The Summer of Our Discontent

The Summer of Our Discontent

The “summer of recovery” should be renamed “the summer of our
discontent” because it seems like almost nobody is happy. As hard as
the Obama team has tried to convince everyone that everything is going
swimmingly, the sad reality keeps rearing its ugly head:

You know you’re in the summer of recovery when both the Wall Street Journal runs editorials titled “It isn’t working” and “Why I’m not hiring” and the New York Time’s front page story is “U.S. Lost 131,000 Jobs as Governments Cut Back“. Listening to the White House
and then analyzing economic data is like participating in an episode of
the Twilight Zone. In the Time’s article we also learn;

“The Labor Department greatly revised its headline number for June, widening the job loss figure
for that month to 221,000 jobs, from 125,000. Private sector hiring in
June, originally reported at 83,000, was lowered to 31,000″

The people that are supposed to keep track of the number
of jobs created from month to month got the number of private sector
jobs wrong by 168 percent last month. So the “it’s getting better”
number that was reported in June was actually much worse. With example after example of this type of incompetence, is it any wonder that polls show that American’s don’t trust their government?

***

At a time when expect our government to be encouraging companies to
hire, President Obama’s policies do the opposite. From the coming tax
increases to President Obama’s recently signed health care legislation,
each policy increases the already high costs associated with adding a
new employee. It costs a NJ company $74,000 to put $44,000 in an
employee’s pocket, and so companies in that position aren’t going to hire.
What happens when taxes go up significantly next year? More companies
will be doing more with less because they have to and President Obama’s
policies have ensured that. How’s that summer of recovery working out
for you? For more and more people it isn’t, and a majority of
Americans are placing the blame squarely in President Obama’s lap.

What does our President have to say about all of this? The world according President Obama proclaims that it is all George W. Bush’s fault. This continual demagoguery might rev up the base, but it’s losing independents in droves. It’s also backfiring.

No wonder the President is getting so bored with it all…According to The Washington Prowler:

….there is a mounting whispering campaign in Washington
about the current President’s disenchantment with the job he currently
holds. “You hear it a lot from White House staff,” says a Democrat
lobbyist in the financial services sector, who worked on the Obama
transition team. “The President is tired of dealing or bored with all
the B.S., or that things haven’t broken the way he wanted and it’s not
shaping up to be the job that he thought it was going to be. The way
some of them talk they make the President sound like a recent college
graduate unhappy with his first job stuck in the mailroom.”

Apparently the entire White House is seriously displeased with events as they have unfolded:

[Todd] Purdum spends a day inside the West Wing and
talks to Obama’s top aides, who tell him about the challenges of
playing the Beltway game, ugly as it has become, even as their boss
insists they find a way to transcend it.

“There’s a relentlessness to this that’s unlike anything else,
especially when you come into office in a time of crisis,” says Obama
senior adviser David Axelrod. “We did not exactly ease into the tub.
The world is so much smaller, and events reverberate much more quickly,
and one person can create an event so quickly from one computer
terminal.”

Larry Summers, who served as Clinton’s Treasury secretary for the
last 18 months of his term, says, “It used to be there was a kind of
rhythm to the day” with the tempo picking up after the markets closed
and as newspaper deadlines approached, between four and seven P.M.
“That’s gone.” And, according to Rahm Emanuel, C.I.A. director Leon
Panetta thinks “it’s a huge problem” that Washington runs at such “a
highly caffeinated speed.”

Emanuel calls it “F***nutsville,” and Valerie Jarrett says she looks
back wistfully to a time when credible people could put a stamp of
reliability on information and opinion: “Walter Cronkite would get on
and say the truth, and people believed the media,” she says.

etc…

Peter Wehner is having none of it, (nor am I):

Life in the White House is challenging; anyone who has
worked there can testify to that. And Washington, D.C., is certainly an
imperfect city, as all are. But the impression Team Obama is trying to
create — that no group has ever faced more challenges, more
difficulties, or more hardships — is silly and somewhat pathetic.
Politics is the worthiest ambition, wrote John Buchan (the author of
JFK’s favorite book, Pilgrim’s Way); it is the greatest and most honorable adventure.

If Obama and his aides don’t see that or anything like
that — if they view politics and governing only through a lens tinted
by bitterness, frustration, and resentment — then it is time for them
to step aside. If not, then they should man up. Self-pity is a terribly
unattractive quality.

Of course, their discontent is nothing compared to the rest of our’s, as Tony Blankley aptly notes:

A foul and dangerous brew is heating up that is composed
of: (1) The economic collapse that started in 2008; (2) the radical,
“fundamentally transforming” left-wing agenda of the government; and,
(3) the thwarting of the public will – with glee – by the entrenched,
non-elected powers (in the courts, media, colleges and government
bureaucracies) as they get into the face and under the skin of the
cultural and political majority.

It is insufferable (and will not long be suffered) to be
lectured to and imposed upon by a ruling class that loathes our
nation’s history, values and accomplishments; by those who are not, in
fact, our genuine betters. They are neither better educated nor more
profoundly morally versed.

In fact, they are our intellectual and moral inferiors – not superiors. Constantly grinning Supreme CourtJustice Elena Kagan
didn’t think the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that human
beings “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”
should in any way affect her understanding of our constitutional rights
– presumably, if any.

Obama’s base should be happy, right? After all, he’s been so
incredibly successful in transforming the country into the Socialist
Utopia they all dream about. But no. As poor Robert Gibbs bitterly
snarks, “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president”:

The White House is simmering with anger at criticism
from liberals who say President Obama is more concerned with
deal-making than ideological purity.

During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White
House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he
said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very
similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right,
saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and
we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on
issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be
satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was President”.

Jeez, I understand the Bush-bashing, but why drag poor Dennis Kucinich into this?

RELATED:

The predictable result of all this discontent in/with Washington:

Big Government: The Rats Begin Leaving Obama’s Sinking Ship

Neither Orszag nor Romer is a fool. They were party to a con, and they surely knew it.

They presumed that the economy would bounce back as it
usually does after a recession, and they went along with Rahm Emanuel’s
strategy of exploiting the crisis lest it “go to waste.” In the
process, they did what they were told and said what they had to. They
endorsed and defended policies that, as economists, they knew were
unsustainable; and they have left us holding the bag. The recovery has
stalled; unemployment is at least 35% higher than Romer predicted it
would be at this stage; and the deficits stemming from the so-called
“stimulus bill” that these two piously praised as necessary for the
recovery now threaten its continuance.

I doubt that Barack Obama cares one whit. His aim was the
transformation of a country that he sincerely hates, and Orszag and
Romer have loyally served his purpose – as Geithner and Summers still
do. There will, I suspect, be a political reckoning for all of this
profligacy, and its first harbinger will present itself on the first
Tuesday in November. You can fool Americans for a time – but not for
long.

Ace Of Spades HQ: Income Falls In Almost All Cities, Except For Three — Including Washington DC

Washington DC’s in the business of government, and business is good, baby.

The other two cities only grew in income due to government salaries, too:

Among the 52 MSAs with a population of one million or more,
only three had an increase in both net earnings and personal income in
2009 (Washington, D.C.; San Antonio, Texas; and Virginia Beach,
Virginia). The biggest gains in compensation in these three MSAs were
in the federal government (civilian and military combined). Private
sector compensation declined in these three MSAs.

Link this to Christienomics and you’re cooking with gas.

Is anyone noticing this? I mean, I know you are; I mean other people.

Yes, people are noticing.

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