Maureen Dowd and New York Times Bash Obama’s Earmarks

What’s next? Chris Matthews mocking the Obama Administration’s lack of vetting applicants’ taxes? Maybe Keith Olberman will whine and scream about Obama’s continuation of the Bush policy in Iraq (timeline dependent on Bush’s status of Forces Agreement and withdrawals conditions-based)? Till then, at least one loon has started seeing reality.

In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.

He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He was slated to make a speech on “wasteful spending” on Wednesday.

“You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation,” he said recently about the “hard choices” we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget.

Unfortunately, Maureen Dowd misses the bigger picture. That’s not hard to do though. It’s understandable given that it is SO HUGE that it’s hard to fit in one frame. She mentions it, but it was too big to get through her beeny little eyes and deaf-to-realty ears. The problem is that all 9000 earmarks (a gargantuan number by any historical standard) total only about $7billion of the $410 billion dollar bill. Barack Obama and his handlers are drawing 9000 lines in the sand over $7billion when in just the past 4 months Senator, President-elect, and President Obama have led the Democrats’ Congress to spend almost as much as all 8years of the Bush Administration’s deficits COMBINED. In that scale, $7billion (9000 earmarks) is chicken feed (or perhaps better described as money for a museum dedicated to sharing the hallmarks of government-funded chicken feed research).

What does Maureen Dowd have to say about the $700billion in TARP I, the $700billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the $700bn in interest and misc money that both combined will need, or the $403 billion in this budget that is not earmarks?

Nothing.

Those numbers are too big for that little brain of hers to absorb. That’s not a dig on her as a person. No one can grasp it. I remember one Republican said that the near trillion dollars for the stimulus bill was like spending a million bucks a day since Christ was born. Analogies like drunken sailor or throwing money away, or burning through cash…those all come to mind.

Think about it this way…what’s it take to burn a single dollar bill? Ever tried? Just envision it. Enivision taking one out of your wallet, flicking the lighter, waiting for it to light, then to burn, and then to turn to ash. Now, if you have 8hrs to sleep, 8hrs to get ready, eat, commute, blog, etc, and only 8hrs a day to burn $1 bills….how many can you burn? I reckon it’s about 1 a minute. That’s about $500 burnt bucks a day. It would take you seven years of doing nothing but burning dollar bills every minute of the workday before you got to a million dollars. To burn a million dollars a day like the original analogy describes, you’d have to use a shovel.

Barack Obama and the Democrats’ Congress are actually spending so much money that if you shoveled it into a furnace, it would still take you CENTURIES to burn as much as they have, and this is only the first month. Good thing we gave “the man a chance.”

Shocking, I know, but what sucks-what pure out sucks and pisses me off is that my kids and likely my grandkids are expected to pay for-not only the 9000 pieces of crap that Dowd cites ($1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah), but for the hundreds of millions, the billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions, and trillions of dollars spent on nothing more than a partisan agenda designed-not to rebuild the United States, but to payoff campaign contributors and buy a hold on power in Washington DC. Sure, my son would love to spend a few trillion on Thomas the Tank Engine trains, and that’s insane to think that a kid or anyone would ever do that, but ironically, the same arguments used to justify Obama and the Democrats’ spending still fit the trillion Thomas train spending program; it would stimulate the economy, and money spent on the trains would go to toymakers, plastics manufacturers, metalworkers, marketing firms, advertisers, and that money would trickle into other places.

Seems to me my son should spend his trillion dollars rather than let Obama and the Democrats, but Maureen Dowd and other Obamatons have only just begun to see the light, and they seem to be blinded by it’s size more than its brilliance.