I was running some errands and got to listen to part of Hillary Clinton’s convention speech, and what a typical mish-mash of nonsense and pandering platitudes. Change we can believe in? Please, spare me.
What really got me was this baloney,
And when Barack Obama is in the White House, he’ll revitalize our economy,….
It just drives me crazy. Presidents have very little control over the economy and those policy tools they do have access to are imprecise and clumsy. Will the economy strengthen while Obama is in the White House? Yeah, almost surely. Would it strengthen if McCain is in the White House? Yeah, almost surely. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it would strengthen even if Mickey Mouse were elected president. And please, nobody post a comment claiming Bill Clinton revitalized the economy as his wife falsely claimed.
And of course we get the usual emotional tugging of the heart strings,
I will always remember the single mom who had adopted two kids with autism, didn’t have health insurance and discovered she had cancer. But she greeted me with her bald head painted with my name on it and asked me to fight for health care.
I will always remember the young man in a Marine Corps t-shirt who waited months for medical care and said to me: “Take care of my buddies; a lot of them are still over there … .and then will you please help take care of me?”
I will always remember the boy who told me his mom worked for the minimum wage and that her employer had cut her hours. He said he just didn’t know what his family was going to do.
Yes, lets base our choice of president on emotion. Lets chuck out rationalism in favor of emotionalism.
He’ll transform our energy agenda by creating millions of green jobs and building a new, clean energy future.
Reminds me of the old joke, do you know when a politician is lying? Their mouth is moving and sound is coming out of it. If it was worthwhile to invest in all of these green technologies it would be happening now creating millions of jobs. That it isn’t tells us that these technologies are not profitable right now. Perhaps one can make an argument for government funded basic research, although I wouldn’t, but the idea that the President can direct this investment by fiat instead of letting the market do it suggests a massive misuse of resources. We’d end up losing just as many and perhaps more jobs in the process of subsidizing these unprofitable ventures. And what will help make these technologies more viable? Why the very thing Hillary Clinton thinks is bad, high gasoline prices and the profits enjoyed by oil companies.
We need to elect Barack Obama because we need a President who understands that America can’t compete in a global economy by padding the pockets of energy speculators, while ignoring the workers whose jobs have been shipped overseas. We need a President who understands that we can’t solve the problems of global warming by giving windfall profits to the oil companies while ignoring opportunities to invest in new technologies that will build a green economy.
[…]
But we don’t need four more years . . . of the last eight years.
More economic stagnation … and less affordable health care.
More high gas prices … and less alternative energy.
Hillary Clinton is an intelligent woman, further it is a reasonable assumption that she knows that higher gasoline/fossil fuel prices will spur research and development of alternatives. Thus, the best conclusion is that Hillary Clinton is a liar, or as I noted above, how can you tell a politician is lying? Her mouth is moving and sound is coming out of it.
This kind of platitudinous blathering is oh so typical of politicians these days (note I said politicians, this applies to both parties). This isn’t “change we can believe in”, it is the same old crap with a new slogan.
