crime and fixing welfare. One major ingredient of Bush hatred was that he campaigned on issues like education and gushed about compassion. I’m not saying that Republicans don’t practice the politics of fear. But I do sometimes wonder if Democrats get so upset about it because they think they’re the only ones allowed to do that.


http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=YmNjYmZkNDA0NDUyZmU2M2UzMjAwZmJjMjhjNjM5NmU=
"Any man who would make an X rated movie should be forced to take his daughter to see it". - John Wayne


There is a line we cross when we go from "I will believe it when I see it" to "I will see it when I believe it".


Henry II: I marvel at you after all these years. Still like a democratic drawbridge: going down for everybody.

Eleanor: At my age there's not much traffic anymore.

From The Lion in Winter.
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George K
Member Avatar
Finally
Posted Image
A guide to GKSR: Click

"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... "
- Mik, 6/14/08


Nothing is as effective as homeopathy.

I'd rather listen to an hour of Abba than an hour of The Beatles.
- Klaus, 4/29/18
Online Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
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