March 11, 2009 8:18 AM
Obama: Fear-mongering rules the day
Fear-mongering rules the dayBy Jonah Goldberg | Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Imagine a child falls down a well. Now imagine I offer to lend the parents my ladder to save her, but only if they promise to paint my house. Would you applaud me for not letting a crisis go to waste? Or would you think I'm a jerk, for want of a harsher word not printable in this space?
I ask because I'm trying to come to terms with Rule No. 1 of the new administration.
"Rule 1: Never allow a crisis to go to waste," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told the New York Times [NYT] right after the election. "They are opportunities to do big things." Over the weekend, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told an audience at the European Parliament, "Never waste a good crisis." Then President Barack Obama explained in his Saturday radio and Internet address that there is "great opportunity in the midst of" the "great crisis" befalling America.
Numerous commentators, including me, have pointed to this never-waste-a-crisis mantra as ideological evidence that Obama's budget priorities are a great bait-and-switch. He says he wants to fix the financial crisis, but he's focusing on selling his long-standing liberal agenda on health care, energy and education as the way to do it, even though his proposals have absolutely nothing to do with addressing the housing and toxic-debt problems that are the direct causes of our predicament. Indeed, some - particularly on Wall Street - would argue that his policies are making the crisis worse.
But those policies aren't the real scandal, even though they're bad enough. The real scandal is that this administration thinks crises are opportunities for governmental power-grabs.
Recall that not long ago, the first item on the bill of indictment against the Bush administration was that it was "exploiting" 9/11 to enact its agenda.
Well, now we have the president, along with his chief aides, admitting - boasting! - that they want to exploit a national emergency to further their pre-existing agenda.
In other realms of life, exploiting a crisis for your own purposes is an outrage. If a business uses a hurricane warning to price-gouge, it is a crime. When a liberal administration does it, it's taking advantage of a historic opportunity.
Obama's defenders respond to this argument by stating that the president's motives are decent, noble and pure. He wants to help the uninsured and the poorly educated. He wants to make good on his vow to halt those rising oceans.
But this is just a rationalization. Every president thinks his agenda is what's best for the country; every politician believes his motives are noble. The point is that scaring people about X in order to achieve Y is fundamentally undemocratic.
This was transparently obvious to Bush's harshest critics, who alleged that 9/11 was merely a convenient crisis for devious neocons who wanted to topple Hussein all along. But it's now clear that many of these critics simply objected to the agenda, not the alleged tactics. Now that it's their turn, they see nothing wrong with doing what they so recently condemned.
Talk back at JonahsColumn@aol.com.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view.bg?articleid=1157782
Posted in Obama Nation | Permalink
Comments
Couldn't have put it better.
Posted by: Lynn | April 18, 2009 2:56 PM
