The Obama Administration spokesholes were having some problems with the softly-pitched question. And the Lamestream media, desperate to circle the wagons around those Democrats that may have strayed off message, even gave do overs.
But that’s just not good enough. This is a question that should not be asked
If you hear a reporter ask people in President Obama’s administration, ideally in a belligerent tone, “are the American people better off than they were four years ago?,”the reporter is trying to tell you that they are not qualified to do their job.
Well, we’ve known all along that many reporters are not qualified by dint of their bias but this is a new charge.
The reason we know that the questioners are incompetent reporters is that this is a pointless question.
There may be, hmmmmm, at least 23 million people who might disagree.
George Stephanopoulos was being absurd when he posed this question to David Plouffe, a top political adviser to President Obama on ABC’s This Week. Bob Schieffer was being equally silly when he asked Martin O’Malley, the Chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, the same question on CBS’s Face the Nation. […]
[S]erious reporters would ask whether the stimulus was large enough, was it well-designed, and were there other measures that could have been taken like promoting shorter workweeks, as Germany has done.
Oh, so that’s the new definition of “serious reporting” now.
Alrighty then.
Riiiiiight… shorter work week. That’ll fix everything.
What the… ?
Shorter work weeks could work. If every business reclassified all their workers as hourly, and then cut their hours below the threshold that defines “full time”, then businesses could avoid a lot of costs associated with having full-time employees, like health benefits, paid vacation and sick time, etc. The brilliance just drips off these guys sometimes. Of course, if you get close, it doesn’t actually smell like brilliance.
While the leftists’ propaganda organ seeks to admonish and instruct Stephanopoulos and Schieffer (as high ranking examples to their lessers in the industry) the propaganda organ must take care that neither Stephanopoulos nor Schieffer find a just sense of offense in the propaganda organ’s use of “absurd” and “silly” as characterizations of their work, no? That’s a tricky road the propagandists have chosen to go down: attempting to keep their media servants complicit while allowing those servants the pretense of choice or freedom at their thought processes.
Of course the Democrats don’t like the question. It never works to their advantage.
New rule (might as well make it official): Any question where the answer will make Obama looks bad is a stupid question.
Doesn’t it get a little tedious to keep contending that all of the metrics by which we have judged the performance of past Presidents are somehow unfair only when applied to this particular President?
Democrats liked the question just fine when Stephanopoulos and Carville were beating H. W. over the head with it on a daily basis.
You want serious? I’ve got your serious right here, racist.
“. . . measures that could have been taken . . . ”
We could hardly want for a better example of what Adam Smith was referring to when he spoke of “men of system” who look upon their fellow men as they would game pieces upon a game board. They see unemployment x in a world with employed hours in the hands of others and think merely to take from the one to give to another, ancillary consequences be damned.
Only a racist judges black Presidents by the same measure as white ones.
The question should be is the economy half as good as it was four years ago.
Good point — though someone maybe should’ve pointed out that the economy they were comparing GHWB’s to wasn’t headed up by a Democrat.
You’d think that would have occurred to somebody. Those were simpler (not in a good way) times.
Democrats liked the question just fine when Stephanopoulos and Carville were beating H. W. over the head with it on a daily basis.
exactly. Do they think the voting public has zero memory of the last 30 years of presidential elections? Or even the last 1 or 2?
This is like the affirmative action double standard – Barry gets the deck stacked in his favor because he’s Black. See how well that works out for a nation?
Meanwhile my employer is about to announce another round of layoffs. And I’m supporting my 3 kids and my parents.
Shorter work weeks are teh awesome. Does that apply to the diminishing population of doctors too, or is that all covered by the magical Obamacare sauce?
Everybody gets healthcare! Because we say so!
[S]erious reporters would ask whether the stimulus was large enough,
It’s absurd to ask “Have you been binge drinking again?” Serious people ask “Did you drink enough water beforehand? Did you make sure you had a full stomach, heavy on starches? Did you take vitamin B12?”
Serious Reporters(TM) say “More cowbell!”
[i]Shorter work weeks could work.[/i]
Only if applied to congress. The less it legislates, the better off we are.
CEPR is one of those “socialisms would work if we tried it longer, harder, and deeper” groups, no?
unqualified : objective
serious : stooge
liberal lexicon duly updated
The serious reporter demands “More Obama“.
A review of the 2016: Obama’s America movie, in which some raaaaacist says the movie misses the point because Barack Obama is W in blackface.
Ouch.
RothBARDians!
“Bush dragged us into two wars.”
Can the mendacity of that expression be topped by Obama?
– The Socialist cabel in DC has gone all in at the table and lost their asses, and ours in the process, betting as they always must against the golden rule of economics, made impossibly worse at a time when the economic equation is being shifted toward a globally based/controlled system.
– They cannot help themselves, it’s their basic ideology. People like Klugman know the truth, they just refuse to accept it. Ric Locke spelled it all out long ago, and most here at PW knew what was coming when Obama reared his Marxo-Socialist head.
– Whatever short comings Romney may evidence, he understands how the whole thing works. Without a hard pivot back to a free market system the country will not recover and things will get unimaginably worse than they already are.
– Welcome to Utopia.
But, but,
What to expect at the DNC :
Now wait jus’ a cotton-pickin’ minute here! Are you trying to tell me that Debbie Blabbermouth says I’m better off because Wallstreet and teh 1% are better off?
When did Debbie Blabbermouth go to work for the Republicans?
“4 years ago we were losing 750k jobs a month. Now we’re not. (Manufacturing is simply running out of jobs to lose. We’ve hit a sort of temporary bottom. Now there’s something to be proud of.)
We had 2 wars. Now we don’t. (We only have one we’ve been fighting for ten years that we can’t win and with no end in sight. Now theres something to be proud of.)
We didn’t know where Bin Laden was. Now we do. (In fact we keep finding out where he is with each passing day and now we’re not even sure he was actually killed killed or died years before. Now theres something to be proud of.)
Health insurance rates were growing at a blistering pace. Now they’re not. (Now they’re growing so fast millions more Americans can’t afford any health insurance at all because they’re unemployed or living off welfare.Now theres something to be proud of.)
The DOW was at 6000. Now it’s at 13,000. (Which is great for the relatively small number of insiders like Nancy Pelosi, but has no practical positive effects on the econoomy or the 100 million plus of the country that are suffering from Obama’s failed economic policies. Now there’s something to be proud of. )
– Got anymore smoke you’d like to blow up the electorates ass Biden, you statist moron.