Wednesday, February 25, 2009
The Jindal Speech
I watched Gov. Bobby Jindal's speech in response to the Obama speech last night. I had never heard him give a speech and knew little about him, but I got a rather strong sense of the man in a remarkably short time. This guy had to introduce himself, give a sense of who he is and were he comes from, give a sense of the part of the country he represents, characterize what is wrong with what the president is doing, say what his alternative, and indicate why it is better -- all in about six minutes.
I thought he did an excellent job. I also gave him points for focusing on the Great Issue of Issues: do you trust the people, or the state that allegedly governs them? Exactly.
And then I saw four talking heads on Fox reacting to the speech as if they had just learned that their only child is mentally retarded. The execution was "amateurish," they said. I think one of them actually said it was "childish." What on Earth are they talking about? Well, the content was okay, another said, but the message is one that the American people don't want to hear right now. One of the talking heads mentioned the "majestic" backdrop of Obama's speech. And here Bobby is standing in next to this crummy little flag. I bet they really, really would not like the above Peter Schiff video. Why, it's just some guy sitting in front of his laptop. How uncool!
I should say, I liked the content of Bobby's speech right up to the point where he said we don't need deep cuts in military spending. Oh, yes we do! The rest was fine.
To give the talking heads their due, I suppose it wouldn't hurt if Jindal would drink a lot of milk shakes and hire a voice coach to work on a booming baritone voice like The Obama's. I suppose that would be an improvement. There's a guy who can say a line like "that is our responsibility ... to ensure that we do not pass on to [our children] a debt they cannot pay" and get cheers and applause, rather than the boos and laughter that such a line, coming from Obama, deserves. That is impressive, I admit, but as the performance of a deft pickpocket is impressive.
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Added later: Here are two small children who have a much solider grasp of basic ethics that does our hypocrite of a President. The first time I saw this, I cried too. (Hat-tip to Anthony Gregory at LewRockwell.com.)
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7 comments:
I don't know anything about you, but I completely disagree about your take about President's Obama not knowing anything about the economy. In fact, what the president said about credit is just what chairman Bernanke said a couple of days before: "we need to stabilize the economy to restore trust and therefore restore bank's ability to lend." That is essentially what the president was referring to. As far a Mr Jindal, he was a complete failure in addressing a rebutal of the president's speech. Just go on Youtube and do a search under David Brooks' (a respected Rep) comments on Jindal's speech. It was a disaster.
I think I said anything about Obama's economic ignorance, but I do find it, quite literally, terrifying. As Peter Schiff says in the above video, his statement that credit is the life-giving blood of our economy is the reverse of the truth. Lately, it's been more like a death-dealing tumor. As to Bernanke, he is one of the people who caused this mess. As to Brooks, I think of him as "the conservative that liberals like."
Going back to Henry Paulson's and Bernanke's fear last September about a potential stock market crash along with Obama's comments about baby boomer 401k retirement values already eroded; and we can see that the focus is on the markets with these policies.
The 90's mantra of future success because of "transition to a service economy" was actually a death knell.
Obama actually believes in Schiff's classical theory that an economy has to produce "things of real value" and he's gambling we can use the development of energy alternatives and energy independence to do this. It looks like a tall order!
Obama knows a lot more than the guy whose sole answer-as has been the entire Republican Party's sole answer since Reagan of the Black Death-is tax cuts. Period. Hmmm, we've done tax cuts for 30 years, and we're in a world of hurt.
It was sophomoric, moronic, and a desperate attempt to recapture the moldy glory days of the '80s. If Jindal and Palin are all the GOP has to offer, they're in for a whole long time in the wilderness.
(Oh, and that hokey bureaucrat story was a lie.)
What Jindal knows that Obama does not is that it is the people who will solve the problem, not the Feds, who caused it in the first place and are now making it much, much worse. The people are trying to liquidate their debt, which is exactly what we will have to do in order to get moving again. Obama just saddled us with about a trillion dollars more in debt. That is profoundly and disastrously ignorant. It's also very similar to Bush's last bone-headed move, with a slightly higher price tag.
Obama only understands how to redistribute existing wealth, not how to create it. Most people in Congress have no idea about entrepreneurs or business - they like to think of incomes over $250,000 as 'the wealthy'. Many of these are small businesses, not Paris Hilton-style inherited money. I guess the Dems are all for tax hikes, given that most of them don't seem to pay their taxes anyway - unless they are being vetted for a slot in the cabinet. The pork-laden stimulus bill that Obama is endorsing is a disgrace - it's not what he campaigned for.
And the cap-and-trade idea is just lunacy. Has everyone lost their mind? The -science- behind the assertion that CO2 -> pathological global warming is extremely tenuous. The press, who are by and large scientific illiterates who wouldn't even know how to solve the most basic quadratic equation that kids (used to) learn in sixth grade, simply parrot over and over in the media the few politically motivated sentences they hear from people like Al Gore. The computer models that simulate climate scenarios (that's all these are, scenarios) don't model cloud covers (a HUGE oversimplification to omit these) and don't seriously model the convection patterns in the oceans, whose effects move at a time scale of hundreds, thousands of years. Many of the land-based sensors are faulty and poorly placed to measure even local temperature trends meaningfully. The earth has had far higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere in its past history, and did not lead to a greenhouse disaster. Yet the fools on the Hill and the White House are now intending to hobble our prosperity with incredibly costly measures. Sadly, I don't think they honestly care about the climate science, they are going to milk this 'fear de jour' for all it is worth, to gain ever greater federal powers.
Ann, I wonder who really believes CO2 is a pollutant? The progress made in cutting pollution (as formerly defined) in transport, power and industry over 40 years was nothing short of miraculous. For those whose opposition to a market economy was based on the pollution case, it was simply necessary to invent a new one.
You're not fair to Paris Hilton(!). The family fortune was dissipated. Her antics are virtually the sole support of her parents. Bet they're proud.
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