The Sky Is Falling: How Obama's administration plays on fear
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opin ... 4970.story
Numerous commentators, including me, have pointed to this never-waste-a-crisis mantra as ideological evidence that Obama's budget priorities are a great bait-and-switch. He says he wants to fix the financial crisis, but he's focusing on selling his long-standing liberal agenda on health care, energy and education as the way to do it, even though his proposals have absolutely nothing to do with addressing the housing and toxic-debt problems that are the direct causes of our predicament. Indeed, some—particularly on Wall Street—would argue that his policies are making the crisis worse.
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Recall that not long ago, the first item on the bill of indictment against the Bush administration was that it was "exploiting" Sept. 11, 2001, to enact its agenda. Al Gore shrieked that President George W. Bush "played on our fears" to get his way. In response to nearly every Bush initiative, from the USA Patriot Act to the toppling of Saddam Hussein, critics would caterwaul that Bush was taking advantage of the country's fear of terrorism.
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Obama's defenders respond to this argument by stating that the president's motives are decent, noble and pure. He wants to help the uninsured and the poorly educated. He wants to make good on his vow to halt those rising oceans.
But this is just a rationalization. Every president thinks his agenda is what's best for the country; every politician believes his motives are noble. The point is that scaring people about X in order to achieve Y is fundamentally undemocratic.
This was transparently obvious to Bush's harshest critics, who alleged that Sept. 11 was merely a convenient crisis for devious neocons who wanted to topple Hussein all along. But it's now clear that many of these critics simply objected to the agenda, not the alleged tactics. Now that it's their turn, they see nothing wrong with doing what they so recently condemned.
- Is what Obama is doing different from what Bush did (I do believe that he exploited a crisis to achieve a different agenda) and how so?
- Is it the same but ok because the cause is just (in your mind)? Please keep in mind that many a hawk would argue that Bush's cause was just.
- Is it really hypocritical and just more of the same old same old that politicians have been guilty of for centuries?
- Is the writer just full of it and why do you think that?
