Barrel Strength

One of the things that your correspondent finds most disconcerting about the Obama mania, is the comparison to Lincoln, FDR and Reagan.  The comparison to Lincoln and FDR were bandied about before Obama had even been sworn in.  All this for a guy with the least executive experience, when compared to other presidents, and the biggest ego.  How has Obama fared in his first 41-days in office?

It is interesting to see that Obama and FDR are at the opposite ends of this table.  So much for the comparison.

A bullish Obama offered the following advice today.

“What you’re now seeing is … profit and earning ratios are starting to get to the point where buying stocks is a potentially good deal if you’ve got a long-term perspective on it,” the president said on a day that trading continued to hover under 7,000….

Obama said he wasn’t focused on “the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market, but the long-term ability for the United States and the entire world economy to regain its footing.” he compared the Dow Jones Industrial Average to a daily tracking poll in politics. “You know, it bobs up and down day to day,” he said. “And if you spend all your time worrying about that, then you’re probably going to get the long-term strategy wrong.”

Don’t you have to be registered in US to dispense financial advice?  No wonder the markets are in trouble because of the unregistered advisers in this unregulated industry.  Congress must immediately pass regulation to recitfy this!

This is essential reading, plain and simple:

Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues. Niceness presents itself as benevolence, but is often merely an evasion of hard decisions that the realities of human nature require. And it has spread throughout our societies because it is often popular with voters. The road to hell, it is said, is paved with good intentions, and so is a good deal of democratic politics. 

[...]

This does not mean, of course, that there will not be a backlash against politicised decency as its nastier consequences become intolerable. That backlash is likely to make the well-judged pains of past practice look merciful indeed. But that is what happens when moral structures collapse.

H/T Five Feet of Fury