The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Looking Presidential’

Posted on | March 11, 2011 | 3 Comments

On a Friday, when the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan is monopolizing news coverage, the White House calls a press conference for the Healer-in-Chief.

For those who appreciate raw cynicism, this is a thing of beauty.

UPDATE: Darleen Click:

[J]ust heard the One say we shouldn’t believe what we are seeing or reading … he is all for drilling, just doing it responsibly.

Right. Because those Republicans are for irresponsible drilling. Also, as His Mendaciousness just implied, Republicans are against research and hate infrastructure.

UPDATE II: AOSHQ is live-blogging the Great Prevaricator’s Big Lie Carnival, and catches this:

[Obama] basically defines cuts as belonging [to] one of two forbidden categories:
1. Cutting our “Investments in the future.” High speed rail and Pell grants cannot be cut because they are investments in the future.
2. “Sneaking” a political agenda into a budget dispute. This category includes pretty much everything else — if you’re cutting an unnecessary program like NPR, that’s really just sneaking an ideological agenda into a budget discussion, and that’s not allowed.
After this political bickering by Obama, he heroically calls on others to “stop their political bickering.”

This endlessly elastic “investments in the future” meme reminds me of how,  whenever anyone criticized the $800 billion stimulus bill, Democrats immediately started talking “roads and bridges,” even though infrastructure projects were something like 6% of the stimulus. The 94% dog (a pork-barrel terrier) was rhetorical wagged by its 6% infrastructure tail.

UPDATE III: We must interrupt the brilliantly dishonest Obama for this breaking update on the delusionally stupid Nancy Pelosi:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the House Republicans’ proposed cut to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget would hurt biomedical research’s “biblical power to cure.”
Pelosi, speaking at a press conference on Capitol Hill celebrating the first anniversary of the health care bill’s passage, said, “There’s a cut in funding for the National Institutes of Health. This is not a healthy thing for our country because that research has answers. You know that every family in America is one telephone call, one diagnosis, one accident away from needing the kind of biomedical research that can cure – really have the biblical power to cure in a very, very special way and so to cut back on that research is wrong.”

(Ed Morrissey has the video at Hot Air.) Yesterday I described the Existential Theory of Liberalism, and here Pelosi deploys it typically: “Biomedical research” and “NIH budget” are the same thing in her rhetoric. 

Federal funding is the sine qua non of research, Pelosi implies, so that no one would do any biomedical research at all if it weren’t for NIH funding. She also implies that the entire NIH budget goes for research that is absolutely lifesaving. To believe this, of course, you must believe that there is no administrative overhead at NIH — not a penny beyond the absolute minimum, the bare necessities — and that the NIH never funded, for example, Professor J. Michael Bailey’s porn-arousal studies.

Category: Barack Obama, Japan

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