WaPo's Ezra Klein: in it so deep that rubber
galoshes are required
by the Left Coast Rebel
Via. Newsbusters:
Ezra Klein (pictured in true form at the top of this post) has thrown down the gauntlet and gotten his useful-idiot marching orders to spread this "moderate" meme but like anything out of the press these days concerning Obama, the fiction is stranger than the truth.Liberals are always trying to place themselves in the center. Washington Post business columnist Ezra Klein tried out the old saw on Tuesday that just as Bill Clinton described himself pejoratively as an “Eisenhower Republican,” Barack Obama isn’t a socialist, he’s a moderate Republican of the George H.W. Bush era:
Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.
If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal health care; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans have staked out before.
Klein has a huge “but” in this theory – if you leave out the massive stimulus program and TARP and taking over the auto industry, he’s not a socialist.
In all fairness, Obama's undying affection for bankrupting debt, unpaid wars, bailouts et al. just throws steroids and jet fuel on top of the legacy of another: the disaster that we are in the midst of began in earnest under the profligate-presidency of George W. Bush (who was anything but a conservative or a moderate, but in actuality a big-government progressive himself).
But Obama The Moderate?
That's just the darndest-stupid thing I have read in a while, defies any semblance of logic, and is something only capable of a liberal academic head-in-the-sand type!
Ezra Klein was the teen-aged smiling face of Journolister (the 400+ press-only club that secretly got together to figure out how to trash the right and help elect Obama, among other things), so it figures that he is pushing this right now.
It's a not-so-subtle way of him saying, "hey, look, independents and swing voters, Obama's really not a far-left, South American-esque, saber-rattling class warrior!"
Will it work?
Cross posted to Proof Positive, Libertarian Patriot and Right Klik.
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