"I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks."

Charles Krauthammer:

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance.

The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive.

After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

But the damage is done and is being done. 

And we will pay, with our wallets, and sadly for more than just a few, with our lives.

This joke of a politician who pulled (and is still pulling) the wool over the eyes of so many of the easily led is now the leader of the free world.

Free for now. 

Comments

[tim aka The Godless Heathen]

Our long national nightmare is…just beginning.

Funny how the Lefties aren’t showing up to defend their boy. The silence is deafening.

[Mommynator]

I told a few people to enjoy their hangovers only to be growled at.

Oh well.

[SpideyTerry]

Wow. Krauthammer ripped through Obama like he was a piece of tissue paper.