Editorial - 19 Feb 2010
Baltimore Sun Has Vested Interest in Stimulus Success
W e understand the reasons that the Baltimore Sun has gone out of its way to defend the much-derided stimulus bill. After all, the Sun’s editorial staff was among the first to start chanting “Yes, we can” , did it’s best to shield the “real” Obama from the American people during the primary season, and remains committed to this administration’s success. And certainly, an admission that the Obama administration has put forth a disastrous economic policy from the very beginning would call into question the irresponsibility of the Baltimore Sun and other media giants for not focusing more on Obama’s lack of executive experience before entering the White House, something we’ve paid a dear price for ever since.
So where are we now?
Obama’s never in his career had to balance a budget, which is now painfully obvious, and he’s
managed to exceed by a wide margin even the gluttonous spending of the Bush Administration. He’s taken
a bad thing, and made it much worse.
Obama originally told us that if we didn’t pass the stimulus bill, the unemployment rate would
rise to 9%. Well, we passed the bill, spent almost a trillion dollars of our children’s money, and the
unemployment rate is at 10%. There’s no evidence that the bill created one single sustainable job, as
Democratic Senator Evan Bayh recently pointed out. Unemployment is higher than it was predicted to be
if the bill didn’t pass, Americans still can’t find jobs, and every number thrown around by this
administration is an intangible pronouncement unaccompanied by facts or evidence. The phrase “saved or created”
has become the butt of late-night jokes, there are no jobs to be had and in moments of honesty even some
Democrats are admitting that the jobs gains haven’t been realized.
We were told that closing GITMO, being compassionate towards terrorists and maintaining
open dialogue with rogue nations would lead to more international American acceptance and make us
safer, but we’ve seen nothing of the sort. In fact, Iran has never been more committed or more dangerous,
and like other rogue nations seems to relish in our weakness. They’re on the verge of having a nuclear weapon,
and the American people are looking to the Israeli’s as potential saviors, acknowledging our own diplomatic
weakness. And direct attack attempts against our nation have held constant despite any presidential overtures.
We’ve been told that health care reform was not open to debate, that the reality of man-induced
climate change was not open to debate, and that those who bother to offer dissenting opinions on these
subjects are radical nutcases who probably belong to the flat-earth society. Yet opposition is growing
as the facts seep in. The ex-head of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia
dropped a bombshell this past Sunday, admitting in an interview with the BBC that there has been no
global warming over the past 15 years. He also allowed for the possibility that as recently as medieval
times the world was quite possibly warmer than it is today -- a striking concession. Perhaps this debate
needs to continue, as the Democrats are currently discussing drastic and expensive new energy restrictions.
We're all for doing what we can to recycle and reduce CO2 emissions, there’s lots of good reasons to do that,
but let’s understand the facts without being blinded by the fumes from Al Gore’s Lear jet.
Obama’s health care reform efforts have been perhaps the worst of the fiascos. Obama, Pelosi and Reid
have focused on everything that nobody cares about, nothing that everyone care’s about, followed through on
none of their campaign promises for openness and transparency, broken every cardinal rule relating to
backroom deals and shady shenanigans, and at the end of the day are still trying to shove down the
throats of the American people a bill that’s almost as widely detested as the people who crafted it.
The fact is, the Obama Administration has thus far been a dramatic failure of unprecedented proportions.
Almost nothing they have tried has worked, the exception being the use of Drones to kill terrorists, which
should be commended. Economically, all their ideas have been bad and the people know it. Militarily, the
quagmire in Afghanistan still exists, and Vice-President Biden just stepped up to take credit for Bush’s
surge in Iraq as a great success. Of course, Biden had nothing to do with the surge, and Senator Obama
actually voted against the surge when in Congress. That’s how desperate this administration is for an
accomplishment.
We don’t blame the Sun for sticking to its guns and not wanting to see this administration’s
economic policy for what it is, or for touting the impossible to prove successes of the stimulus bill.
Its human nature to not want to admit when one is wrong. Yet we find it entirely regrettable and more
than a bit disturbing to see this once-great newspaper sloshing through the mud with blinders on, unable
and unwilling to grasp the enormity of the economic mistakes made by this administration.
At the end of the day, neither the Baltimore Sun nor the NY Times can shield the
truth from the American people. There was a time when they could, but that day is past and
it’s not coming back. Hence, Obama’s poll numbers will continue their largest-in-history
descent until his policies improve or his Congress is tossed out. That moves the Sun’s
misguided editorial from the category of “dangerous” to the category of “pathetic”,
which also happens to sum up Obama’s first year in office.
Editor - bethesite.com
