I think that Stephen Colbert’s testimony before congress the other week, typifies the basic contempt that congress has for the American people. The fact that congress adjourned without voting on the fate of the Bush tax cuts is proof that despite the spin of liberal pundits, the Democrats know they are in it deep up to their knees caps with the electorate and will wait for the lame duck session to let the tax cuts expire. Wait until your first pay check in 2011 to see the consequences of Obamanomics. Elections have consequences.
by Charles Krauthammer
A president’s first midterm election is inevitably a referendum on his two years in office. The bad news for Democrats is that President Obama’s “reelect” number is 38 percent — precisely Bill Clinton’s in October 1994, the eve of the wave election that gave Republicans control of the House for the first time in 40 years.
Yet this same poll found that 65 percent view Obama favorably “as a person.” The current Democratic crisis is not about the man — his alleged lack of empathy, ability to emote, etc., requiring remediation with backyard, shirt-sleeved shoulder rubbing with the folks — but about the policies.
And the problem with the policies is twofold: ideology and effectiveness. First, Obama, abetted by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, tried to take a center-right country to the left. They grossly misread the 2008 election. It was a mandate to fix the economy and restore American confidence. Obama read it as a mandate to change the American social contract, giving it a more European social-democratic stamp, by fundamentally extending the reach and power of government in health care, energy, education, finance and industrial policy.
Obama succeeded with health care. Unfortunately for the Democrats, that and Obama’s other signature achievement — the stimulus — were not exactly what the folks were clamoring for. What they wanted was economic recovery.
Here the Democrats failed the simple test of effectiveness. The economy is extraordinarily weak, unemployment is unacceptably high, and the only sure consequence of the stimulus is nearly $1 trillion added to the national debt in a single stroke.
And yet, to these albatrosses of ideological overreach and economic ineffectiveness, the Democrats have managed in the past few weeks to add a third indictment: incompetence.
[….]
As if this display of unseriousness — no budget, no appropriations bills, no tax bill — were not enough, some genius on a House Judiciary subcommittee invites parodist Stephen Colbert to testify as an expert witness on immigration. He then pulls off a nervy mockery of the whole proceedings — my favorite was his request to have his colonoscopy inserted in the Congressional Record — while the chairwoman sits there clueless.
A fitting end for the 111th Congress. But not quite. Colbert will return to the scene of the crime on Oct. 30 as the leader of one of two mock rallies on the Mall. Comedian Jon Stewart leads the other. At a time of near-10 percent unemployment, a difficult and draining war abroad, and widespread disgust with government overreach and incompetence, they will light up the TV screens as the hip face of the new liberalism — just three days before the election.
I suspect the electorate will declare itself not amused.
Read the rest here: The Colbert Ddemocrats
Tags: Charles Krauthammer
