The always worth reading Bob Herbert is very good Friday with an article titled "Miracles Take Time". In this piece Mr. Herbert points out that Pres. Obama is getting blamed for this economic disaster unfairly by the right wingers and others for not fixing the Stock Market, even though he has only been president for 6 weeks.
Barack Obama has only been president for six weeks, but there is a surprising amount of ire, anger, even outrage that he hasn’t yet solved the problems of the U.S. economy, that he hasn’t saved us from the increasingly tragic devastation wrought by the clownish ideas of right-wing conservatives and the many long years of radical Republican misrule.
He goes on to point out 4.4 million jobs have been lost since this recession started in December, 2007 and instead of people offering help to fix that, they take to the floor of the senate this week to deride him over of all things earmarks.
Freaking out over earmarks is like watching a neighborhood that is being consumed by flames and complaining that there is crabgrass on some of the lawns.
However maybe the most important paragraph to me is this one, which to me points out one of the best arguments for President Obama's bold agenda.
In the midst of the craziness, conservatives are busy trying to blame this epic economic catastrophe — a conflagration of their own making — on the new president. Forget Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush and George Herbert Hoover Bush and the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth and Phil Gramm and Newt Gingrich and all the rest. The right-wingers would have you believe this is Obama’s downturn.
As I said it is a great opinion piece. Bob Herbert is one of my favorites at the Times, and he didn't disappoint yesterday. He goes on to point out how the right are trying to paint the president with the Socialist meme, as a communist, and every other radical thing they can find.
He even brings up the Alan Keyes birth certificate lawsuit and how crazy that is. The article is worth taking a minute to read. It is very well written and very good. He ends it with this thought.
What I know is that the renegade clowns who ruined this economy, the Republican right in alliance with big business and a fair number of feckless Democrats — all working in opposition to the interests of working families — have no credible basis for waging war against serious efforts to get us out of their mess.
Maybe the markets are down because demand has dried up, because many of the nation’s biggest firms have imploded and because Americans are losing their jobs and their homes by the millions. Maybe a dose of reality is in order, as opposed to the childish desire for yet another stock market bubble.
Maybe the nuns in grammar school were right when they counseled that patience is a virtue. The man has been president for six weeks.
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1 comment:
I think I'll send the Herbert article to a friend of ours who isn't quite as liberal as we are. He's been reading too many Wall Street Journal editorials and has been buying into their point of view. Need to use Bob Herbert to straighten him out! Thanks for posting this.
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