A.J. DiCintio
Obama's contemptible attacks no surprise
By A.J. DiCintio
In a recent column, David Brooks (NYT) condemns President Obama for his attacks on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital, pointing out the crucially important role private equity firms have played in rehabilitating a formerly "bloated" and "sluggish" corporate America and offering empirical evidence for his assertions, including from scholarly studies that show private equity firms generally transform failing companies into "prosperous," job preserving enterprises.
Further strengthening the piece, Brooks employs facts to counter "wildly misleading" allegations Democrats are making against Romney's former company and argues not just for continuing America's business renaissance but applying its best principles to the federal government.
Finally, he insightfully observes that while Romney argues he has the experience to apply sound business practices to government, Obama deems the business transformation "not a good thing" even as he refuses to offer the country "[an] agenda to reform the public sector."
As incisive as it is, however, the op-ed contains two astonishing flaws, the first occurring when Brooks fails to comment upon the shameless hypocrisies inherent in the attacks.
Surely aware of the president's insufferable crowing about "saving" GM and Chrysler, Brooks incredibly neglects to mention that in exchange for lending the companies $60 billion, Obama demanded a lower wage structure for every new auto worker; insisted the UAW's health insurance plan forgo a claim to billions in cash owed it by the corporations; directed 2,243 dealerships to be shut down at the cost of over 100,000 jobs (see washingtonexaminer.com); ordered numerous plant closures at the cost of thousands more jobs; and forced bondholders (including pension funds and bond funds owned by individual retirees) to take significant losses.
Now, that makes power pikers of equity managers in the private sector! But then, they don't sit in the Oval Office, a phone call away from unleashing the enormous resources of the entire executive branch of the U.S. government.
Just as incredibly, Brooks fails to point out the stunning hypocrisy that lover of big, centralized government Barack Obama, who has never run as much as a lemonade stand, much less a lemonade company, is ideologically committed to obsessively playing equity firm CEO out of the White House (not with his own money, mind you, but the public's), his arrogant incompetence having resulted in a slew of abject failures, best exemplified by the huge losses and corrupt political cronyism associated with the Solyndra "investment."
And in a final incredible omission, Brooks offers not a word regarding Obama's eagerness to bless Wall Street money that goes into his campaign coffers as perfectly acceptable, for example, the huge piles of cash bundled by Jon Corzine, whom the expedient president certainly regards as one of the nation's most venerable non-vulture capitalists.
The second of the essay's major flaws occurs when Brooks concludes by telling us he has "no idea" why Obama is failing to lead a "party of change and transformation," no idea why a man "who successfully ran an unconventional campaign that embodied change and transformation" is willing "to run a campaign this time that regurgitates the exact same ads and repeats the exact same arguments as so many Democratic campaigns from the ancient past."
Regarding the reasons for those fantastic statements, we can only speculate. We can, however, be certain about the efficacy of a piece of advice that will shake their author back into the real world:
Brooks should read Michael Gledhill's "Who Is Barack Obama?" which examines the self-portrait Obama painted in "Dreams from My Father." (He'll have no problem finding it because just this week nationalreview.com posted the essay, which was originally published in the September 1, 2008, issue of National Review.)
If he does, his mind will be enriched by the following passage:
"[The book] reveals Barack Obama as a self-constructed, racially obsessed man who regards most whites as oppressors. It is the work of a clever but shallow thinker who confuses ideological cliché for insight, a man who sees U.S. history as a narrow, bitter tale of race and class victimization. The Barack Obama presented in these pages is not electable to national office. No wonder that Obama, aided by a compliant media, has created a new self for public view. . ."
He will also learn about the Barack Obama who was attracted to and deeply influenced by "Marxist-Leninist literature," who "even in his thirties [wrote] with enthusiasm about the Viet Cong," and who for years on end was delighted to ensconce himself in a church where he was bathed in an endless flow of sermons based upon black liberation theology and racial hatred.
The real Barack Obama in mind, Brooks will immediately understand why to spur the economy, the anything-but-transformative disciple of the threadbare ideology and discredited politics of the Chicago Machine could think of nothing brave or innovative, much less transformative, but only of slopping nearly a trillion dollars into troughs frequented by the inevitable failures that are this nation's most contemptible congressional porkers.
He will understand why instead of thoughtfully proposing even one of the many real reforms the country's healthcare system desperately needs, Barack Obama forced down the nation's throat a sixties-welfare-style, 15,000 IRS agents hiring, federal bureaucracy bloating, 2,000 page Rube Goldberg "[un]affordable care" abomination, all the while lying a more than trillion dollar lie about its true cost.
He will understand why as the average income of Americans declines and the middle class increasingly struggles to make ends meet, Barack Obama, in the madly ironic name of "spreading the wealth around," has proposed bigger, more powerful, more tax heavy, more wasteful government, the virulently rampaging federal debt be damned.
And as a bonus, David Brooks will no longer express a bit of surprise about why ostensible "transformative change agent" but actual liberal/leftist ideologue Barack Obama has chosen to attack Mitt Romney and Bain Capital in a manner so thoroughly bereft of intellectual honesty that a number of Democratic leaders who are serious about job creation have condemned it, one going so truthfully far that he called the strategy "nauseating," which it definitely is.
