The Emil Minty of American politics

The unemployment that has wrought such devastation in black communities for decades is now being experienced by a much wider swath of the population. We’ve been in deep denial about this. Way back in March 2007, when the official unemployment rate was a wildly deceptive 4.5 percent and the Bush crowd was crowing about the alleged strength of the economy, I wrote:

“People can howl all they want about how well the economy is doing. The simple truth is that millions of ordinary American workers are in an employment bind. Steady jobs with good benefits are going the way of Ozzie and Harriet. Young workers, especially, are hurting, which diminishes the prospects for the American family. And blacks, particularly black males, are in a deep danger zone.”

The official jobless rate is now more than twice as high — 9.4 percent — and even more wildly deceptive. It ticked down by 0.1 percent last month not because more people found jobs, but because 450,000 people withdrew from the labor market. They stopped looking, so they weren’t counted as unemployed.

A truer picture of the employment crisis emerges when you combine the number of people who are officially counted as jobless with those who are working part time because they can’t find full-time work and those in the so-called labor market reserve — people who are not actively looking for work (because they have become discouraged, for example) but would take a job if one became available.

The tally from those three categories is a mind-boggling 30 million Americans — 19 percent of the overall work force.

This is, by far, the nation’s biggest problem and should be its No. 1 priority. --BOB HERBERT, The New York Times, 8-11-2009

Yet, to listen to the Democrats tell it, we either flip our entire health care delivery system upside down by tomorrow night at the very latest, or all is lost. Without this long, long-debated reform being settled by, say, yesterday, America can be no more. Oh, yeah, and “less bad (economic news) is good.”

Jackasses all!

All of which led me to two separate thoughts last night. I’d make the claim that they were epiphanies, but I strongly suspect that my thoughts are not mine alone.

The first one was that Barack Oblahblah is calm, cool, calculated and utterly clueless without a teleprompter blocking out the glare of the increasingly white-hot electorate not hopelessly worshiping his every utterance.

And the second being that his elitist sense of self-assuredness--the result of a misperceived political capital stockpile--is going to get Republicans, Independents, Greens and some Democrats alike openly and loudly clamoring for a return to the disasterous days of Jimmy Carter. Anything but this. Right?

And then I was reminded of how completely the media excoriated Sarah Palin after she made her straight-to-the-point but probably ill-advised “death panel” comment.

Yeah, that was after I read today that Sen. Arlen Specter told a raucous crowd at a town hall meeting that he opposes mandatory counseling on end-of-life issues called for in a House of Representatives version of health care legislation.

And today, at yet another town hall meeting, Oblahblah told that crowd, ”I’m not in favor of death panels.”

Gee, how reassuring. He’s not in favor of seating a federal Department of Euthanasia. But what he didn’t do was rule it’s eventual creation out.

For me, all of this coattails on the disturbing, the distressing creation of a single e-mail address…flag@whitehouse.gov.

So this administration has now taken a page right out of Mad Magazine with the Spy vs. Spy bit. Only, what they are seeking is a variation on the basic theme, thereby pitting Americans against Americans. And all in the name of partisan politics.

They claim what we need is a peaceful and respectful “discourse,” while commanding the Idolatry Corps to make like the secret police? Proof that Oblahblah is becoming increasingly intolerant of dissenting opinions.

The marching orders are, when confronted with “angry mobs” of “GOP operatives,” rent a mob of your own and have at it. Do a full frontal.

So, in order to squelch the increasingly loud opposition to an ill-timed and ill-conceived and hastily presented health care coup d’etat, the plan is to launch Operation American vs. American? And, on purpose no less?

And where were the demands for a peaceful and respectful discourse when G.W. Bush was spending like a blood-engorged tick, just like a Vodka-soused Democrat? How was it that the Code Pink crazies always managed to gain access to Republican speaking events, and quite a few of W’s oft-mangled speeches?

"I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you're not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration."--Hillary Clinton, 2003.

But to hear the latest from Oblahblah and the mentally incontinent majority leaders of both the House and Senate, to protest these days is completely “un-American.” That’s a stretch. That’d be humorous if we weren’t skating on such thin economic ice.

All the while, our deficits are soaring beyond any previously imagined apogee, and our revenues are dropping like a stone-fed starling. But fret not, kiddies. This health care fiasco won’t cost us more than a trillion or two or three over the course of a decade.

As far as the ongoing health care “debate” is concerned, the longer Oblahblah is forced to speak out in defense of his health care boondoggle in the offing, the more he speaks in vaguer and vaguer generalities, further fueling the growing suspicions of average Americans not begging for a cradle-to-death panel entitlement. He is blowing it.

What Americans need most are jobs. And fast. But the president has already warned us not to expect jobs for a year or so, perhaps longer. Meanwhile, the leading economists are warning us that the creation of jobs in any appreciable numbers may still be many years away. But at least the unionized party apparatchiks have construction jobs coming by way of the stimulus package, Oblahblah’s election hangover-fueled gift to party loyalists from sea to non-rising sea.

All of which leads me to a startling conclusion: Despite his supposed oratorical skills, Barack Oblahblah has become the Emil Minty of American politics sans the bladed boomerang.

Sure, his lips keep on moving. But all I’m hearing at this point are grunts, growls and snorts.

Them’s my thoughts on all of that.

And before that forgotten second-tier issue--that wholesale unemployment--leads to disorder, stock up on water, canned goods and ammo.

Buh-bye