Geitner Moment
by Hal_10000
The recent actions of the Obama Administration—on DC vouchers, on the budget, on medical marijuana, now on NHTSA has gotten me thinking about one of Lee’s strokes of genius:
I’d like to take a moment to coin a new phrase: Brownie Moment. A Brownie moment can be defined simply as the moment when a supporter of President Bush is smacked in the head by reality and loses any and all faith in the president from that moment forward. As you may have surmised the term comes from Bush’s recent comment regarding former FEMA head Michael Brown’s leadership in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
This was my Brownie moment. I understand that in the world of politics leaders often have to say things they don’t mean, or shake hands with dictators and scumbags, and do a lot of morally repugnant stuff. But when Bush said that I realized that after surveying the impotent, incompetent response of the federal government he truly, honestly believed that Brownie was doing a heck of a job. That sealed it for me. I’d been turning sour on Bush for a while, but I was still generally supportive of him. When I heard him make that remark, however, that was it. That was my Brownie moment.
More and more people are having the Obama equivalent of a Brownie Moment—call them Geitner Moments. To see what one looks like, check out Nick Gillespie. He soured on Obama almost immediately but Obama’s speechifying last week pushed him over the edge:
And now this morning, Obama was on the tube again, yapping about traffic jams. What the hell is going on here? The president of the freaking United States is talking about traffic jams? Then again, in grammar school we did all learn that part of George Washinton’s Farewell Address where he warned against entangling alliances and the dread menace of highway jughandles and traffic circles. That Obama’s big solution is, ta-da!, “high-speed rail” is simply one more sign that he is simply not serious about anything other than paying off 19th and 20th century legacy special interests. I look forward to tomorrow’s press conference, when Obama trains his laser-beam brain on the question of whether Razzles is a candy or a gum.
Seriously, isn’t there a Portugese water dog re-gifted from Ted Kennedy that we can and should be talking about? (And btw, the one non-negotiable in a pet or a mistress for the Duke of Chappaquidick is swimmability; who says we can’t learn from our past mistakes?).
Question to the folks, including some of the libertarian persuasion (you fools!), who were bullish on Obama back when the alternative was John McCain, the Terri Schiavo of presidential candidates: When are you going to admit that Barry O stinks on ice? That for all his high-flying and studiously empty rhetoric he’s got the biggest presidential vision deficit since George H.W. Bush puked on a Japanese prime minister (finally, revenge for that long run of Little League World Series losses in the ‘70s!). If you’re the president of the United States and you’re talking about goddamn traffic jams and you’re proposing high-speed rail as anything other than an unapologetic boondoggle that will a) never get built and b) never get built to the gee-whiz specs it’s supposed and c) be ridden by fewer people than commuted by zeppelin last year, you’ve got real problems, bub. And by extension, so do we all.
To be honest, I’m happy for Presidents to blither about meaningless projects that will never happen. It distracts them from destructive projects that might happen—like, say, heading the NHTSA with a puritanical, anti-scientific, booze-grabbing, Nanny State neo-prohibitionist shithead.
I’m trying very hard to be nice to Obama. I tell myself that he’s in this for the long haul, that any day now we will see entitlement reform (which would erase the planned deficits) or something. I tell myself to be patient—it hasn’t even been 100 days yet. Clinton started off even worse and that turned out somewhat reasonably. I look at good things he’s done—like ending torture—and I think it’s not so bad.
But as time goes on, I find my patience wearing thin. Ending medical marijuana raids are not an issue Obama needs to take his time with—it’s something he campaigned on. Heading NHTSA with Hurley is not a slow step away from the Nanny State but a huge leap toward it. His budget didn’t even have token gestures toward fiscal responsibility.
if we’re not seeing even incremental change in the first 100 days, when will we see it? After 2010? 2012? 2016? The space year 17,000?
Obama’s poll numbers, tea parties not withstanding, remain strong. But that’s the American people being patient. That’s the American people giving the new guy a chance. That’s the American people, exhausted after the most arduous election since 1800, taking a breather before they start complaining that they haven’t gotten their free MRI’s yet.
At some point, this pragmatic leader we’ve heard so much about is going to have to emerge and do something besides hand out easter eggs and put innocent medical marijuana dealers in prison. Or we’ll all be having our Geitner Moments. And Gillespie might sounds like one of the reasonable ones.
Comments
Hal, Please this is making my hair fall out. Have mercy on me, I beg you. It’s not even 3 months. He has a tremendous amount on his plate. Sure there is stuff to criticize, we are all human. Give this administration a chance before you start filling page after page with what you think he’s doing wrong. You are the most reasonable critter here. If you are already after him hammer and tong before he’s had a chance to legitimately screw up, then I guess I’ll have to get used to bing bald again.
