California Conservative

When it comes to delusional idiots, you can’t go wrong picking NY Times propagandist Paul Krugman. Krugman’s latest column is worthy of a quick fisk. Let’s get started:

Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.

This is utter fantasy. Yes, there are birthers but hinting that they make up the majority of the GOP is wildly inaccurate. It’s the type of inaccuracy that you’ll only find in a Krugman or Nick Coleman column. It’s embarassing that this idiot is getting paid to pump out this drivel.

Here’s the next paragraph that needs correcting:

This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.

Poll after poll shows that a majority of the American people think President Obama is too liberal. Unless Mr. Krugman is willing to admit that the Republican Party is the majority party, President Obama’s opposition includes more than the Republican Party.

As for Krugman’s saying that the attacks on President Obama have nothing to do with the radical policies he’s attempting to implement is patently absurd. When President Obama shoved ARRA down our throats without Congress being able to read the bill, people were upset. When President Obama started bullying car manufacturers into settlements that put the unions ahead of secured bondholders, people were outraged. When President Obama attempted to not let banks that had accepted TARP funds to repay their loans, people howled.

That’s before talking about how Speaker Pelosi and President Obama pushed the National Energy Tax through without Congress having the opportunity to read through the bill, people were outraged.

The final straw came when President Obama tried shoving the health care ‘reform’ bill down our throats without the bill being read again.

Despite all those policy-related motivations, Mr. Krugman has the audacity to whine that “the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing.” If that isn’t a sufficiently substantial list of why the American people have turned on him for substantive reasons, then the color of the sun in Mr. Krugman’s world is different than the color of our sun.

So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years, the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia, are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.

You’ll notice that Mr. Krugman glossed over the Bush years as though they were a time of great harmony. That doesn’t match up with reality. Then again, it’s rare that anything that Mr. Krugman’s writings have anything to do with reality so that isn’t surprising.

What, then, should Mr. Obama do? It would certainly help if he gave clearer and more concise explanations of his health care plan. To be fair, he’s gotten much better at that over the past couple of weeks.

What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage, passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.

What’s missing is verifiable facts in President Obama’s presentation. I noted here that President Obama’s stump speech was deceptive:

At his Tuesday town hall event in New Hampshire, President Barack Obama made a point to reach out to seniors, noting the low support in polls for his health care proposals. “We are not talking about cutting Medicare benefits,” Obama said, trying to assuage the audience.

This requires parsing skills that I first learned during the Clinton administration. It’s technically true that President Obama “isn’t talking about Medicare cuts.” That doesn’t mean that he hasn’t proposed cutting Medicare. In fact, he’s proposing cutting Medicare’s budget by $313,000,000,000. That isn’t just opinion. That’s what the LA Times is reporting:

Under pressure to pay for his ambitious reshaping of the nation’s healthcare system, President Obama today will outline $313 billion in Medicare and Medicaid spending cuts over the next decade to help cover the cost of expanding coverage to tens of millions of America’s uninsured.

As I’ve noted before, President Obama is proposing cutting Medicare by 10 percent at the same time that Medicare enrollment is expected to increase by 30 percent. It isn’t surprising that President Obama isn’t interested in talking about cutting Medicare funding. (HINT: If you’ve noticed anything about the people getting most upset with the proposed reforms, it’s that there’s alot of senior citizens.)

It must be liberating working as a columnist for the NY Times. You’re well-paid. Best of all, you don’t need to do any fact-checking. In fact, you can make stuff up to suit your needs. It’s the perfect employment for a Democratic shill.

Technorati Tags: Journalism, Media Bias, Paul Krugman, NY Times, President Obama, ARRA, Bailouts, Special Interests, Unions, Democrats, Factchecking

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 7:59 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Health Care, Liberals, Media, Obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.