BigDaddyCool

Note: I recieved an e-mail a couple of days ago from Christal Smith who works for KCET in Los Angeles. She would like to hear from anyone in the SoCal area about your unemployment/underemployment experiances. As she put it:

“I”m working on a story about the underemployed in Southern CA. If you could post this or otherwise help with leads I could really use it!

Here goes:
UNDERemployed? Grossly OVERqualified?

Are you settling for a job you never imagined you’d accept before the Recession? Or did you have to start your own business just to make a living? Share your experience in confidence for a PBS story about the professional dilemmas facing the
underemployed. SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA RESIDENTS ONLY. Contact: csmith@kcet.org 

And now, on with today’s post…

I have been shaking my head for the last 36 hours after the announcement that President Obama was going to announce a spending freeze tonight during his State of the Union address. However I haven’t been shaking my head in disbelief at the announcement itself – I have been shaking my head over the conniption fit that the left is having over this piece of news.

For the past two nights I have been watching Rachel Maddow decry the news about the spending freeze on her show. I have been watching her say over and over again what a bad idea this is, and how it gives the Republican Party a Political Victory. She has backed up her opinion by bringing on economists who also think that the freeze is a bad idea, and she has cited opinions from the Washington Post as well as other media outlets about how this could prove to be a disaster.

Look, I love Rachel Maddow, I think she has a first-class mind, I think she is one of the best things to happen to television in a long time, and if I were still single and if she were oriented in that particular direction I would marry her in a New York minute. That being said I believe that Rachel is wrong about this. I think that she, and other progressives who are rendering their garments over this are putting the cart before the horse and getting waaaaaaaaaay ahead of themselves here.

I believe that everyone on the left needs to slow down, sit down, take a breath and wait for the speech tonight. I do not believe that President Obama is going to – as he said in the debate – take a hatchet to the budget. I believe that we need to wait for the details of what is going to be frozen to come out in the speech tonight – and then react to it!

I remember some time ago, I don’t remember if it was during the election or just after, President Obama said that it was his intention to go through the budget “line item by line item” and cut out all of the wasteful spending that wasn’t doing anybody any good. He was going to stop spending money where it wasn’t helping people, and start spending money where it would help put people back to work and keep them in their homes.

Memo to the left: THAT IS WHAT HE IS DOING NOW!!!!! HE’S KEEPING HIS PROMISE DOFUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The president is doing exactly what he pledged that he would do – so why are you giving him a hard time about it?!?!?!?

As far as I’m concerned i am going to wait and hear the entire speech tonight before I react to the freeze because the devil is in the details, and we should be hearing some of those details tonight. I think that we are going to hear that some of what is being frozen will make perfect sense and that all of the people tearing their hair out about this are going to feel pretty silly afterwards – some of whom work for MSNBC.

However I also believe that after the speech that Republicans are still not going to be happy, and that they will still oppose the President no matter what he chooses to cut. I also think that some Republicans will be up in arms afterwards because they are going to find that some of the things that are being cut or frozen out are some of their pet projects, and then they will find that there will not be as much “bacon” on their political plates as there was before.

When that happens then we’ve got ourselves a ballgame, because Conservatives, Tea-Baggers and Republicans have all been shouting “wasteful spending this” and “wasteful spending that”. If they all start whining about the spending freezes that the President proposes tonight then they are going to look worse then hypocrites – they are going to look like a bunch of idiots. They’re going to look like “The Gang that couldn’t Shoot Straight.” They’re going to look like monkeys at the zoo that try to throw their own crap at the visitors, only to have it bounce back at them because there is a Plexiglas partition between them and the patrons. If they come out against the spending freeze they are only going to make themselves look bad, and the American people will see them for the anti-government, pro-anarchy, anti-job ambulance chasers that they really are. The more I hear them talk the more I am convinced that the people on the right do not want what is best for you and me – they only want what is best for themselves.

Last night on her show Rachel Maddow said that everything that the President has done for the economy to this point was the equivalent of taking the ball down to the one-yard-line in football. But instead of taking the ball over the goal line for the Touchdown, the president has decided to punt – from his opponents one-yard-line – and hand the Republicans the ball.

Personally I think the President is pulling a misdirection play – or a “trick play” out of his playbook. And trust me, we here in Boise know all about “trick plays.” Wifey said this to me earlier: she said that it sounds like President Obama purposely leaked the news of a spending freeze to put the Right off guard. Then when he speaks tonight he’s going to whup them upside the head with a spending freeze that they are not going to like, but yet cannot speak out against for fear of looking stupid. Meanwhile the Left will sheepishly hang their heads in embarrassment over their gross over-reaction while saying “oh, that’s what he meant.”

So I liken the president’s strategy not to punting on the opponents one-yard-line, but to a trick play designed to gain a huge chunk of yardage, if not score. Remember the 2007 Fiesta Bowl when Boise State took on Oklahoma? Remember the end of regulation? Well if I were to use football plays as metaphor for what actions the President is taking like Rachel has, then I would say that the stimulus package was like this:

The Stimulus was just like that trick play which scored a touchdown for the nation at the 11th hour.

Now with the spending freeze that he’s proposing, it’s as if he has diverted every-one’s attention to the right, but the real play is happening on the left. So the spending freeze looks something like this:

So, if the Stimulus Package was like “Circus”, then the Spending Freeze is going to be like “Statue Left”.

So can everybody just calm down until the end of the speech, please?!?

Until next time…