Humor from Jacob Weisberg
Anyone in need of a therapeutic laugh — and who isn’t these days? — should click on over to Slate and savor Jacob Weisberg’s latest exercise in unintentional comedy. The fact that Weisberg’s column is called “THE BIG IDEA 2009: The thinking behind the news,” is already grounds for a chuckle, since Weisberg has scrupulously excluded ideas of any but microscopic size and all thinking whatever from his writing for as long as anyone can remember. All the left-liberal clichés all the time. That’s his motto, and he’s sticking to it.
Still, with his current column Jacob Weisberg really outdoes himself. The title says it all “Obama’s Brilliant First Year.” Yes, I did a double-take, too. In fact, the only reason I clicked on the story — which I stumbled across on RealClearPolitics — was because of that ostentatiously absurd title. It’s about as truthful as “Dubai’s Brilliant Financial Leadership” or “North Korea’s Brilliant Human Rights Record.” It’s the sort of hyperbole that a humorist like Stephen Potter would have appreciated. (If you’re planning to dazzle the punters with fibs, make ‘em big ones he advised in Oneupmanship.) “Surely,” I thought, inspecting Weisberg’s latest, “we’re in for a bit of irony or sarcasm.” Perhaps, I speculated, this was The Onion undertaking a spoof of Slate, of Weisberg? My innocence wavered when I digested the subhead:
“By January, [Obama] will have accomplished more than any first-year president since Franklin Roosevelt.”
Another joke? If, like me, you’ve read The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes’s percipient book about FDR and the Great Depression, you might at first have been inclined to suppose that here was another piece of irony. “. . . more than any first-year president since Franklin Roosevelt”: get it? By the end of his first year in office, Roosevelt had made a dog’s breakfast of the economy, derailing an incipient recovery and putting the country firmly on the road towards the financial disaster that would envelop America over the next several years. [UPDATE: See Ed Driscoll for some informative charts on this subject.]
But, no. Had I been paying attention, I would have known. After all, I had absorbed the byline. Indeed, it was really the conjunction “Obama’s Brilliant First Year” and the name “Jacob Weisberg” — why is that smile producing? — that prompted me to position the cursor over the relevant URL and quickly depress the Kimball digit on the mouse. Maybe some second thoughts were afoot? Maybe Jacob Weisberg, like Paul on the road to Damascus, had undergone a metanoia?
Maybe the moon is made of green cheese.
I ought to have known what I was in for. Having failed in the past to exercise proper precautions, I had occasionally exposed myself to some columns by Jacob Weisberg. Experience had forewarned me. Still, I wasn’t quite prepared for the combination of naïveté and smugness. Item:
If, as seems increasingly likely, Obama wins passage of a health care reform a bill by that date, he will deliver his first State of the Union address having accomplished more than any other postwar American president at a comparable point in his presidency. This isn’t an ideological point or one that depends on agreement with his policies. It’s a neutral assessment of his emerging record — how many big, transformational things Obama is likely to have made happen in his first 12 months in office.
Weisberg’s Big Idea was thinking way behind the news in this case. It was posted on November 28, 2009, i.e., yesterday. Yet he says it is “increasingly likely” that Obama will have rammed his obscenely expensive effort to extend bureaucratic control over another huge swathe of the eocnomy — and your life — by January 20, 2010. In fact, it is increasingly less likely that Obamacare will pass by January 20. The Washington Examiner , in a story posted November 27, has the news: “Growing public backlash over Obamacare”. Ony 38 percent of the public now favors the plan, the Examiner reports. The bill squeaked by in the House with the narrowest of margins. The Senate just barely managed agree even to discuss the bill. Grass-roots organizations like ReversetheVote.org are springing up all over the country to rally voters and persuade Congressmen that Obamacare is an express ticket to electoral defeat. Maybe something will pass by January 20. If so, I predict, it will be something that, though it might be called “Obamacare,” will be purged of most of its more toxic elements. If we’re lucky, the whole bill will crash and burn.
“The United States was the richest, freest, mightiest nation the world had ever seen. Obama and his lieutenants have made us poorer, much less free, and incalculably weaker.”
Hmmm…. As I remember, when Obama took office we were in the 7th year of two unresolved wars, one of which was supposed to be a “cakewalk” (Richard Perle) that would take “6 months tops” (Dick Cheney) and cost no more than “$100 million” (Andy Card), and an economy in such bad shape that Bush’s Sec. of the Treas. asked for $70 billion in stimulus funds on the basis of a four-page memo because it was needed so quickly and desperately.
