Crossposted from Flopping Aces

My favorite line today comes from Ed Morrissey with this one:

Obama fiddled with Rush Limbaugh while Wall Street burned.

This is after Ed learned the White House attacks on Rush are a deliberate strategy to get everyones minds off of the real issue’s of the day:

So far, Obama’s attack machine — and there’s no other term for it — has mostly succeeded. While the markets have lost 18% of their value in the six weeks of his leadership, all Democrats can talk about is Rush. Newspapers and media have followed suit, and so have the blogs. Usually excellent sites like The Moderate Voice and Political Machine have turned themselves into almost nothing but anti-Limbaugh sites, where Jazz Shaw’s light satire of the trend gets completely subsumed in the overwhelming focus on someone who has no direct power on policy or enforcement. Instead of focusing attention on the real policy leaders in Washington — all Democrats — whose every move has received a resounding vote of no confidence from investors, they have allowed themselves to get distracted by a deliberate strategy of misdirection originating in the highest levels of the White House.

It’s reminiscent of Nixon’s enemies list, and it comes from the supposed messiah of Hope and Change.

And Rush is telling the White House to bring it on:

RUSH: It is on the record — thanks to Politico.com — since last fall, the White House, led by Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff to Barack Obama, has been targeting me, your host, your harmless, lovable little fuzzball. Their standard operating procedure: they need a demon to distract and divert from what their agenda is. They need a demon about whom they can lie so as to persuade average Americans that they’re the good guys, the benevolent good guys, and the mean SOBs are their enemies trying to stop this great young little president from doing miraculous and wonderful things.

Here is a new ad that this union bunch is running in Washington, DC, ladies and gentlemen. And, of course, it’s been picked up all over the Web.

~~~

RUSH: That’s the union bunch. Can you just see…? (laughing) “Call the Republican leadership and say no to Limbaugh.” (laughing) Now, ladies and gentlemen, the Politico story today. I got an e-mail last night from the writer of the story, Jonathan Martin, who did not tell me the full details of what the story they were working on was. He did not tell me that they have discovered that there is a team inside the White House targeting me and that they’ve been doing this since last fall, when they went out and did some polling data and found out I’ve got very high negatives among certain groups. So they thought, “Well, this is the guy to demonize! Since Bush is leaving, we need somebody,” and so this is being led from the White House. There is an orchestrated attack, daily drumbeat on me from the White House. The participants here are James Carville, Paul Begala and Rahm Emanuel.

But make no mistake about it. Emanuel is the leader of all of this. Carville and Begala are just trying to ride my fame into their fortune and become relevant again. Begala and Carville, don’t confuse them with the power brokers that are managing this. It all Emanuel. Begala and Carville are second-rate talking heads on CNN. CNN has no audience. Rahm Emanuel is the power behind the throne — and don’t let his effeminate nature and his ballerina past mislead you on this. He may look effeminate (he was a ballerina at one time) but he has the feral instincts of a female rat defending its young. Well, take a look. When Emanuel and Carville and Begala are together (and I’ve seen pictures) it looks like a reunion of the Village People. (singing) Y! M! C! A! They are really the official greeters in Roswell, New Mexico, in Area 51 where Carville was born.

My point here is that these are really odious, empty, nasty people who are feasting on their own arrogance. They are power hungry. But, you know what? They’ve never had a serious debate over ideas. Their goal is to destroy opponents, which is what they’re trying to do now. They don’t want to engage opponents. Their idea of victory is the destruction of the opponent. They’re not for a level playing field. They want to clear the playing field so that their ideas do not have to undergo any scrutiny. So what do they do? They leak stories to The Politico intended to create impressions about their own importance and their brilliance, when in fact they aren’t even bit players on the nation’s stage. This is Emanuel, and this is Obama.

But I have an idea. If these guys are so impressed with themselves, and if they are so sure of their correctness, why doesn’t President Obama come on my show? We will do a one-on-one debate of ideas and policies.

