Delay is No Longer Not an Option

In an unintentionally comic piece, Stanley Crouch claims, "On President Obama's watch, patience is the ultimate virtue."

Is he kidding?  To rephrase the expression, Barack Obama never waited a day in his administration.  (Up until the presidential campaign, "worked an honest day in his life" covers him pretty well, too.)

Obama would have nationalized healthcare, banned carbon dioxide, withdrawn from Iraq, and started a second New Deal while still in the "Office of the President-Elect" if he could have gotten away with it.

President "I want a stimulus package on my desk by January 20" Obama couldn't be bothered with niceties like posting the bill online for 48 hours for voters to read, even though he waited four days after it passed to sign it.  In his quote from the week before the $800 billion boondoggle was brought to a vote-"We can't afford to make perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary"-by "perfect" he evidently meant "a bill with completed wording."

Obama is just fine with Nancy Pelosi ramming "healthcare reform" through Congress with a simple majority by inappropriately using budget reconciliation to write it into law after the budget is approved, so members of Congress don't have time to debate it.

President "Delay is no longer an option" is content to let the Environmental Protection Agency enact cap-and-trade regulations if Congress doesn't pass them soon enough for his liking.

Our Hastener in Chief is willing to lose the war in Iraq so he can make sure combat troops are home in time for the midterm elections.

And President "Bow at the Waist" Obama just can't wait until he and Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are on good enough terms that he can add them as Facebook friends, even though Castro hasn't promised to confirm his request.

Crouch explains Obama's leadership style thus: "He clearly understands that a democracy with many, many circles of power is prone to a slow velocity of policy achievements."  Apparently Obama understands it well enough to cut Republicans out of committee meetings on the stimulus package, cut the American people out of a chance to look at and comment on the bill, cut shareholders out of hiring and firing decisions at automobile manufacturers and banks, and cut Congress out of passing environmental regulations.  That's one way to deal with "many, many circles of power," otherwise known by our Founding Fathers as "checks and balances" and "limits on rule."

Crouch contrasts Obama's administration with a dictatorial or totalitarian regime by explaining that in the latter, "Orders are given to go with a theory...  Physical threats can almost always guarantee compliance and the speed once called 'greased lightning.'"

Let's recount what orders Obama has served up so far to go with his "theories."  There are the massive stimulus package and budget to go with the discredited theory of Keynesian economics.  There are the wasteful bailouts to go with the meritless theory that some companies are "too big to fail."  There are the suicidal environmental regulations to go with the delusional theory of man-made global warming.

As for threatening those who do not follow orders, Obama has already set his staff on private citizens who might impede his progress (Rush Limbaugh, Jim Cramer), fired or intimidated CEOs who interfered with his plans (Rick Wagoner, Vikram Pandit), ordered creditors to accept lousy bankruptcy terms and warned that he would ruin their reputations if they didn't comply, and issued a veiled threat against dissenters by implying that he might unleash the Department of Homeland Security as a bulwark against their dangerous right-wing tendencies.

Crouch sagely counsels, "It is always good for our nation to sit back, be patient, be determined, be disciplined and listen carefully to everything that is said."  Sorry-who was it who didn't have time to post the stimulus bill online for Americans to read so they could "listen carefully to everything that is said"?  Who is too busy to provide promised details on how the stimulus money is being spent so we can be "disciplined" and spend it wisely?  Who isn't "patient" enough to let U.S. soldiers in Iraq finish their job and let Congress and the American people have a chance to debate nation-altering healthcare and environmental legislation?

Perhaps what Crouch really meant is that Obama's "patience" is demonstrated by his willingness to wait a long time for our problems to be solved.  Maybe Obama believes that precipitous action is needed now, and then we can relax and engage in luxuries like "debate."  But if these issues have allegedly gone unaddressed for so long and will take years or decades to resolve, then we can certainly afford to spend a mere few months discussing them.

Even Stalin probably didn't institute one of his Five-Year Plans without sleeping on it.