The rest of RK’s blog is of equal accuracy.
If I said that best way to improve home ownership in this country would be to subsidize home owners insurance, what would people say? If I said the best way to improve the quality of car people drive would be to “reform” car insurance and provide a public option, who wouldn’t laugh?
If the above are absurd, surely the notion that screwing around with health insurance will do nothing to improve health care. And as the 20th century has ample empirical evidence for, the government take over of any industry, including medicine, will be a disaster, reducing access and quality, limiting medical innovations, while at the same time costing more money.
The best way to improve health care is to allow more medical procedures to be done by non-doctors, e.g. nurses and medical technicians, and by allowing more people to become doctors. People might say this will reduce the quality of medicine or the quality of doctors. My retort to that is imagine if the government said the minimum wage would be $100,000/year. I would be out of work, as would the bulk of the people in the country because I, as well as most others, don’t make that much. However, the average salary for workers would now be above $100,000/year because no one who doesn’t work would be included in that average. But anyone looking at this scenario immediately recognizes that the average salary PER INDIVIDUAL in the country as been radically reduced.
The same is true for medical care and doctors. If more people can do certain procedures, more sick people will have access to these procedures. If you increase the number of doctors, you may get lower quality doctors on average, but the average medical care to people will increase because more people will have access to doctors.
The way to get more doctors is to reduce or eliminate the income tax, tell the AMA to screw itself when it insists on certifying new doctors, and to reduce barriers to competition by insurance companies (which includes eliminating medicare and medicaid). Since doctors make alot of money, less people are inclined to go through four years of college, then four years of med school, then three years of residency to start making decent money, only to have a large chunk of it stolen by the government (eliminating the income tax also allows workers to spend their hard earned money on their own medical needs, as well as incentivizing more work). One of the AMA’s primary purposes is to keep the number of doctors low (by withholding accreditation of medical schools) to keep doctors’, hence their own, salaries high. Increasing insurance competition, like allowing people to buy insurance from out of state insurance companies, will reduce the price of insurance and allow more customization of insurance policies. Eliminating medicare and medicaid will reduce people’s tax burden (giving them more money to spend on their own health insurance rather than lining the pockets of congressman, lobbyists, etc) and eliminating a cumbersome, byzantine coverage process that doctors have to deal with, which frees up more of their time for, you know, healing.
In short, the amazingness of Obama that Weisburg is cheering will make nearly everyone, particularly the poor, worse off. Over the long term, medical care will be dramatically lower than what it otherwise would have been due to a lack of infrastructure investment in our medical system.
Just in case anyone forgot, the government owns almost all roads (the federal government owns all interstates), which includes bridges. Look at the number of bridges that exist and the number of bridges lacking in adequate maintainance and a general lack of investment (to the point where the structural integrity of a large percentage is in serious question), then ask yourself if you think the government will really do any better with health care.
When I read things like the article referenced, I just wonder what these people are smoking, and perhaps we just need to legalize it, tax it and let these libtards finance the governments wasteful practices.
Jacob Weisberg is living in a dream world. He must be smoking some really good stuff. I asserted over six months ago that Barack Obama was already a marginalized president unable to get any serious domestic legislation through both houses of Congress. My guess was that the odds were 75/80% I would ultimately be proven prescient. Knock on wood. So far that prediction is holding up very well. The majority of Americans now sense that Obama does not even begin to have his act together. He lacks both the education and the experience required to carry out his duties. This guy should still be in the Illinois state senate. Obama is the elected leader of this country only because of white guilt. He is a master at exploiting these well meaning but befuddled voters. This is actually Obama’s only real talent. And yes, I am carefully choosing my words. It is my adamant conviction that Obama is an ideological buffoon perhaps reminiscent of Benito Mussolini. He is, at best, a soft totalitarian clown.
terrible thing that mean ole bush asking for 70 billion. Good thing obama fixed that with 787 billion for starters followed by how many billion in bailouts. Like when I would get in trouble for fighting with my siblings “well, he started it”
biblio:
And it’s all been made worse by Obama.
We taxpayers have been stuck with a stimulus package which cost three quarters of a billion dollars and was promised that it would reduce unemployment. Yet unemployment has risen about three percent since the beginning of the year. That’s some effective stimulus!