Beano, I’m sympathetic. I feel dirty for going off on OBama like this so early on, especially as I was thinking his election was a positive thing. But there are several things he is doing that are just making my jaw drop.
Well, SO, I think Chicago and New York are really the point for this. It’s never going to be viable as a truly national network, but there is a legitimate national interest in improving the efficiency of interstate commerce in the midwest and northeast. Whether we *should* do it or not is a valid question, but it’s neither blatantly stupid nor clearly unconstitutional.
The point isn’t thousands of miles, it’s to replace those absurd trips to an airport way out of town with an hour long wait through security in order to travel from Indianapolis to Chicago, or Philadelphia to Boston.
Still, yes, your hipster friends are idiots.
"But there are several things he is doing that are just making my jaw drop.”
Oh, you mean like using the verboten Politics of Fear (TM) and turning support for the Stimulus into a question of patriotism? After all, if we didn’t pass it, it would cause “chaos on this globe”.
This is Liberal Bush. He threw away my Hope a while ago.
it’s to replace those absurd trips to an airport way out of town with an hour long wait through security in order to travel from Indianapolis to Chicago, or Philadelphia to Boston.
The only thing that is keeping those long waits through security at the trains is that almost nobody takes them. When I used the bullet train in Spain, I had to go through extensive security checks.
And Obama has proposed that this be a viable national network. It won’t be as long as planes fly.
I do not think rail will ever be viable. It might be, but it will take a lot of work/money. If you live in the northeast, it is useful for a commute to work, but that’s about it. By plane is way faster and often times cheaper if you want to go long distance.
The point isn’t thousands of miles, it’s to replace those absurd trips to an airport way out of town with an hour long wait through security in order to travel from Indianapolis to Chicago, or Philadelphia to Boston.
Still, doesn’t Amtrak already exist for this purpose? Greyhound? Why not improve and develop the infrastructure already in place?
Not to mention the cost of putting such a network into place. Check out Denver’s FasTracks project and all the problems it is having. Nice in theory, a problem in execution, and there is no guarantee that it will EVER be financially solvent. Nationally, Amtrak only survives due to massive government subsidies; without those, passenger rail would have gone the way of the horse-drawn carraige about 40 years ago.
The only thing that is keeping those long waits through security at the trains is that almost nobody takes them. When I used the bullet train in Spain, I had to go through extensive security checks.
Fair enough, but I often enough spend 45-60 minutes just getting to JFK from Manhattan. The aim of the rail network is to connect city cores.
And Obama has proposed that this be a viable national network. It won’t be as long as planes fly.
Let’s ask that question again once we stop bailing out and subsidizing the airlines.
Still, doesn’t Amtrak already exist for this purpose? Greyhound? Why not improve and develop the infrastructure already in place.
That’s what the plan has long been for the Chicago network and for the NYC-Quebec route: you can’t just put a high speed train on a traditional track. Some track sections can’t support it, others need to be elevated out of the way of traffic, etc.
Check out Denver’s FasTracks project and all the problems it is having. Nice in theory, a problem in execution, and there is no guarantee that it will EVER be financially solvent.
Totally agreed. While I feel it’s urgent that we modernize our rail infrastructure, it needs to be put as much in private hands as possible and geared toward economic, not political, interests.
Nationally, Amtrak only survives due to massive government subsidies; without those, passenger rail would have gone the way of the horse-drawn carraige about 40 years ago.
I think a crucial point is being missed here, which is that a high-speed train is completely different, from a competitive standpoint. Trains are currently empty because they take forever, and can even be slower than driving. The Boston-NYC route can sometimes run as slow as 40 miles per hour due to Amtrak’s track-sharing arrangements and aging infrastructure.
By comparison, Tokyo-Osaka runs 137 miles per hour, and Paris-Marseilles at 162. At these speeds, with transit times to and through the airports removed, short-haul trips like these are time-competitive with air travel and much more cost-effective once you get the passengers on board. Japan’s passenger high speed rail service is private and profitable.
I don’t think anybody who knows what they’re talking about thinks that high speed rail is going to replace flight from Chicago to San Francisco. That’s stupid. Regional networks, however, have a lot to gain.
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One of my neighbors thinks a national hi-speed rail network is just the freaking bomb. He waxes poetic over how we should be so “European” and spend trillions of dollars on this. That way you could live a hundred miles from work and just spend an hour each way commuting on the train - say, live in Ellensburg and work in downtown Seattle, which is where all the really hip and cool people really want to be anyway (right?).
Of course, we already have a method of getting from coast to coast for cheap - we go the airport. If I need to travel a few thousand miles, a few hours in a jet is far preferable to spending the same or more money for a longer trip.
There are a few places where large amounts of rail service work - but all the libtards in NYC and Chicago need to realize that the rest of the country doesn’t really fit the model.