With all the media outlets and forums these days there is no shortage of opinions. The certitude of people who haven't the slightest idea what they're talking about is a constant source of amusement but terrifying as well because they probably vote.
The average person is too often overly dependent on ideologically-constrained pundits, to say nothing of the blowhards who somehow manage to get elected to Congress. House Republican Eric Cantor, for example, on Tuesday's "Washington Journal" repeated his party's tortured rhetoric about homeowners "who didn't play by the rules". And he said Obama's budget would shortchange small business owners, suggesting that Obama's tax cuts would actually increase taxes in the small-business sector.
As Pat Moynihan used to say, ‘everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts.' Anyone who isn't suffering from a factual shortfall knows there are many homeowners across the nation who absolutely played by the rules but had their properties foreclosed when they lost jobs or fell ill. As for increasing taxes on individuals earning more than $200,000 a year, or households earning, not grossing, more than $250,000 - - most small-business owners should be so lucky.
And they would be likely to profit from a suspension of their capital gains taxes and benefit from middle-class tax cuts. Cantor further maintains that increasing liquidity, an administration goal, isn't much of an issue for smaller firms because they rarely seek loans to finance their businesses. For a supposedly unimportant concern, there sure are a lot of lending establishments servicing precisely that segment of commerce.
Someone called "The Journal" to say Cantor was "a breath of fresh air" and that he and, oh my goodness, Michele Bachmann were the "voices of sanity struggling against fascism". And there was Bachmann on Thursday's "Journal" insisting banks were "forced" in the 70s and 90s (Democratic presidencies of course) to make the shaky loans that brought us to our financial knees, when in fact the bundling of sub-prime loans into putative Triple-A derivatives played a much larger role in tanking the economy. Be careful, though, Bachmann says, about over-regulating - - "America is all about risk-taking." That must be why insurance companies like AIG make out like bandits helping people protect themselves from imprudent investment strategies; the logic escapes me.
The strangest thing about the fascism remark is that it's the irrational flip-side of the other right-wing talking point callers often make that Obama is a socialist menace. Dictionary.com defines Socialism as "a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution of capital, land etc. in the community as a whole" while Fascism is a "governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism". Ascribing to Obama such divergent political agendas, neither of which is a plausible description of his administration, is a stunning triumph that only the most intellectually challenged among us could achieve.
There seems to be an endless supply of absurd critiques offered up by conservatives, or commentators who must fill air time with something other than fires and plane crashes. How dare Obama deliver a commencement address at Notre Dame, he's anti-Catholic says former Speaker Gingrich, he of affairs and multiple marriages. Why does Obama have to use Teleprompters so much ask others who can put a negative spin on just about anything? Considering the issues he has addressed, the appointments he has made and the busy schedule he has observed, it shouldn't be surprising that he wants to get what he says just right. He is, in any case, demonstrably capable of speaking extemporaneously to the press and at town hall meetings without wasting time nicknaming people and wisecracking his way through the Q & A portion of press conferences.
The president faces problems that seem at times all but insoluble. Republicans keep trying to get him off his game, and Democrats don't support him in every undertaking. One of the most inspirational things he said at his press conference, however, was that he believed in persistence - - a great word for reaffirming his commitment to the goals he promised the American people to pursue.
Belief
teleprompter