For The New York Times economic scene section for March 31, David Leonhardt came across with one of the most amazing admissions about Obama that I've ever seen in the Times. Namely that Barack Obama is just like Hitler. Now, many of you may be solemnly shaking your head in agreement, but in so doing you would be missing why the Times was comparing Obama to Hitler. You see, Leonhardt didn't mean it as an insult. He was saying that it was a good thing that Barack was being like Hitler at least in an economic sense.
Here Leonhardt is taking the trains-on-time track with his Hitler angle by saying that, despite that whole Holocaust and World War II business, Hitler's policies were good for Germany. So good, in fact, that he celebrates the ways he sees that Obama is emulating the mustachioed mad-man's economic prescriptions with the massive takeover of the economy and bloated government spending on "stimulus."
You know the left has lost it when they are invoking the "success" of Hitler to prop up The One!
If I might rephrase Leonhardt's opening sentence a bit: "Every so often, the left serves up an analogy that’s uncomfortable, a little distracting and yet still very telling."
The telling thing here is that Leonhardt is willing to ignore the ultimate outcome of Hitler's policies so that he might justify the destruction of the capitalist system, elimination of personal property rights, and to excuse away giving dictatorial power to an all encompassing government juggernaut here in the US. He so dearly wants the Keynesian theory to be the right one that he is willing to turn his face from genocide and world war to prove his wishes beneficial to man.
Here is how he sets up his absurd take on history:
More than any other country, Germany -- Nazi Germany -- then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across Munich and Berlin.
Oh, sure Germany became a powerhouse previous to the outbreak of WWII. But, what Leonhardt criminally ignores is that Hitler made Germany a powerhouse by stealing the personal property and wealth of minorities and business owners alike and remanding them to the state. And then, to sustain this wild growth, he launched a war of greed and acquisition on his neighbors that added to that power but cost the lives of millions. Germany built this empire on the destruction of God-given rights, oppression of religious and ethnic minorities, and widespread death and war.
In light of the final outcome, I'd wager that this Hitlarian bargain doesn't seem very appealing to anyone but Leonhardt.
From here, Leonhardt segues into an appreciation of the policies of the most communist of presidents we've ever had, Franklin Roosevelt. Leonhardt rehashes New Deal apology by claiming that FDR's economic plans helped the USA out of The Great Depression. He says it all proves that, "Yes, stimulus works."
Of course, like many who admire FDR, Leonhardt glosses over the fact that none of FDR's policies worked at all until the gearing up for war began. He also ignores the unsustainability of Germany's economic "benefits" that dictated that it must go to war to expand the pool of wealth from which the state could steal to support its wild growth. In fact, that same war aim that helped FDR's economic outlook was also unsustainable to the point that the singular goal was, indeed, war. At some point, it must be realized, the war will end and one faces either destruction -- whether mutual or exclusive -- or at the very least will discover a cessation of the activity involved in the run up to war and hence the economic "stimulus" that it entails. Leaving? Leaving an empty hole where that artificial war stimulus was and no stable economic activity to fill it.
In fact, the main reason that the US came out of WWII so strong wasn't because we had spent ourselves to prosperity by gearing for war, but because afterward we became the supply house and construction company of the civilized world by helping re-build the many nations devastated by that war.
A little further in the piece, we realize just how benighted Leonhardt's understanding of things economic is when he favorably quotes George Soros, a man that has admitted that his singular goal isn't to improve the economy, but to destroy it in order to remake the world in his own image.
George Soros, the billionaire investor who was born in Budapest and works in New York, came to Washington last week and captured both the problem and the potential for a solution. “I think they can be brought around,” he said of the Europeans. “I am actually hopeful something constructive can happen.”
Leonhardt's got to be kidding, right? This from a man that said that the world's economic collapse was "the culminating point of my life’s work"?
Leonhardt's Soros quote could certainly have been uttered by Hitler himself because there is no elucidation of the moral theme behind what being "hopeful" that "something constructive can happen" means. Like Hitler, what Soros means by "constructive" would NOT be an outcome that any humane person would agree is so wonderful! Yet, from Leonhardt's treatment we have to assume that he imagines that Soros' "constructive" must obviously be a mutually beneficial good for us all. Leonhardt truly does not understand Soros' apocalyptic point.
Anyway, Leonhardt's ridiculous exposition on the benefits of the socialist model is replete with so many misunderstanding of history, so many bald faced denials of truth that it boggles the mind.
But, it was interesting to see a slavish Obamaite trying to assure us of how wonderful The One is by favorably comparing him to Hitler. I laughed right before I threw up a little in my mouth over the reality of it all.
