Somebody protect Amity Shlaes from those nasty Obama bloggers!
May 06, 2009 10:09 am ET by Eric Boehlert
Byron York kicked off the GOP meme and now Shlaes dutifully hauls it around in her Bloomberg column: libs, and esp. those darn bloggers, are so angry even though Obama won!
As with York's piece, you'll laugh until you cry reading Shlaes in full-on whining mode:
What is surprising is that the [liberal] attacks are continuing after an election. In the past, politicians and policy thinkers tended to be magnanimous in victory. They and their friends focused, post- victory, on policy and strategy -- not on trashing individuals...Still, somehow, the magnanimity isn’t there. Indeed, the closer the Democrats get to total power, the nastier the commentators friendly to them have become.
See, it's liberals who won't turn off the partisan hoses after the November election. It's liberals who refuse to be magnanimous. It's liberal who are strangely angry.
Question: Has Shlaes ever turned on Fox News?
Ha! Trick question, because I saw her on Fox News a few days ago, so I know she's aware of the Fox News programming in the Obama era. Therefore, the thin-skinned columnists who's so upset about angry Obama liberals must be aware that Fox News, along with the rest of the right-wing media, has become completely unhinged since Obama's election and have embraced and broadcast the most paranoid, angry, irresponsible kind of rhetoric perhaps ever recorded in mainstream American politics. Or at least in modern American politics.
Shlaes must be aware that it's the Fox News crowd that has routinely accused the new, wildly popular president of being a socialist and/or a communist and/or a fascist, and who warn of a looming totalitarian state under Obama.
But according to Shlaes, it's liberals who are angry in the Obama era. It's liberals who aren't being "magnanimous"; who won't just accept Obama's victory. Wow. Just, wow.
And do I even have to point out that in her entire column Shlaes never once mentions the run-away right-wing anger that's careening out of control?
UPDATE: As if to pile on the absurdity in a an ill-advised column already drowning in the stuff, Shlaes points to George Will as a target of those mean, Obama bullying libs:
Writers who are not pro-Barack Obama are suffering character assassination as well. George Will of the Washington Post, the nation’s senior conservative columnist, has been so assaulted by bloggers that his editor, Fred Hiatt, recently wrote, “I would think folks would be eager to engage in the debate, given how sure they are of their case, rather than trying to shut him down.”
Love the use of "assaulted" don't you, as Shlaes scrambles to tie liberal writers with acts of violence. (How dare anybody critique George Will?!) But here's the best part, which Shlaes completely ignores: Will was called out by liberal bloggers because he wrote a column that was filled with falsehoods and because he, along with the Post, refused to correct the egregious errors.
If Will and Hiatt don't want to be on the receiving end of stinging rebukes, than here's an idea: don't stand by falsehoods.












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The absurdity of her arguments and the fact that she was an integral part of the SEC that implemented no holds barred anti-regulation is all the proof you need to NOT take her seriously.
A reich-winger playing the victim?! Shocking...
"Even as he attacked Bachmann for errors, the author on The New Republic’s Plank blog misspelled her name...In an ecstasy of anachronism, he toldKatie[sic] Couric,"
Ah, yes, Muphry's law.
"The unsteadiness began with Obama: Instead of shaping the stimulus package himself, according to his own principles, he handed over the work to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Appropriations chairman, who in turn produced a porky package without discernible philosophy."
...and now all that money is going to go straight into the economy! Oh, no!
"Unsure of whether it wanted to punish or stimulate -- and so choosing to attempt both -- the administration generated legislation to help financial institutions and legislation that hurts them by restricting rates and terms for the credit cards they issue."
...because there's no surer way out of a recession than through rampant usury.
"The Democrats of 2009 are showing less awareness than their predecessors did in President Bill Clinton’s time on the importance of low taxes and reasonable regulation. Only these permit strong growth, a point made articulately by none other than Bachmann herself, in the now-infamous “Hoot-Smalley” TV clip."
...and I trust a cross-eyed, spoonerism-prone wingnut from Minnesota over John Maynard Keynes any day.
"On the key question of trade, Americans are pretty sympathetic to Bachmann’s pro-trade views, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Citizens don’t necessarily line up with the protectionist unions and House Speaker Pelosi."
Yes, now that only 56% of Americans don't support NAFTA, instead of 65%, it's fair to say that we are with Bachmann and against unions and the Democratic Congress.
Great job, Amity! I look forward to your next humor column.
cf. Sadly, No!