QOTD

Posted by on . 3 comments.

Peter Schiff, one of a handful of people who correctly called the credit crunch and the recession, on Tuesday’s Daily Show:

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Stewart: Is there a saving grace here? Is there a silver lining? Is there something that can be done? Or do you feel like you are literally just watching us driving off a cliff?

Schiff: Well, I don’t know. We have to change the path. Barack Obama talked about the fact that when you’re driving toward a cliff, you need to change directions. The problem is that all he did was step on the gas. If we could actually change, you know he ran on a platform of change. If we could actually get change instead of more of the same, then maybe we’d have a chance.

Of course I don’t agree with many of Schiff’s remedies, but they’re more valid than the nonsense Obama, Geithner and Summers have hatched.

On the economy and the credit crunch, civil rights for gays and lesbians, Iraq and Afghanistan, torture, state secrets, retroactive immunity and smothering investigations, Obama hasn’t changed a fucking thing. I dare/beg you try to argue with me on this. That’s a pretty long list of important issues, about to get longer with the looming fiasco that is health care reform. Is this what you voted for?

Comments

  1. Jerome says:
    June 11, 2009 at 11:35 am

    Matt, I’m pretty firmly in your camp on this one. If you’ll recall from our last exchange my rationale for voting for Obama was that McCain and Palin were just unacceptable options given how nutty they, or more specifically, she, came across. So now I’m wondering, and am curious about your thoughts on this as well, whether they would have been much different had they been victorious? Aside from having to listen to them and see them on the news, which admittedly would ruin my day, do you think they would be handling any of this any better/worse/differently? Now I realize that I’m asking you to extrapolate hypothetical behavior but with Democratic control of Congress would it have almost come out better with them in the White House, given that real progressives could come out more strongly against a Republican President? Could McCain have been marginalized in that scenario to an effective point by being the “common enemy” we need instead of some pseudo-Dem celebrity pres?

    Keep up the good work, both of you. It’s too bad there’s not more good discussion in the comments these days…or at least entertaining “discussions.”

  2. matt says:
    June 11, 2009 at 12:14 pm

    well, last week I wrote:

    For the last year, on the rare occasions that I allow myself to be pulled into political discussions, it always comes down to “well, would you rather McCain and Palin were in the White House?” That’s not valid anymore, and if you find yourself saying it, remember, suicide isn’t just for celebrity masturbators. The election is over, and the choice isn’t between Obama and McCain, it’s between making Democrats do the right thing, or allowing them to be just slightly less destructive than the Republicans who preceded them.

    i realize that you aren’t trying to justify obama’s actions with the mccain/palin thought experiment, so i will allow you to live for the time being. kidding.

    i think at this point, the furthest i’m willing to go is to say that at the margins, we’d be worse off, but big picture we’d be about the same.

    rather than having a very few liberals and a passel of center-right appointees in government, we’d have almost uniformly hard right psychos executing policy.

    rather than a poorly designed and too-small stimulus that is destined to fail, we’d have more tax cuts targeted at the richest 1%. but on a moderate time horizon, i don’t think there is any difference at all in the expected economic outcome.

    rather than a squishy iraq withdrawal that keeps getting kicked down the road into infinity, we’d have started out at infinity.

    rather than empty words of support and complete inaction for full human rights for gay/lesbian americans, we’d have complete inactio with a bias toward more bigotry.

    on torture and state secrets, i can honestly say that it’s a wash. i really can’t imagine any difference at all.

    we’d certainly have a hard right supreme court nominee, but then again, i think souter would have stuck around rather than let mccain have a shot at his chair.

    so i really don’t see the benefit of obama winning unless you count preferring to see him on tv more than mccain, a very, some, uh, would say, uh, close, uh, call for me.

    a trifecta doesn’t come along all that often these days, much less one where the party out of power is quite so toxic. couple that with a financial crisis that is probably the best teachable moment in history, and wasting this with obama’s bullshit is just plain unacceptable. the trifecta won’t last, recent history has shown that holding the white house beyond 2 terms is very hard for either party. obama is pissing away “our turn.”

  3. Jerome says:
    June 12, 2009 at 9:57 am

    He certainly seems like he is pissing it away.

    Thanks for the stay of execution and for indulging me. Take it easy.