Yesterday, in response to the spread of depression throughout the body politic, Bruce Kesler explained Why I’m Not Depressed.
I’m not depressed. Mostly because I’m a glass-half-full type, with the life experience that with difficulty and pain has seen and been shown that it is.
Depression implies a fixation upon the perceived negative forces at work, with a tendency toward paralysis of action to change them or our self. These are unconstructive and self-defeating attitudes and behaviors.
Avoidance of or ending depressed feelings and behavior comes from attitudinal resilience and from engaging in efficacious actions.
No doubt, we’re in a mess, both of our own making and by others, and many in our political and societal elite are making it worse, with potential dire consequences. Still, one must recognize the resilient strengths we have. Forty-eight percent did not vote for Obama, despite a perfect-storm in his favor, and current polling shows him losing support, and even his allied media are having to take some notice of his excesses and lackings. The US is emerging from this economic calamity relatively stronger than other countries. The positive trend-line in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere that was hard-earned under Bush has not been abandoned by Obama, though it may become weakened. Ordinary Americans are buckling down in their personal affairs and continuing to achieve for themselves, society, and our futures.
Bruce was concerned with the spread of despair on the Right, exemplified by the reactions of very well respected thinkers like Scott Johnson and Victor Davis Hansen but I am with Bruce on this, although as noted, the despair is spreading.
Dr. Sanity shares in the depression and understands that this is an issue not only in the economic sphere but also in our perilous international relations:
Since Inauguration Day, Obama's intentions have been completely predictable and transparent to our enemies; he has wasted no time or thought in implementing his ideological fantasies; yet, at the same time, he is operating at a tempo that is easy to keep one step ahead of (primarily because everything he is doing has already been tried before in the last half century and is hardly new or original). Finally, the man is so wrapped up in himself and his own words and agenda, that he is not in the least bit interested in "clarifying the intentions" of anyone else.
Like the Minor League star who suddenly finds himself in the Show, he has no idea how to cope or why his batting average has dropped so precipitously.
Thus, it is Obama who is continuously underreacting and behaving in an uncertain and ambiguous manner. Staying one step ahead of him is rather easy; and boxng him will be a piece of cake for the Mullahs.
As for the economy, he hasn't even the smallest clue, and observing and orienting to the facts is of little interest when one is intent on ushering in a progressive utopia.
We now see the spread of despair to the Center and Left. Paul Krugman believes that Obama will fail out of a breakdown in reality testing:
Over the weekend The Times and other newspapers reported leaked details about the Obama administration’s bank rescue plan, which is to be officially released this week. If the reports are correct, Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, has persuaded President Obama to recycle Bush administration policy — specifically, the “cash for trash” plan proposed, then abandoned, six months ago by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
This is more than disappointing. In fact, it fills me with a sense of despair.After all, we’ve just been through the firestorm over the A.I.G. bonuses, during which administration officials claimed that they knew nothing, couldn’t do anything, and anyway it was someone else’s fault. Meanwhile, the administration has failed to quell the public’s doubts about what banks are doing with taxpayer money.
And now Mr. Obama has apparently settled on a financial plan that, in essence, assumes that banks are fundamentally sound and that bankers know what they’re doing.[Emphasis mine-SW]
And, more ominously, Tom Barnett, who supported Barack Obama as the candidate more likely to navigate the changing interrelations between America and the world necessitated in a post-Bush world, is worried. [All emphases mine-SW]
This is a great piece about tempering our current populist anger, the key point being, the more we let our government indulge our popular rage, the more inconsistent and untrustworthy it's going to seem to the very private sector players it's trying to lure back on the playing field.
I could expand that same argument to the Obama administration and foreign economies: reversing Bush-era free-trade policies and suddenly calling into question long-negotiated free-trade agreements with old friends like South Korea will only make us look scared, desperate, and untrustworthy.
And that will backfire in our faces.
Beginning to see how far we'll end up going on AFPAK
Now we're thinking about strikes in Baluchistan, or southern Pakistan, because our success in strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas are pushing Taliban in that direction to a certain extent.
Absent the patent self-destructiveness on trade, I would be far more likely to support this, but the more Obama engages in protectionism while saying otherwise, the more I see the world's other great powers leaving America to hang alone as we accumulate a larger conflict zone in Pakistan.
We may not see the connections, but they will.
Good Obama foreign policy, bad Obama foreign policy
... the administration, while not renegotiating NAFTA openly (don't forget the bad decision on Mexican truckers), won't be following through on Bush-started Free Trade Agreements. Instead, those will be subject to new criteria of "social responsibility."
