The Ruiners

Since this is a quote, I'm helping myself, along with the plenty of room y'all will need to accomodate the whiplash-inducing double-take:

[Mort] Zuckerman added that he detects in the Obama White House “hostility to the very kinds of [business] culture that have made this the great country that it is and was. I think we have to find some way of dealing with that or else we will do great damage to this country with a public policy that could ruin everything.”

[Niall] Ferguson added: “The critical point is if your policy says you’re going run a trillion-dollar deficit for the rest of time, you’re riding for a fall…Then it really is goodbye.” A dashing Brit, Ferguson added: “Can I say that, having grown up in a declining empire, I do not recommend it. It’s just not a lot of fun actually—decline.”

Ferguson called for what he called “radical” measures. “I can’t emphasize strongly enough the need for radical fiscal reform to restore the incentives for work and remove the incentives for idleness.” He praised “really radical reform of the sort that, for example, Paul Ryan [the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee] has outlined in his wonderful ‘Roadmap’ for radical, root-and-branch reform not only of the tax system but of the entitlement system” and “unleash entrepreneurial innovation.” Otherwise, Ferguson warned: “Do you want to be a kind of implicit part of the European Union? I’d advise you against it.”

This was greeted by hearty applause from a crowd that included Barbra Streisand and her husband James Brolin. “Depressing, but fantastic,” Streisand told me afterward, rendering her verdict on the session. “So exciting. Wonderful!”

Huh?  What'd I miss here?  Barbra Brolin enthusiastically nodding in agreement with the prognosis that her "some kind of a god" is a Marxist economic saboteur whose collectivist totatitarian policies must be deposed at all costs if the America of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, Lee Iacocca, mom, apple pie, and an emancipated Chevrolet is to be saved from the ashheap of history?  Shinola, next thing you'll be telling me is that she's taking her husband's name.

Maybe THAT was the cue the White House took for a propaganda pushback effort, although I can't remotely fathom why they would bother at this point.  It's not like Zuckerman is letting some sort of cat out of the bag, after all.

Maybe they're looking ahead to 2012 and a Clintonesque triangulation strategy vis-a-vie the Republican Congress they know is coming the November?  I can't see them taking such a strategy at all, because, to borrow the famous Lloyd Bentsen phrase, "I knew Bill Clinton.  Bill Clinton was never a friend of mine, but I DID know him.  And you, Barry, are no Bill Clinton."  Barack Obama is a Marxist true-believer who was able to fool enough people in 2008 through a demonic mixture of empty idolatrous hype, background camouflage, and the sheer dumb luck (?) of a financial panic erupting seven weeks before the presidential election.  With the record in office he's accumulated to this point, both of rhetoric, policies, and shall we say "personnel," he'd have to do a helluva lot more than just triangulate to bury it in under two years.  Something he couldn't remotely fake convincingly, even if he was at all inclined to make the attempt.

Not that Zuckerman would let them get away with it anyway:

To employ one of Rush Limbaugh's sage adages, "Words mean things."  Words are the means by which we communicate ideas and concepts and intentions.  When a regime [ahem] makes a ritualistic practice akin to human blood sacrifice of denouncing businesses - big business, small business, it's all the same to them - as "being thieves, villains, and cheats that the government has to bring to heel," and then follows that up with the imposition of punitive, draconian tax and regulatory (and predatory - see "ObamaCare") policies (and "hostile takeovers" - see "Obama Motors and Obama-Chrysler") to back up their denunciations, it's not at all unreasonable or "paranoid" for businesspeople and investors to draw the conclusion that the Obamunists are anti-business, as well as anti-capitalist and anti-prosperity.  They would be crazy NOT to draw that conclusion.  Indeed, it is an indication of this White House's totalitarian instincts that their propaganda Narrative demands that their victims embrace an official "reality" that is so stupendously counter-factual.

That is NOT "just rhetoric".  It's the frakking TRUTH.  And TRUTH is NOT the slightest bit malleable.  It is rigid, it is monolithic, it is unyielding.  It's only our acceptance of it that can be molded and sculpted.  And that is what CANNOT be tolerated if this regime is to be held to account for its criminally unAmerican actions and removed, as it must be.

Just don't expect Ed Schultz to be part of that effort:

Well, actually, Schultz is right about Obamerica "going down the road of a third world country".  Now if he could somehow learn to stop channeling his inner Krugman, maybe he could be released from the asylum one day.