Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Unadulterated Ineptitude

A curious piece by Thomas L. Friedman today. It seems to start out on a Diana West Death of of the Grownup tack, bemoaning the lack of maturity in the land:
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve found the last few weeks in American politics particularly unnerving. Our economy is still very fragile, yet you would never know that by the way the political class is acting. We’re like a patient that just got out of intensive care and is sitting up in bed for the first time when, suddenly, all the doctors and nurses at bedside start bickering. One of them throws a stethoscope across the room; someone else threatens to unplug all the monitors unless the hospital bills are paid by noon; and all the while the patient is thinking: “Are you people crazy? I am just starting to recover. Do you realize how easily I could relapse? Aren’t there any adults here?”
Anyone have a clue what he's nattering on about so far? It sounds like he's upset about the failure to get behind Obamacare--either that or he's describing a nightmarish but not implausible scenario under the plan (i.e. frustrated health care workers throwing and unplugging things). But reading down a ways, it turns out to be about Obama's latest run-in with the banks, and how, as even rabid swooner TLF must admit, it isn't going so well:

President Obama is so much better when he takes a heated, knotty issue, like civil rights or banking reform, and talks to the country like adults. He is so much better at making us smarter than angrier. Going to war with the banks for a quick political sugar high after an electoral loss will just work against him and us. It will spook the banks into lending even less and slow the recovery even more.
In other words, the haplesschanger's screwing up again--and it has nothing to do with talking "to the country like adults" (has he ever done that?) It's about Americans, heretofore entranced by the optics and the sing-song cadences of Obama's purty speechifying, waking up from the spell and realizing that, unless they want their country to become the next Sweden--or Canada--they had better take it back.
 
Nothing "childish" about that.

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