What's a Christ Figure Without a "Day of Reckoning"?
The president has not even begun his non-State of the Union tonight, and already (at least according to leaked excerpts) he's full of shit:
We have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn't afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.
Which regulations? Seriously, let's name them. Here's our list; where's yours?
And "short-term gains"? What could be more short-term than pass my bill or else "our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse"? What could be a better example of putting off critical debate than trying to shut it down, and putting off difficult decisions by treating a loose-credit-based crisis with more loose credit?
Obama seems to have a difficult time shifting from campaign rhetoric–where drive-by mischaracterizations of political and ideological opponents are the coin of the realm–and governing, where a president in the midst of a crisis might just want to start talking honestly, instead of blowing smoke up the nation's collective arse about the 3.5 million jobs that will be "created or saved" (no really, think about it) as a result of his magic wand.
Consider this your open Obama/Jindal speech thread.