{"id":2194,"date":"2008-02-29T13:36:23","date_gmt":"2008-02-29T18:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2194"},"modified":"2008-02-29T13:36:23","modified_gmt":"2008-02-29T18:36:23","slug":"money-well-spent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2194","title":{"rendered":"Money Well Spent"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you haven’t checked out Ed’s new digs at Hot Air, you should.\u00a0 He’s blogging full-time again, and he’s got\u00a0 some great stuff going on; his takedown of the Dems’ attempt to provide economic stimuli<\/a> to voter fraud, his rip on the Times’ <\/em>loathsome drive-by<\/a> of John McCain’s citizenship status…<\/p>\n

…and this story, about the depressing venality of Barack Obama’s economic “policies”<\/a>\u00a0so far:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Many people have compared Obama to Ronald Reagan in his ability to promise \u201cmorning in America,\u201d but they have focused only on the most superficial part of the Reagan revolution. Reagan didn\u2019t cast himself as the agent of hope, but appealed to the hope within Americans that they<\/em> could lift up the country, and not the other way around. He focused on the hope of the individual as the true agent of change, and not the despair of the collective that required government intervention.<\/p>\n

The rhetoric has given us nothing really new. It has the same populist ring to it that we have heard since before collectivism got entirely discredited in the latter 20th century. It\u2019s simplistic calls to soak the rich and redistribute the wealth, to impose economic isolationism, and to prey on the fears of the working class by casting globalization as an unmitigated evil.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve noted, a few weeks ago<\/a>, the Carteresque side of Obama’s polarizing, vilifying rhetoric.\u00a0 Ed notes the similarities with William Jennings Bryan, another demigogue and legendary stemwinder.\u00a0 And for me – a North Dakota native – Obama naturally smacks of Bill Langer, leader of the “Non-Partisan League” party, which advocated radical (and socialistic) measures to deal with the farm crisis during the Depression (and, if you’ve read the farm bills of the last sixty years, he’d seem to have won).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you haven’t checked out Ed’s new digs at Hot Air, you should.\u00a0 He’s blogging full-time again, and he’s got\u00a0 some great stuff going on; his takedown of the Dems’ attempt to provide economic stimuli to voter fraud, his rip on the Times’ loathsome drive-by of John McCain’s citizenship status… …and this story, about the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-08","category-democrats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}