James Pethokoukis notes that “Big Media Distorts Bush Economic Record.”
It’s a mixed-bag of course–just not the one being peddled on the 6:30 Evening News.
Pethokoukis writes:
The past four months have been terrible. You had the money-sucking leviathan that is the poorly implemented Paulson Plan — and Bush’s failure to push better alternatives. You had the Detroit bailout. You had a failure to vigorously defend the free-market approach that, when implemented 25 year ago, saved the imploding economies of the West and helped win the Cold War. We really needed the Explainer-in-Chief to bring his A-game. Didn’t happen.
He had an A-game as a speaker? Of President Bush’s attributes as a leader (the best of which I’ll cheerfully acknowledge), explaining anything was not his strong suit.
Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg writes that his successor “is interested in any idea, as long as its peddler starts from the same ‘non-ideological’ assumption that government experts know best“:
The current climate reminds former Freddie Mac economist Arnold Kling of the battle of the Somme in World War I (a war everyone knew would be over in six months). “Having experienced nothing but failure using offensive tactics up to that point, the Allies decided that what they needed to try was … a really big offensive,” Kling writes. “My guess is that in 1916, anyone who doubted his own ability to direct an enormous offensive involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers would never have made it to general. Similarly, today, anyone who doubts the ability of a handful of technocrats to sensibly allocate $800 billion would never make it into government or the mainstream media.”
Read the rest.
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