More Egyptian Rivers

A State of Denial - By Yuval Levin - The Corner - National Review Online: "These projections, especially compared to our fiscal circumstances in past years, also make a mockery of the now familiar nostalgia with which the president opened his speech—harkening back to the meteoric growth of the immediate postwar era in America. Even if his wistful reminiscences of that bright yesterday were better grounded in reality, the fact is that we simply cannot recreate the economic circumstances of those years, when America’s global competitors had just burned each other’s economies to the ground while ours stood ready gallop ahead. It is true that the unique explosive growth of those years also allowed for major expansions of government spending, and persisted despite fairly heavy tax and regulatory burdens. But that does not mean that it was caused by that spending or those burdens. It obviously wasn’t. And under very different circumstances, in which we must effectively compete and innovate in order to grow, we cannot afford such spending or such burdens. We must find other paths to broadly shared prosperity.

But the president does not seem interested in finding those paths. Instead, he prefers to shadowbox the familiar bogeymen held up by progressives for a century and more. Indeed, his striking appeals to replace our raucous republican politics with the model of military discipline at the beginning and the end of the speech offered conspicuous echoes of the progressive longing to overcome politics."

Come to think of it, my reference to "denial is not a river in Egypt" is quite apt. He's also got his head in the sand that the new Islamist government in Egypt is about to make a mockery of his "Arab Spring". Or was that his purpose? And is he a good Alinskyite in misdirecting the Snooky watchers while he craters the economy?

You dismiss Obama's idol Alinsky's dedication of "Rules for Radicals" to Lucifer at your own risk...