Obama Compares AIG to Suicide Bombers

March 20, 2009

obama

Photo from the LA Times

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

A while back, a certain secretary of education compared the teachers’ unions to terrorists and got in super-major hot water. Remember?

I just wanted to put that on the table so everybody bears in mind the standard for civil discourse that was established during that episode. Of course that standard would apply equally to both parties, right?

The LA Times is reporting that at a California town hall meeting, President Obama compared AIG to a suicide bomber:

Well, OK, that all made sense, but then he compared AIG to a suicide bomber, and at that, we really perked up.

“Same thing with AIG,” Obama said. “It was the right thing to do to step in. Like they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger, you don’t want them to blow up, but you’ve got to ease them off the trigger.”

And the president held out his arm and pantomimed a hand on a trigger, and we were rapt, waiting for what would happen next.

But then he called for a final question from the crowd.

HT Campaign Spot.

When he’s off the teleprompter, he’s really off the teleprompter.

Steyn is telling Hugh Hewitt that now he’s recycling all the jokes Frank Sinatra used to do about Bob Hope’s reliance on cue cards as Obama teleprompter jokes, and they’re going over really well.

3 Comments | economics, politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

In Defense of Failure

September 18, 2008

Good can come from failure.  Abraham Lincoln’s failure to capture a Senate seat set the stage for his presidential run.  Winston Churchill’s failure at Gallipoli prepared him for the strategic challenges of WW II.  Recognizing failure and trying to move forward is almost always better than pretending that you haven’t really failed.

So why is the federal government preventing the failure of financial firms, such as AIG or Bear Stearns?  Providing government loans to AIG or guaranteeing the buyer of Bear Stearns against loss did not alter any of the financial reality.  Nothing new was produced or created.  No new capital was created; it was simply transferred from taxpayers (either by contributing to inflation or by adding to national debt) to people who do work for or business with these firms. 

Conversely, if these firms had instead been allowed to fail by going bankrupt nothing would have been destroyed.  All of the financial capital held by these firms would still exist.  And all of the human capital of the people who works for those firms would still exist.  Bankruptcy doesn’t mean that you take all of the capital of a firm, put it in a pile, and blow it up.  It’s all still there.  What bankruptcy does is it forces people to reorganize what they will do with that financial and human capital.  That is, they are forces to recognize their failure and figure out a better way to do things.  

And even more importantly, failure forces people involved with these firms to experience the consequences of their actions.  Those people — and everyone else — learns from those consequences and hopefully changes their behavior in the future.  To prevent failure is to prevent learning.

The same is true for schools.  Good can come from failure.  Of course, we’d prefer to avoid failure, if at all possible.  But if the reality is that students or educators or schools have failed, then insulating people from that reality doesn’t do anyone any favors.  No new knowledge is created by hiding failure and none is destroyed by recognizing it.  Admitting that students, educators, or schools have failed allows us to reorganize how we do things and to all learn important lessons.

13 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene