Henninger: The Obamaian Universe

Wall Street Journal ^ | 02/28/2013 | Daniel Henninger

[SeekAndFind]

It may be that we have to move beyond politics alone to explain events in Washington. We are in the fifth year of the Obama presidency, and Washington is still dead in the water. Four straight years in which the government of the United States of America fails to enact a budget is, well, amazing.

The sense is growing around Washington, and this increasingly includes Democrats, of living in an alternative universe. Barack Obama gives his State of the Union speech, the sequester looms, and the president flies around the country giving speeches. He's had virtually no contact on the sequester with the legislative branch. Now he's going to meet with them after the sequester happens. This is unusual. We need to look outside normal politics for explanations.

Mr. Obama likes to convey the impression that he doesn't think or do business like other presidents. It's time to take him at his word. If Washington is starting to look like an alternative universe, that's because the president is creating an alternative universe, the Obamaian Universe. (Obamaian is pronounced Oh-buh-mayan, as in the recently famous calendar.)

The Obama administration is trying to pull us back into what astronomers would call the pre-Copernican world. Copernicus' heliocentric system overthrew what was known as geocentrism—the belief that everything in the universe revolved around the earth. Beautiful maps exist depicting geocentrism.

Economic thinkers since at least the time of, well Copernicus, have understood that national well-being derived from private individuals going out into the private world to produce goods and trade goods, an activity that for centuries has created wealth for many nations. No longer.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Mitt tried to warn ya. “A government-centered society”.

[Vigilanteman]

Maybe the Keynesian Multiplier, like green ooze, just doesn't work.

It doesn't matter. As with geocentrism, the president's pre-Copernican political economy is based in religious belief.

Wow! Does Henninger ever nail it here! I have to go back to a state university classroom in the early 1980s to recall an economics professor who actually took the Keynesian Multiplier and the Phillips Curve seriously. Of course, a lot of political science professors did and still do.

[SMARTY]

I am certain that, in ” head, there is a movie running 24/7 in which HE is the STAR and in which the glow of media attention is wholly focused on HIM and HIS administration, to the exclusion to all and everything else.

There is something SO pathologically unwholesome about the entire “O” cult and its associated social, cultural and political phenomena that it has produced a disconnect between “O” and the rest of America. This is dangerously surreal! Americans and all people whose security depends on the strength and credibility of the President of the United States, have been stuck in this dreamlike torpor...they’reheld in some kind of narcotic thrall!! Of course our enemies are taking advantage of this.

“O”, the Rip van Winkle of American politics, will have to awaken and face this irreversible destruction his vacation from reality has produced. In the meantime, Americans have their eyes wide open, and are waiting for the worst in breathless anticipation!

The “O” high wire act has another 4 years to run and I don’t think the big top can take it.

[AngelesCrestHighway]

"You're a bad man!...A very bad man!" Obam's Universe is an alternate dimension...

[y6162]

“A government-centered society” = Communist society

Might as well call ObaMugabe what he is.

[Georgia Girl 2]

“Might as well call ObaMugabe what he is.”

How about Muzzie lovin commie?

[Sergio]

bkmk

[twoputt]

I love reading Henninger. I look forward to his column every Thursday.

[MissMagnolia]

If after all these years no one in Washington can cut a deal with Barack Obama on spending, taxes and economic growth, maybe it's because he is in a place indeed occupied by no one else.

Madness ... deliberate & otherwise.