Reply #3: Well, I'm glad you posted here too. [View All]

I feel like what I want to say would get eaten alive right now. I see what's happening with him as a microcosm of what happens with all of us, in the sense that we may know we have to take a completely new turn, but "not right now". He seems to be trying to put the situation back into some semblance of order, but he hasn't grasped that it's gone beyond that possibility, if by order is meant the way it was. I'm reminded of that discussion we had about him some weeks ago, and the phrase I pulled out of the discussion, that he's the one to "land the flaming plane" of the old order. In that metaphor, he seems to have forgotten that it's really, truly, going down.

I really don't think it helps, either, that the people giving him economic advice are the inheritors of the Chicago School of Economics; the Friedman-inspired libertarian types who have been mightily messing around with human civilization for the past 30 or so years under false assumptions. The trouble is that the study of economics is mistaken at its base, it has mistaken, unscientific assumptions about continual growth, closed systems, "externalities" and so forth. Criticizing economics with that in mind is such a penetrating criticism that it's just glossed over, for fear of ruining too many careers and financial systems at once.

Why do I think this is important? Because I think it's especially difficult for Obama, if he can overcome the inertia, to basically call his expert, learned, personal friends incompetent to fix the problems. It's such a breach of trust that it's an especially hard hurdle to jump. These aren't just people he's appointed, these are people he's known here in Chicago for about a decade.

It's like all of the reasons why are civilization is stuck are instantiated in this one man, and muddling through just is not the thing that will work now. Unless, of course, the Republicans actually earn, all on their own, the permanent contempt of the voters. It's hard to see how that will happen though, with the MSM wagons permanently pulled around them.