© A.J. DiCintio
May 27, 2012
In a recent column, David Brooks (NYT) condemns President Obama for his attacks on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital, pointing out the crucially important role private equity firms have played in rehabilitating a formerly "bloated" and "sluggish" corporate America and offering empirical evidence for his assertions, including from scholarly studies that show private equity firms generally transform failing companies into "prosperous," job preserving enterprises.
Further strengthening the piece, Brooks employs facts to counter "wildly misleading" allegations Democrats are making against Romney's former company and argues not just for continuing America's business renaissance but applying its best principles to the federal government.
Finally, he insightfully observes that while Romney argues he has the experience to apply sound business practices to government, Obama deems the business transformation "not a good thing" even as he refuses to offer the country "[an] agenda to reform the public sector."
As incisive as it is, however, the op-ed contains two astonishing flaws, the first occurring when Brooks fails to comment upon the shameless hypocrisies inherent in the attacks.
Surely aware of the president's insufferable crowing about "saving" GM and Chrysler, Brooks incredibly neglects to mention that in exchange for lending the companies $60 billion, Obama demanded a lower wage structure for every new auto worker; insisted the UAW's health insurance plan forgo a claim to billions in cash owed it by the corporations; directed 2,243 dealerships to be shut down at the cost of over 100,000 jobs (see washingtonexaminer.com); ordered numerous plant closures at the cost of thousands more jobs; and forced bondholders (including pension funds and bond funds owned by individual retirees) to take significant losses.
Now, that makes power pikers of equity managers in the private sector! But then, they don't sit in the Oval Office, a phone call away from unleashing the enormous resources of the entire executive branch of the U.S. government.
Just as incredibly, Brooks fails to point out the stunning hypocrisy that lover of big, centralized government Barack Obama, who has never run as much as a lemonade stand, much less a lemonade company, is ideologically committed to obsessively playing equity firm CEO out of the White House (not with his own money, mind you, but the public's), his arrogant incompetence having resulted in a slew of abject failures, best exemplified by the huge losses and corrupt political cronyism associated with the Solyndra "investment."
And in a final incredible omission, Brooks offers not a word regarding Obama's eagerness to bless Wall Street money that goes into his campaign coffers as perfectly acceptable, for example, the huge piles of cash bundled by Jon Corzine, whom the expedient president certainly regards as one of the nation's most venerable non-vulture capitalists.
The second of the essay's major flaws occurs when Brooks concludes by telling us he has "no idea" why Obama is failing to lead a "party of change and transformation," no idea why a man "who successfully ran an unconventional campaign that embodied change and transformation" is willing "to run a campaign this time that regurgitates the exact same ads and repeats the exact same arguments as so many Democratic campaigns from the ancient past."
Regarding the reasons for those fantastic statements, we can only speculate. We can, however, be certain about the efficacy of a piece of advice that will shake their author back into the real world:
Brooks should read Michael Gledhill's "Who Is Barack Obama?" which examines the self-portrait Obama painted in "Dreams from My Father." (He'll have no problem finding it because just this week nationalreview.com posted the essay, which was originally published in the September 1, 2008, issue of National Review.)
If he does, his mind will be enriched by the following passage:
"[The book] reveals Barack Obama as a self-constructed, racially obsessed man who regards most whites as oppressors. It is the work of a clever but shallow thinker who confuses ideological cliché for insight, a man who sees U.S. history as a narrow, bitter tale of race and class victimization. The Barack Obama presented in these pages is not electable to national office. No wonder that Obama, aided by a compliant media, has created a new self for public view. . ."
He will also learn about the Barack Obama who was attracted to and deeply influenced by "Marxist-Leninist literature," who "even in his thirties [wrote] with enthusiasm about the Viet Cong," and who for years on end was delighted to ensconce himself in a church where he was bathed in an endless flow of sermons based upon black liberation theology and racial hatred.
The real Barack Obama in mind, Brooks will immediately understand why to spur the economy, the anything-but-transformative disciple of the threadbare ideology and discredited politics of the Chicago Machine could think of nothing brave or innovative, much less transformative, but only of slopping nearly a trillion dollars into troughs frequented by the inevitable failures that are this nation's most contemptible congressional porkers.
He will understand why instead of thoughtfully proposing even one of the many real reforms the country's healthcare system desperately needs, Barack Obama forced down the nation's throat a sixties-welfare-style, 15,000 IRS agents hiring, federal bureaucracy bloating, 2,000 page Rube Goldberg "[un]affordable care" abomination, all the while lying a more than trillion dollar lie about its true cost.
He will understand why as the average income of Americans declines and the middle class increasingly struggles to make ends meet, Barack Obama, in the madly ironic name of "spreading the wealth around," has proposed bigger, more powerful, more tax heavy, more wasteful government, the virulently rampaging federal debt be damned.
And as a bonus, David Brooks will no longer express a bit of surprise about why ostensible "transformative change agent" but actual liberal/leftist ideologue Barack Obama has chosen to attack Mitt Romney and Bain Capital in a manner so thoroughly bereft of intellectual honesty that a number of Democratic leaders who are serious about job creation have condemned it, one going so truthfully far that he called the strategy "nauseating," which it definitely is.
© A.J. DiCintio
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