This alone is enough to make me rethink my vote for Obama. McCain would have done far less damage to our future simply by trying to do less to "fix" trade.
And, finally, from this morning:
This is direct payback for caving in to the Teamsters on restricting Mexican trucks from entering the U.S. and transporting their cargo directly to destinations. ...
This is by far the dumbest thing Obama has done to date, and it's substantial. It was slipped into the $410B spending package he just signed. That alone should have triggered the veto.
Doing this while Mexico suffers so badly from our drug war dynamics, and while we're trying to stabilize the global economy--really dumb.
And then, just when my faith in Obama drops dramatically, he moves to make amends with this pilot program, as his administration "began efforts Friday to ease an erupting trade dispute with Mexico by starting work on a new program to give Mexican truckers broader access to U.S. highways."
You start messing with NAFTA and Mexico retaliates with tariffs, and then you decide to fulfill your commitments.
If Obama has his way, he will manage to worsen (continue to worsen) our recession and increase international instability at the same time. In Scott Johnson's phrasing, Barack Obama may well combine "infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity" in a perfectly dysfunctional whole. Only someone steeped in the academic culture can continue to believe in infantile leftism after they have begun to actually pay their own bills. But that is no reason for despair; in fact I would suggest that despite all the damage that Barack Obama and the infantile leftists can do in the next 4 years, he is also offering a marvelous opportunity that, if squandered, will be our loss, not his.
The American center and right have slowly been drawn into the orbit of the "nanny state." George W. Bush perfectly captured this ethos with his "Compassionate Conservatism." The Republicans, prior to the capture of the Congress by the Democrats, became indistinguishable form Democrats in their propensity to spend without any particular concerns about actually paying for their wish list. Our entire country has been living beyond our means with the unstated infantile fantasy that "someone" will rescue us for our profligacy. Reality is painful, yet we see signs that the sleeping giant of America may be waking up. The "Tea Parties" have evoked an interesting response.
Glenn Reynolds have been doing an even better job than usual keeping an eye on the Tea Party protests. The author of An Army of Davids knows better than most the power of the empowered, and leveraged (in a non-financial meaning of the word), individual. Glenn has noted, as has become a spreading meme, that among their other failures, the MSM is conspicuously not reporting on the Tea Parties which are taking place in their back yards. In response to his simple noting of an indisputable fact, consider the "reasoned" response at one of the better known Left wing sites: [HT: Glenn Reynolds]
Assrocket [presumably, Glenn Reynolds] links to photos of Teabagging in Orlando, FL, Raleigh, NC and Ridgefield, CT -- the last of which drew a staggering 200 people.
...
Here's a thought. Maybe if the Teabaggers wanted even more ink than they're already getting, they should consider staging these circlejerks in towns that can't fit their entire populations in the Staples Center.
Firedoglake has long been the home of proudly enraged leftists. Now they have one of their own in the White House and the sterility and banality of their ideas is becoming obvious. That is why Paul Krugman, a man with whom I almost never agree, is alarmed. He is a serious leftist who has thoughtful and sophisticated ideas about how to fix our problems. He knows that money does not simply appear in the pockets of the wealthy, like the golden eggs from the goose, but must be earned. He understands that in the real world, bills must eventually be paid (even if I might differ with him on how much to buy and who should decide what to spend our money on.) Paul Krugman is in despair because he sees the Obama administration as deeply unserious and apparently unaware of their adolescent grandiosity and failed reality testing. Only an adolescent can respond to such a serious reality with such juvenile name calling.
Perhaps infantile name-calling is now the last refuge of scoundrels.
It has been a long time since I attended a protest. It is hard to join in a protest when you have a job and responsibilities. Yet more and more Americans, among them the most productive, are now joining in with their fellow citizens, and it is frightening the hacks that be. Chris Dodd is likely to lose his next race for the Senate. John Corzine, who has never met a tax he doesn't, like is now attempting to look financially conservative and is in trouble in liberal New Jersey. (If Charlie Rangel or Barney Frank were to decide not to seek re-election, or could actually lose, we would really be at a turning point, but I doubt anything would affect those two.)
This is hardly reason to be in despair. Barack Obama's fantasies cannot survive long exposure to reality and the American people are already speaking out. This is real "power to the people" not the vapid inanities of the infantile Left. We have very difficult times ahead of us but American resiliency has been underestimated before and those who have done so have been the sorrier for it. If people are in despair it is up to them to refuse indulge in the passivity that is the only way Obama succeeds in remaking this country, and take action. Turning passive into active is a time honored treatment for depression.
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