17.6% Real Unemployment

What could go wrong? They thought they were clever by passing the bills without the tax increases needed to pay for them. They thought they could make housing affordable by government fiat. They lied to us about how Stimulus would turn the economy around with millions of shovel-ready projects.

If another country had done us this much damage it would be an act of war. That's why I'm so amazed that the polls show Democrats still in the running in so many elections. Obama was supposed to be so inspiring, but unlike FDR he has been spreading fear rather than restoring hope. We're not the rubes we used to be.

"Progressives" living in the past--the irony of our age. They've been replaying the New Freedom and the New Deal for nearly a century. And now they've accomplished nearly all their dreams and not even America's resilience can shake it off. The Ponzi scheme is bankrupt.

A column by Peter Roff is headed Obama Fundamentally Doubts America Is a Good Country. It begins with a reference to this Op-Ed by Shelby Steele which is acerbically entitled A Referendum on the Redeemer. Steele writes:

Whether or not the Republicans win big next week, it is already clear that the "transformative" aspirations of the Obama presidency—the special promise of this first black president to "change" us into a better society—are much less likely to materialize. There will be enough Republican gains to make the "no" in the "party of no" even more formidable, if not definitive.

But apart from this politics of numbers, there is also now a deepening disenchantment with Barack Obama himself. (He has a meager 37% approval rating by the latest Harris poll.) His embarrassed supporters console themselves that their intentions were good; their vote helped make history. But for Mr. Obama himself there is no road back to the charisma and political capital he enjoyed on his inauguration day.

How is it that Barack Obama could step into the presidency with an air of inevitability and then, in less than two years, find himself unwelcome at the campaign rallies of many of his fellow Democrats?

Ouch! You could almost feel sorry for the dude, if he weren't so busy blaming everybody else, including us, the "scared," and attacking those who think that raising the national debt by $3,000,000,000,000 in two years is reckless and dangerous.

Read the whole thing, at both links. I can't match their eloquence.