Transformation

They may be tighty-righties, but nobody ever said that the AmSpec guys don't know how to twist the knife.  It's just so much more fun to watch them plunge it into the other party for a change.

This morning Phil Klein draws the most, um, red haze-inducing historical presidential parallel imaginable of the current White House squatter - but what hurts about it most is that deep down, in his dark, scheming, flinty heart, Barack Obama knows it's 100% true:

One of the most prevalent criticisms of President Bush was that he wouldn't acknowledge that he made mistakes and thus stubbornly refused to alter his decisions based on new information. This charge was most prominently associated with his policy in Iraq. During the campaign, Barack Obama attacked John McCain for having a similar trait.

"We've seen this movie before," Obama said at a May 2008 campaign event. "A leader who pursues the wrong course, who is unwilling to change course, who ignores the evidence. Now, just like George Bush, John McCain is refusing to admit that he's made a mistake."...

[But i]nstead of acknowledging that the $862 billion economic stimulus package was a dismal failure that did not produce the promised four million jobs, his administration continues to tout it as a major success. Now, he's announcing plans for yet another round of government spending, making the same arguments that he made when selling the original plan.

In addition, the New York Times reports that Obama is going to dig in on raising taxes on those earning more that $250,000 a year, even though many of them are small business owners filing as individuals.

And we've seen THIS movie before, too, haven't we?  Another "leader" who pursues the wrong course, who is unwilling to change course, who ignores the evidence.

Difference is, President Bush DID change course in Iraq - not by cutting and running, which would have been a strategic political and tactical military disaster, but by....doubling down with the Petraeus Surge strategy, which he was loathe to properly and graciously credit with saving Iraq last week, even as he was pilfering credit for it.  Even in this, Red Barry is aping the Bushitler, except that in this case, doubling down is just digging his PR hole that much deeper.

Y'see, Bush knew he was right to liberate Iraq, knew that seeing the mission through was the right thing to do, and did what was necessary to accomplish that end.  Obama THINKS he's right to lay waste to the private sector because he's blindly wedded to Marxist dogma that teaches that government is the cornucopia of all economic plenty.  In the real world, the "wealthy" he wants to punish are the sole source of the "private sector jobs" he claims to want to see created.  Two years into this relapse of Keynesian socialism another generation of Americans have learned that it just doesn't work, and now it's B.O. with the "Are we learning yet?" problem.

If he keeps doubling and tripling and quadrupling, etc. down like this, when even his first budget director is conceding that extending ALL the Bush tax cuts just might be a good idea for incentivizing job creation, public perception of Barack Obama's economic stewardship will evolve further, from cluelessness to obstinancy to downright malice:

Stubbornly high unemployment and signs of persistent weakness in the housing market have prompted economists to further cut their outlook for U.S. growth in the second half of the year, a Reuters poll showed on Wednesday.

The September poll marked the third consecutive month economists had scaled back expectations for gross domestic product in the second half, and followed the U.S. government’s announcement on Friday that unemployment ticked up to 9.6% in August. …

Overall, GDP is forecast to average 2.7% in 2010, down from 2.9% in the August poll and 3% in the July poll. The median of forecasts in the most recent poll was for average GDP growth of 2.4% in 2011, down from an August forecast of 2.7% and a July forecast of 2.8%.  

The reason the economy is hitting critical mass as an issue now is precisely because he did NOTHING to genuinely stimulate it when he took office, but the exact opposite by piling trillions of dollars onto the national debt instead.  Now he refuses to admit failure and "change direction," proving that economic recovery isn't what he truly is pursuing - giving the voters a[nother] peek into what his "transformative agenda" really means for America.  Ensign Ed provides a peek at the political consequences two years from now of continuing to flip off the American people after the message they send in just under eight weeks:

If unemployment rates remain above 8% or higher coming into the presidential primary season, Obama will have a lot of difficulty convincing his party to stifle a primary challenge, let alone convincing voters in a general election to give him a second term.

And if Democrats thought this midterm election season was tough, the survivors of this election will see an even angrier and more motivated electorate in 2012 if the economy does nothing but stagnate for the next eighteen months.

Y'know the murmering in some quarters of the rightosphere over the past few months about the possibility of Barack Obama going the LBJ route and not seeking re-election, or even the Nixon route and resigning?  Given what we now know about his "Bushian" temperment, such speculations are looking less and less idle, aren't they?

Exit question: If Barry rides this crazy train to the point where even his own party is trying to get rid of him, will he take the hint, or will his stubborness and delusions of godhood take us all to a place that (almost) none of us could have ever imagined in the heady Hopenchange days of yore?