Here's MoDoBro giving us the Full Fox Jacket:
The voters left no doubt about their feeling for his super-nanny state where the government controls all aspects of their lives and freedoms.
Not just nanny, but super-nanny! And in just eighteen months "the government controls all aspects of voters' lives and freedoms". Again: all aspects of voters' lives and freedoms. I'm not even sure totalitarian states achieve that; China doesn't achieve that. Maybe Burma and North Korea qualify under that standard. So in 18 months, one president has ended the constitution and turned American citizens into North Korean subjects?
Where is this remarkable claim substantiated in the column? Does MoDoBro offer a single piece of evidence? Here's the substance graf, so far as I can find one:
Instead of focusing on jobs and turning the private sector loose to provide them, he insisted on giving the American people things they did not want: expensive health care, more regulation and higher taxes. He clumsily interjected himself on behalf of the mass-murdering Muslim Army major, the ground zero mosque, the civil trials of enemy combatants and the lawsuit against Arizona.
Let's examine the first claim - that Obama has not focused on jobs. The stimulus, which almost every economist, even critical ones, believes saved jobs, and spent a third of its money on tax cuts to boost demand in the private sector is left out (except, of course, to buttress the claim that the government now controls everything!). The auto-bailout - which, amazingly, has steered GM to a remarkable comeback, saving countless jobs in related industries - is ignored. Then we get the private sector canard. The latest data show private sector growth in employment and public sector decline:
Overall, the private sector has now added more than a million new jobs over the past
year a good start, in the wake of the 8 million job losses we saw over the course of the recession. And 400,000 of those new jobs have come in the past three months. For people with jobs, wages and hours are rising, too. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings are up 1.7%, while average hours worked are up 1.8%, resulting in a rise in average weekly earnings from $753.20 to $779.64. That’s a raise of $1,375 per year pretty healthy, given the state of the economy and the large number of people out of work ... But government employment is down.
Yes, government stepped in, but only temporarily and only modestly. And the recovery is largely in the private sector, where it belongs.
Next up: Expensive healthcare?
Under the pre-Obama status quo, healthcare costs were rocketing and premiums were soaring. Under the health insurance law, Medicare is actually cut, and a provision is in place that establishes
an executive commission that regularly amends reimbursement rules so that Medicare spending is held down to a specified target and whose amendments automatically become law unless Congress overrides them and provides alternative amendments that meet the target.
That keeps healthcare spending under control, not unleashed. And that, remember, was what the GOP ran against, turning an attempt to restrain costs into the threat of "death panels". Remember those ads accusing Democrats of trying to cut Medicare? And Kevin thinks Obama is the enemy of cost-control?
More regulation? Well, MoDoBro has a point there, especially with the healthcare law. Some of that could be addressed by a GOP interested in reforming the bill rather than repealing it, but somehow I suspect Kevin wants revenge, not reform. Higher taxes? Does Kevin even know that the hated stimulus was one third tax cuts? Yes, the Fox masses believe that their taxes have been raised, even though they have been cut. Why? Because their ideology demands that Obama be a tax-hiker. So he is. Reality is irrelevant in this tightening circle of epistemic closure.
Then we enter the cultural zone. Kevin pulls together several Obama comments to reinforce the alien nature of the president. The unifying theme? First that the president actually sought to protect American minorities from abuse: legal Hispanic immigrants who could get targeted by the cops under the Arizona law for the color of their skin, and Muslim-Americans who have been conflated by Fox News with al Qaeda. Second, that trying terror suspects in civil trials is somehow anathema (when the Bush administration did it, and the alternative is no justice at all); and that any rush to judgment with respect to a one-man terror attack should await the full facts. You will also notice that Kevin believes that Obama has actually been prosecuting war crimes:
To Eric Holder: Try suing the bad guys.
And again, this is completely untrue, a fantasy. Today, we discover that in the only instance yet revealed of actual investigation into war crimes and obstruction of justice even beyond the Yoo standard, the CIA has been spared any legal consequences. Yes, they destroyed tapes of their own illegal torture sessions in a conscious pre-meditated attempt to erase any evidence of guilt under the plain meaning of domestic and international law. And they have gotten clean away with it. Why? Because Obama has decided to be enmeshed with war crimes himself rather than actually defend the rule of law and throw war criminals into court and the slammer where they belong.
What thanks does Obama get for what he regards as an act of patriotism? He is accused of doing exactly what he has refused to do. Only in the world of the Big Lie can that kind of absurdity gain traction.
(Photo: US President Barack Obama gestures as he delivers a speech at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta on November 10, 2010. Obama said Muslim-majority Indonesia's national philosophy of unity between people of different faiths and ethnic backgrounds is an inspiration to the world. By Jim Watson/Getty.)