Okay… it’s certainly added to the graft our congress critters can collect, along with ACORN, SEIU, and all their other pet special interests.
We have proposed healthcare legislation which will not improve healthcare (have you noticed that the government is telling women over 40 that they don’t need annual mammograms, and even those over 50 only need them every other year? And that they don’t need to bother with breast self-exams, as they’re supposedly not effective… even though thousands of women can attest that a self-exam detected cancer in its early stages.); which will cost far more than promised; which will offer far fewer services; and which guarantees even greater shortages of doctors and nurses as these professionals flee the system.
So just STFU about the failings of the previous administration, because that’s not relevant to the discussion at hand. (BTW, I don’t recall unemployment rising three percent in the span of ten months under Bush, do you?) We’re sick of people like you trying to sidetrack the issue. The fact is, Obama sucks royally as POTUS, and much of the country knew that would be the case well before the last election.
Oh, and if you want to discuss poor military judgment, wasn’t it Obama who said throughout his campaign that Afghanistan was the war Bush should’ve been fighting? So what’s keeping Obama from following the recommendations of his own general for more than three months, while soldiers are dying? What’s he done to start withdrawing troops from Iraq? What’s he done to develop a winning strategy in Afghanistan? He’s spent plenty of time on the golf course, vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard, jetting to Europe to apologize or campaign for the Olympics, and throwing plenty of parties in the White House, but can’t seem to find the time to make a decision which — by his rhetoric during the campaign — was already made.
So is that maybe an indication that he’s the sort of politician who’ll say anything to appease whatever voter block he’s addressing today?
How about we discuss the crippling debt he’s grown since taking office? A debt which threatens to bankrupt this nation and sell our future generations into figurative if not literal slavery. Everything he’s done to the economy has made things worse, not better. And most Americans know this; so why don’t you?
Obama made scores of promises about how he’d fix the mess of the Bush administration, yet here we are… with even more Americans out of work, with more companies out of business (meaning the prospect of recovery is even further away), and with a dollar which now has the purchasing power of the Canadian dollar. With that kind of hopeless hope, you can keep the change…
Biblio thinks that being in the middle of two unresolved wars means it’s okay to work to lose one, that having a $400 billion debt over eight years means it’s okay to create a $1,400 billion debt over ONE; that Andy Card was George Bush, that warfare is the same as peacekeeping; that BS’ing about GWB will make people forget what a total disaster teh 2006-2009 COngress has been and what a total disaster Barack O’BOWma is…
In short, Biblio is a ninconpoop. Or a Democrat. Or deluded and a liar. But I repeat myself.
Back when Weisberg was the political columnist for New York magazine during the Clinton years, he made former position-holder Joe Klein look like a model of non-partisanship by comparison. Four-pack-a-day cigarette smokers don’t do much hacking as Jacob does every time he puts fingers to keyboard.
Good column. However it is Amity Shlaes, not Schlaes.
#7, thanks for the correction. Now fixed!
“#7, thanks for the correction. Now fixed!”
Ok Roger, now it’s perfect.
He’s actually ripping off a eugene Robinson column from a few weeks back. At the end of Robinson’s column he actually writes “All that and he won a Nobel Prize to boot.” Manlove knows no bounds.
My sympathies for wading through that article, Roger! Like you, I figured it was going to be Onionesque when I clicked through; but I found myself time travelling back to the 60′s, when my old man – a hard core conservative – used to encourage his kids to read the People’s Daily just so we could understand the intellectual absurdity of the Left. (JJ Dion of the WaPo falls in the same hagiographic vein…).
Re. Amity Shlaes – another writer worth reading on FDR is Paul Johnson, and his book “Modern Times” (written in the early 90′s). I think his favourite term for FDR is “frivolous”, and he does make it stick.
4. elaine: “biblio: So just STFU about the failings of the previous administration, because that’s not relevant to the discussion at hand.”
Jeez, elaine, Roger takes us all the way back to FDR. And btw, it’s OK to say “Shut the fuck up.” Using the initials doesn’t make you any less vulgar.
As I remember, when Obama took office we were in the 7th year of two unresolved wars
You remember the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns starting at the same time, do you? As for their resolution, you may have noticed Iraq isn’t in the news much. That’s not just the press covering for their guy – deaths should be 1/2 as high this year as last, and 2008 saw a third the toll of 2007. It looks like the surge Obama opposed, and said in late 2008 he would still have opposed, worked.
