The Discerning Texan

Yet another Mark Steyn gem; a few highlights:

... Yeah, sure, no previous occupant of the White House has been able to walk on water—your Eisenhowers and Roosevelts, your Chester Arthurs and Grover Clevelands and whatnot. But Barack Obama didn’t run as just another of those squaresville losers. He was gonna heal the planet, and lower the oceans. So, even if he couldn’t walk on water, he should at least be able to paddle in it. “He is a community organizer like Jesus was,” said Susan Sarandon, “and now we’re a community and he can organize us.”

So how’s that going? Jesus took a handful of loaves and two fish and fed 5,000 people. Barack wants to take a trillion pieces of pork and feed it to a handful of Democratic-party interest groups.

[...]

I got a little muddled over two adjoining newspaper clippings—one on the stimulus, the other on those octuplets in California—and for a brief moment the two stories converged. Everyone’s hammering that mom—she’s divorced, unemployed, living in a small house with parents who have a million bucks’ worth of debt, and she’s already got six kids. So she has in vitro fertilization to have eight more. But isn’t that exactly what the Feds have done? Last fall, they gave birth to an $850 billion bailout they couldn’t afford and didn’t have enough time to keep an eye on, and now four months later they’re going to do it all over again, but this time they want trillionuplets. Barney and Nancy represent the in vitro fertilization of the federal budget. And it’s the taxpayers who’ll get stuck with the diapers.

Those supporters who were wary of touting Obama as the walk-on-water Messiah did their best to lower expectations by hailing him merely as the new FDR. You remember the old FDR—“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Ha! With the new New Deal, we have everything to fear. As President Obama warned on Tuesday, “A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.” If you’re of those moonstruck Obammysoxers still driving around with the “HOPE, NOT FEAR” bumper stickers, please note that, due to an unfortunate proofreading error at the printing plant, certain nouns in that phrase may have been accidentally transposed.

As it happens, the best way to ensure catastrophe is to “act now.” It would be nice if the world could all prance along in regimented unison like the Radio City Changettes. But, alas, the foreigners made the mistake of actually reading the “stimulus” bill, and the protectionist measures buried on page 739 sub-section XII(d) ended, instantly, the Obama honeymoon overseas. The European Union has threatened a trade war. Up in Canada, provincial premiers called it “a march to insanity.” Wait a minute: I thought the Obama era was meant to be the retreat from insanity, a blessed return to multilateral transnational harmony?

[...]

Maybe it’s time for President Obama to come out and give one of his big hopey-changey speeches. It’s been a few weeks now, and I kinda miss them. You know—“We are the change we’ve been waiting for.” “We have nothing to hope for but hope itself.” “Ask not what your hope can change for you, ask what you can hope for your change.” Etc.

But I wonder if the old songs from last month’s hit parade would play as well today. On Wednesday, Salon headlined a story on Obama: “The New Great Communicator . . . Isn’t.” Oh, dear. It’s early yet, but the gulf between the rhetoric and the reality, between the audacity of hope and the reality of pork, yawns ever wider. Right now, it’s the Obama mythology that urgently needs some stimulus. Some of us never expected him to walk on water. But we didn’t think he’d be all at sea taking on quite so much of it after a mere two weeks.

Read the whole thing.

Week 4, coming up (thanks to Classical Values for the countdown clock code):