Why dont' they just shut up?

Cross posted from The Lonely Conservative



Every day President Obama and his staff make announcements on the dire straights of the economy. They’ve been doing it for months, years even. The more they talk, the worse things get. Wouldn’t it be nice if they would all shut up, say for two weeks, just to see what happens?

JR Dunn has an interesting article up at American Thinker about the oddness of the first week of the Obama presidency and the even odder reaction from his leftist supporters. You’d think they would be doing cartwheels, The One won! Why aren’t they dancing in the streets?

Dunn points out the string of missteps and mishaps since the inauguration, ending with the stock market dive.

It’s difficult to see, lacking an easy supply of fairy dust, how Obama could have avoided this. But it does underline something that has been overlooked throughout the current slump: the fallacy of the Economic Man argument. Human
beings are not economic robots mindlessly following ironclad laws. They are, in Isaiah Berlin’s acute formulation, “Kettles that watch themselves come to a boil”. Most of the problems of today’s economy aren’t economic at all, but functions of mass psychology. We’d be far better off if people like Bernanke,
Greenspan, and Obama himself weren’t continually quoted about how bad things are and how much worse they’ll get, if reporters who insist on using the verb “deteriorate” were treated the same as the Iraqi shoe guy, and if the president’s entire economic staff were given copies of Canetti’s Crowds and Power and Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Read full article.

Here’s the thing: they can’t stop talking down the economy because they need economic distress. That’s the only way they’ll be able to push through their radical agenda. Barack Obama won the election because of the economy, with a lot of help from the media who made him appear to be a centrist. But he and Congressional democrats owe the lefty nut-roots big time, and the left expects payback.

A tanking economy is perfect cover for enacting everything from the green agenda to national health care, especially while the media’s still on their side. Once they’ve successfully socialized what remains of the American economy there’s no doubt they’ll start singing a more cheerful tune.

Update: Thank God Robert Gibbs waited until just before the closing bell on Wall Street before his press conference today. Talk about doom and gloom. The Dow dropped something like 20 points after he opened his mouth. Had he appeared any earlier the slight gains of the day surely would have been completely wiped out.