I am dispirited by the media's accelerating failure to do what it has heretofore always considered its primary responsibility: to provide tough, fair-minded investigation of the issues of the day.Alas, as CBS veteran Bernard Goldberg says in his new book, A Slobbering Love Afair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media:
"The media's liberal bias has crossed an important line-moving from their usual unthinking liberal bias to crass partisanship of the crudest kind, practically acting as spin doctors for Barack Obama."
I teach my career coaching clients to assess the probability of an effort being worth the time. In light of the ever accelerating tidal wave of media-driven ObamaMania, I've decided to move on to topics where my efforts are more likely to make a difference.
So here, I'll just offer my summative thought regarding Obama's policies: Those policies, at their core, are united by one principle: that resources should be redistributed from the haves to the have-nots. In practice, that means redistributing from the pool of people and businesses with the greatest potential for using the resources wisely and for creating positive societal ripple effect to those people and businesses with the least. That formula ensures America's failure.
That's especially true when Obama's spending will be so massive. On top of the Republican-initiated $700 billion TARP bank bailout which heretofore has been a disaster, Obama wants to spend an incomprehensibly large $1 TRILLION dollars in this spending spree. And experts agree that more TRILLIONS will be spent in Obama's next round or two of spending sprees. And these are trillions the government simply doesn't have and can't get with the proposed tax increases. So, the result will be yet more taxes, including on the middle class, an attempt to borrow huge sums of money from what may be an unwilling world of lenders, and/or print lots of money, which will create painful inflation.
Alas, I believe Obama will able to get his policies enacted to a greater extent than any president in history thanks to his perfect storm of communication skills, a liberal Congress, and an unprecedentedly unquestioning media.
So I predict that Obama's policies will yes, short-term, create jobs and do other public-pleasing things but by the time he's completed his eight years in office, he will have done more to destroy this country than all our enemies combined.
Of course, the public will not think that: The media has overstated the economy's problems to give Obama nowhere to go but up (for example, today's 7.6% unemployment rate is near the historical average,) will hyperinflate his accomplishments, and blame America's troubles on remnants of conservatism and libertarianism.
That all said, I'd love to be wrong and for Obama to succeed--His intentions are most noble.