As I remember, when Bush took office Iraq was a totalitarian country which we confronted with a sanctions regime and troop presence in Saudi Arabia, both of which were sources of – or at least, excuses for – Arab anger with the US. I also remember that when Bush took office, he took office, and didn’t spend months whining about the fact that prior administrations hadn’t abolished war and poverty so he could concentrate on playing basketball and throwing parties.
If memory serves, Bill Clinton made this claim for his presidency about a year in, although Hillarycare was now dead (for which I was and am grateful) and he ended up with “don’t ask, don’t tell” instead of openly homosexual military personnel, which was what he had promised.
4. elaine: “biblio: …. So just STFU about the failings of the previous administration….”
Such a long and entertaining paroxysm of rage! And btw, elaine, using initials doesn’t make you any less vulgar.
5. DaveP.: “Biblio thinks … that Andy Card was George Bush….”
No, just his spokesman.
Have a nice, hateful day, folks!
‘“By January, [Obama] will have accomplished more than any first-year president since Franklin Roosevelt.”
‘Another joke? If, like me, you’ve read The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes’s percipient book about FDR and the Great Depression, you might at first have been inclined to suppose that here was another piece of irony. “. . . more than any first-year president since Franklin Roosevelt”: get it? By the end of his first year in office, Roosevelt had made a dog’s breakfast of the economy, derailing an incipient recovery and putting the country firmly on the road towards the financial disaster that would envelop America over the next several years.’
I have read Shlaes book. It’s a dog’s breakfast of factoids. But the best response — even more relevant today — comes from FDR himself:
“Let me warn the nation against the smooth evasion which says: ‘Of course we believe all these things. We believe in Social Security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them; we will do more of them; we will do them better; and best of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.”
biblio44 – Are we still in Iraq? Yes. Are we still in Afghanistan? Yes. How has Obama “resolved” these two wars?
When we took Clinton’s “peace dividend”, we went from being able to win 2 wars simultaneously as a strategy to “win-hold-win”. This meant wars would be longer. Our enemies have seized on this strategy change so that the conventional force war is short as our opponents go straight for the counterinsurgency to drag out the process. This Clinton strategy change wasn’t reversed by GW Bush and it was a mistake. This is why these two wars are long and Obama has signed up to continue win-hold-win.
Maybe these articles are only fun for kids but reading this as an adult I keep thinking about the pirate ship ride at our town fair. Weisberg takes you all the way up to the left and you feel sick to your stomach on the way down … Roger takes you all the way up to the right and you feel sick on your way down. I just want to get off of this nauseating carnival ride called political debate!
“I just want to get off of this nauseating carnival ride called political debate!”
Welcome to the world of adulthood. I also want candy from Santa on Christmas morning and brightly colored eggs from the Easter bunny. Instinctively, we are inclined to pretend that the problems of our era can be avoided. This was the pervasive attitude of most citizens of the West toward the Nazi threat before WWII erupted. Sorry about that, but you are morally compelled to keep paying attention.
Barack Obama is a product of affirmative action policies. It is obvious that he merely had to go through the motions while attending Harvard University. The only real thing demanded of him was to behave like an “authentic black man.” Thomas Sowell also attended Harvard for a number of years—but he never embraced leftist doctrines. He is therefore deemed not to be truly a man of color. Obama openly brags about his eagerness to interact with the more radical elements on campus. He stuck his wet finger into the air and saw which way the winds of the zeitgeist were blowing. There was nothing courageous concerning his behavior. When everything is said and done, Obama is a flunky of the white left-wing establishment. I may sound cruel, but it is very fair to describe him as an Uncle Tom. And no, I don’t believe that I am even slightly exaggerating.
OMG America is like, so over, liberal and “conservative” alike. Roger Kimball has been farting out of his mouth for decades, to zero effect. Hello, I don’t take lectures from a guy in a combover! EPIC FAIL.
Top Twelve Signs That ObamaCare Is Here
“No Shirt, No Shoes, No Surgery”
1. Medical degrees from Devry
2. Mandatory organ donor cards
3. Lighters used to sterilize syringes
4. Stomach stapling done at Office Max
5. Coin operated morphine dispensers
6. Tap water plasma substitute
7. Homeless people all have one kidney
8. Free cremation with any major operation
9. Bunkbeds in the Intensive Care Unit
10. Your first dose of narcotics is free
11. Special “showers” for the elderly
12. Tongue depressors taste like Popsicles