In an op-ed at "Bloomberg View" on Wednesday evening, editor and columnist Michael Kinsley's headline teased that "Maybe President Romney Wouldn’t Be So Bad," before twice urging readers to vote to reelect President Obama, including in the final paragraph after an alleged parenthetical (and obviously mythical) "Pause for reflection." Ha ha.
What came in between wasn't very funny at all -- and since he's an editor, his view of things presumably has impact beyond his columns. The worst whoppers came in the following paragraph:
President Barack Obama navigated us through the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression in a way that (in my opinion) deserves a B+. He didn’t get us into any wars, and there were no major terrorist episodes on his watch. That, to me, seems like a pretty good record. True, Obama added $4 trillion to the national debt. But that was a conscious exercise in Keynesian demand stimulation, not a careless waste of taxpayer dollars. You can argue that it was a mistake. But a smaller deficit -- i.e., a smaller stimulus -- would hardly have created more jobs.
Just, wow.
Kinsley's two contentions on the economy are laughable, but his "no major terrorist episodes" claim, coming 29 days after the murders of Christopher Stevens and three other Americans at the hands of terrorists in Benghazi, Libya, with already overwhelming evidence that the administration has massively misled and withheld the truth from the American people about their circumstances, is execrable.
The Obama administration's economic stewardship is objectively the worst since Franklin Delano Roosevelt extended the Great Depression for eight years while failing to bring the unemployment rate below 12 percent.
The "$4 trillion" Kinsley claims has been added to the national debt is really over $5.5 trillion ($10.63 trillion on January 20, 2009 compared to $16.16 trillion as of Thursday). Since he is the one characterizing the debt runup as a "conscious exercise in Keynesian demand stimulation," it's fair in this post to divide the correct figure for the debt increase by the alleged 3.3 million jobs "created or saved" per the comedians at the Congressional Budget Office. The result, if it could even be believed, which it can't: $1.68 million per job "created or saved" (the $5.53 trillion difference divided by 3.3 million). Per Kinsley, that was worth it. No, it wasn't, and future generations will loathe Obama and those who supported him for what they have done.
Kinsley's economic and budget assertions can be passed off as all too typical leftist economic ignorance, but his "no major terrorist episodes" assertion is beyond the pale. (Oh, and last time I checked, Obama did get U.S. troops involved for a time in Libya when there was a something called a "war" going on there.)
Earth to Michael: Even if by some perverse logic you consider four deaths at an American consulate not "major," Stevens is the first ambassador killed in 33 years, and he was killed by terrorists. When does a terrorist attack and murder spree reach your "major" threshold? Twenty deaths plus a Cabinet official? Fifty plus a U.S. Senator? And what do you think the Ft. Hood massacre was? Oh, I forgot -- those 13 murrders of U.S. soldiers occurred as a result of "workplace violence." Kinsley and the rest of the so-called "reality based community" has completely lost its grip on reality.
I must stop. I don't have any clean words left.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