~~~

Just come on this program. Let’s have a little debate. You tell me how wrong I am and you can convince the rest of the Americans that don’t agree with you how wrong we all are. You’re a smart guy, Mr. President. You don’t need these hacks to front for you. You’ve debated the best! You’ve debated Hillary Clinton. You’ve debated John Edwards. You’ve debated Joe Biden. You’ve debated Dennis Kucinich. You’ve debated the best out there. You are one of the most gifted public speakers of our age. I would think, Mr. President, you would jump at this opportunity. Don’t send lightweights like Begala and Carville to do your bidding — and forget about the ballerina, Emanuel. He’s got things to do in his office. These people, compared to you, Mr. President, are rhetorical chum.

~~~

But I’ll cover the cost. I will cover the cost, Mr. President, so that the taxpayers do not have to pay for it, as they did your Super Bowl party, and as they do your Wednesday afternoon cocktail party. So you have no excuses. Your flunkies are demanding this debate. Your flunkies are targeting a private citizen with an enemies list that so far has three or four names on it: Mine; Rick Santelli; Jim Cramer at CNBC; and let’s not forget Joe the Plumber, who your allies in Ohio also tried to destroy. The difference is that Joe the Plumber does not have his own microphone every day. They’re shutting Santelli up at CNBC. They’re going to shut Cramer up pretty soon, too, but he’ll go down with a fight. That isn’t going to happen here, to me.

I’m calling. I’m ready. I’ll do everything I can to facilitate it. You’re a very courageous man, Mr. President. I am, after all, just The Last Man Standing. If you take me out, if you can wipe me out in a debate and prove to the rest of America that what I say is senseless and wrong, do you realize you will own the United States of America? You will have no opposition. You have America’s media in your back pocket. It’s amazing. In 1972, Richard Nixon had an enemies list, and the media was outraged by this. They were outraged. At the same time, those who weren’t on it were a little jealous. But they were outraged that a president would engage in this kind of behavior toward the media. Now they go after a private citizen.

Rahm Emanuel is leading the team going after a private citizen, and the Drive-By Media applaud, get on board and help further the mission. We live in different times. So if you can wipe me out — and, by the way, Mr. President, and Mr. Emanuel: Don’t make the mistake of assuming I’m wiping myself out here in the process. I want to thank you guys for elevating me beyond the stature I already earned and achieved, because now more and more Americans have the opportunity to learn who you really are, what your ideas will really accomplish, and what damage and harm I think your policies will bring for a very, very long time to them and to this country. So I want to thank you for the opportunity. Obviously, it’s a threat targeting me. I’ve extended the invitation. I’m looking forward to hearing back from whoever in your cabal one way or the other on accepting my offer.

Obama is doing a bang up job of changing the tone in Washington eh?

Also:

Maureen Dowd and New York Times Bash Obama’s Earmarks

What’s next? Chris Matthews mocking the Obama Administration’s lack of vetting applicants’ taxes? Maybe Keith Olberman will whine and scream about Obama’s continuation of the Bush policy in Iraq (timeline dependent on Bush’s status of Forces Agreement and withdrawals conditions-based)? Till then, at least one loon has started seeing reality.

In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.

He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He was slated to make a speech on “wasteful spending” on Wednesday.

“You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation,” he said recently about the “hard choices” we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget.

Unfortunately, Maureen Dowd misses the bigger picture. That’s not hard to do though. It’s understandable given that it is SO HUGE that it’s hard to fit in one frame. She mentions it, but it was too big to get through her beeny little eyes and deaf-to-realty ears. The problem is that all 9000 earmarks (a gargantuan number by any historical standard) total only about $7billion of the $410 billion dollar bill. Barack Obama and his handlers are drawing 9000 lines in the sand over $7billion when in just the past 4 months Senator, President-elect, and President Obama have led the Democrats’ Congress to spend almost as much as all 8years of the Bush Administration’s deficits COMBINED. In that scale, $7billion (9000 earmarks) is chicken feed (or perhaps better described as money for a museum dedicated to sharing the hallmarks of government-funded chicken feed research).

What does Maureen Dowd have to say about the $700billion in TARP I, the $700billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the $700bn in interest and misc money that both combined will need, or the $403 billion in this budget that is not earmarks?

Nothing.

Those numbers are too big for that little brain of hers to absorb. That’s not a dig on her as a person. No one can grasp it. I remember one Republican said that the near trillion dollars for the stimulus bill was like spending a million bucks a day since Christ was born. Analogies like drunken sailor or throwing money away, or burning through cash…those all come to mind.

Think about it this way…what’s it take to burn a single dollar bill? Ever tried? Just envision it. Enivision taking one out of your wallet, flicking the lighter, waiting for it to light, then to burn, and then to turn to ash. Now, if you have 8hrs to sleep, 8hrs to get ready, eat, commute, blog, etc, and only 8hrs a day to burn $1 bills….how many can you burn? I reckon it’s about 1 a minute. That’s about $500 burnt bucks a day. It would take you seven years of doing nothing but burning dollar bills every minute of the workday before you got to a million dollars. To burn a million dollars a day like the original analogy describes, you’d have to use a shovel.

Barack Obama and the Democrats’ Congress are actually spending so much money that if you shoveled it into a furnace, it would still take you CENTURIES to burn as much as they have, and this is only the first month. Good thing we gave “the man a chance.”

Shocking, I know, but what sucks-what pure out sucks and pisses me off is that my kids and likely my grandkids are expected to pay for-not only the 9000 pieces of crap that Dowd cites ($1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah), but for the hundreds of millions, the billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions, and trillions of dollars spent on nothing more than a partisan agenda designed-not to rebuild the United States, but to payoff campaign contributors and buy a hold on power in Washington DC. Sure, my son would love to spend a few trillion on Thomas the Tank Engine trains, and that’s insane to think that a kid or anyone would ever do that, but ironically, the same arguments used to justify Obama and the Democrats’ spending still fit the trillion Thomas train spending program; it would stimulate the economy, and money spent on the trains would go to toymakers, plastics manufacturers, metalworkers, marketing firms, advertisers, and that money would trickle into other places.

Seems to me my son should spend his trillion dollars rather than let Obama and the Democrats, but Maureen Dowd and other Obamatons have only just begun to see the light, and they seem to be blinded by it’s size more than its brilliance.