Failure?

EXAMINER: No Second Stimulus, Please. “Be sure to thank the President and Congress. This week, with news of some 467,000 jobs lost in June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the U.S. has now lost about two million jobs since the economic stimulus package passed. Even more notable is that the average workweek has been slashed to 33 hours - the lowest number on record. When the President signed his $787 billion stimulus package into law, he confidently asserted that unemployment would not exceed eight percent. If Congress hadn’t passed it, he warned, it would rise to nine percent by 2010. Well, unemployment reached 9.5 percent last month, meaning, by the President’s own logic, that his stimulus package has failed.”

Posted at 2:26 pm by Glenn Reynolds

Failed? Well, that depends on what you think "the President's own logic" was. I think the stimulus package was, from the start, primarily a mechanism to put a plethora of government programs into place, get them entrenched, and establish those precedents. In that respect it has been a success. In all other respects it's a predictable failure that, worse, will leave behind a permanent, toxic legacy.

When the Obster finally tanks, he's going down hard, and on multiple fronts. And if you read even slightly between the lines of recent news stories, one thing is clear: The Clintons have no intention of going down with that ship. They will not be the only ones scuttling down the ropes to reach the dock.

Obie needs to get incredibly lucky on the economy (in about six different ways), on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and more besides. The chances of that kind of luck are approximately zero. He got his whole domestic wish list enacted (except his health care plan, which is DOA), so blame will be hard to off-load onto others. The best you can say about his foreign/security policy is that it's probably well-intentioned and might even work on some planet other than Earth.

Righty conservatives found it much easier to be out of power than in power, now lefty liberals are discovering the same thing. This is setting up to be a crash-and-burn of historic proportions. The sycophant, cheerleader media are annoying, but their blither will be of no consequence from here forward. The commitments are made, the direction set, and what happens now will happen in full view.

Byron