He went on and on, slamming the “pettiness” of “partisan politics”, derogating the “Washington gimmicks” that do nothing but make problems worse. He said we have to “move beyond” the “same tired battles” that have defined national politics in recent years, and even said that the evil boogeyman “Washington” is “unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems”.
Now, you can imagine that all of this anti-“Washington” rhetoric left me feeling a bit whiplashed. After all, we have spent the last 12 months looking on as our young and inexperienced President has done nothing but seek “Washington” solutions to everything that ails us as a country.
Got a recession going on? Hey, let ol’ “Washington” waste $787 billion of your dollars on a fake “stimulus” bill that was really nothing more than a means of dramatically raising the baseline for all sorts of wasteful discretionary federal programs. Oops – we’ve got a $1.4 trillion deficit? Why, we’ll get “Washington” to put a “freeze” on those discretionary programs whose baseline budgets we’ve just increased by about 40% - we can afford it now. General Motors is about to go bankrupt? How about letting “Washington” take over and run the company – he can do it! It’ll only cost $50 billion or so, the first year.
