We’ve always been at war with Eastasia, notes White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs (who is rapidly distinguishing himself as an even bigger doofus than Scott McClellan):

Turns out the $787 billion “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” (AARA) was not designed for full economic recovery, but rather to “stabilize” the downturn.  That’s the word from White House officials today, who held off-camera briefings with reporters on how the AARA is working so far.

“This legislation was designed to cushion the downturn,” said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. “That’s why we have always talked about this as one function of economic recovery.”

When pressed about the change in terminology, Gibbs said he was not trying to temper expectations after the fact. “I can probably find 15 or 20 occasions when I said this in the lead up,” Gibbs said, explaining that he had always defined the AARA as part of a “multi-legged stool.”

Evidently the Council of Economic Advisors didn’t get the memo regarding the goalpost-moving exercise.  Meanwhile, national punchline Joe Biden assures us of the fierce moral urgency of killing the patient in order to save him:

“And folks look, AARP knows and the people with me here today know, the president knows, and I know, that the status quo is simply not acceptable,” Biden said at the event on Thursday in Alexandria, Va. “It’s totally unacceptable. And it’s completely unsustainable. Even if we wanted to keep it the way we have it now. It can’t do it financially.”
 
“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.
 
“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

Er, no, not really, says the CBO: “No net federal cost savings,” which is bureaucratese for, “Oceans of red ink as far as the eye can see.”  And savor the irony of the Vice President delivering this spiel to the AARP, which continues to support this dreck despite, as Dick Morris points out, seniors being most likely to take it in the shorts.

And of course, this is all to say nothing of the President’s pathological lies on the subject of his healthcare plan.

(Hat tip AllahPundit.)

I love this chart.  Earlier this year the un-annotated version was trotted out by Mr. Obama’s economic team to persuade us all of the urgency of passing his $787 billion monstrosity of a pork-laden special-interest giveaway economic “stimulus” package.  The argument went that if we passed the stimulus, things would still get pretty bad in the short term, but through the magic of Keynesian multipliers we’d pull the economy off the ropes so as to avoid the truly ghastly job losses that would result if we did nothing.

So Geoff at Innocent Bystanders started annotating the chart with actual unemployment data, to compare the Obama administration’s predictions with reality.  The takeaway is that unemployment is significantly worse with the “stimulus” than Mr. Obama’s advisors predicted it’d be without it.  It’s certainly possible they could have been more wrong (never underestimate the incompetence and mendacity of bureaucrats), but I’m not sure how: this is a predictive error that is on the same quantitative and qualitative level as, “We’ll find WMDs in Iraq.”  Or, rather, it would be, if the people involved had any shame.

And now these idiots are apparently toying with the idea of passing a second monstrosity of a pork-laden special-interest giveaway economic “stimulus” package, on the grounds that the first one was too small to do any good.  Yes, by all means let’s stuff more taxpayer money down this rathole, because Paul Krugman thinks the definition of insanity somehow doesn’t apply, here.

By my lights the most surreal aspect of the two-minute hate directed toward AIG (over its payment of lavish bonuses to employees despite being on the taxpayer dole) is that we’re evidently supposed to get worked up over a couple hundred million dollars out of the nearly $2 trillion that government has shovelled out the door since last fall (the $700 billion TARP bailout plus the $800 billion “stimulus” bill plus the $410 billion 2009 budget that Congress is putting the final touches on).  We’re talking about a difference of four orders of magnitude.  We should be so lucky that just 1/100 of 1% of what we’re spending gets squandered or pocketed.

I take a backseat to no one in my contempt for the Wall Street miscreants whose foolish financial gambles helped create this fiasco, but I am absolutely gobsmacked by the lack of any dollars-and-cents perspective, here.

Mr. Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress was on the radio as I was driving home last night, and while I anticipated my own sour reaction to the speech I turned it off about midway through because my disgust was becoming a distraction.  After reading the transcript, there are a few points I think are worth making.

First, one cannot help but admire Mr. Obama’s cheek in his complaining about “inherited” deficits.  The man was part of the Congress that helped run up the bill over the last eight years (and the majority that helped run it up over the last two), and he and his political allies have just finished stuffing a trillion or so dollars down the fiscal rathole of dubious Keynesian “stimulus” theories (with still more in the wings).  The budget-bloat under George W. Bush was by any measure appalling, but for Mr. Obama to try to absolve himself and his party of bloody-handed complicity in that bloat is even moreso. 

Second, the Clinton-era practice of using human shields to protect bad policy has evidently come back into vogue.  The political left complained, not entirely unjustifiably, about George W. Bush’s propensity for implying that disagreement with his policies was unpatriotic — but Bruce at No Looking Backwards finds no fewer than nine instances of disgraceful “for the children!” hectoring in Mr. Obama’s speech.  Apparently dissent is the highest form of patriotism so long as the president is a Republican, but anti-child when a Democrat occupies the White House.

Third, let’s again call out the audacious lie that the recent “stimulus” bill contained no earmarks.  I’ve talked about this before, so there’s no need to belabor the point here.

Fourth, responding to Mr. Obama’s point:

But that does not mean we can afford to ignore our long-term challenges. I reject the view that says our problems will simply take care of themselves; that says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity.

…calling this “making the world safe for straw men,” take it away, Tom Maguire:

Reagan believed that the US government had an obligation to face down the Soviet empire; Bush 43 believed it had an obligation to oppose terror.  Who are the folks who think government has “no role” in laying the foundation for our prosperity?  Laws, courts, national defense – c’mon.  The ongoing tussle has not been between “no role” and a modest role for the government; the tussle has been between limited government and a wildly expansive government that is involved in every nook and cranny of the economy.

I would add “and individuals’ lives” to the end of that last sentence, but otherwise, just so.

Fifth, as to Mr. Obama’s remark:

As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President’s Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets. Not because I believe in bigger government – I don’t.

This is transparently disingenuous.  Mr. Obama is rather clearly a proponent of activist government with benevolent technocrats empowered to try to save us all from our own (real or perceived) human failings.  His writings, speeches, and actions all lead ineluctably to the conclusion that he regards government as problem-solver without portfolio notwithstanding the cost to individual and economic liberty whenever and wherever government intervenes.  But I agree with Rich Lowry: Mr. Obama is once again trying to camoflage an explicitly ideological agenda as simple, non-ideological, just-doing-the-people’s-work pragmatism, and it’s frightening that he might succeed.

Sixth, when will those self-styled hard-headed empiricists on the left call Mr. Obama out for playing fast and loose with medical bankruptcy figures to further his case for socialized medicine?

Seventh and finally, I (unsurprisingly) find much to agree with here:

The president called his budget “a blueprint for our future,” and as my colleague John Samples notes, “A blueprint is a plan for the society as a whole just as a real blueprint is a plan for a building…. [This is] a plan for the remaking of America. The metaphor reveals a habit of mind at odds with a free society.” Obama promised that the federal government would impose comprehensive redesigns on energy, health care, and education. But the success of America has always been rooted in individual enterprise and free markets. Obama blames free markets for our problems, when it was cheap money from the Fed and misguided federal incentives that caused the mortgage debacle.

It’s going to be a long four years.

The President’s press conference last night was a carnival of whoppers.  Let’s go through a few of the more egregious ones.

Lie #1:

“Most economists, almost unanimously, recognize that…when you have the kind of problem we have right now…that government is an important element of introducing some additional demand into the economy.”

This isn’t remotely true.  The Cato Institute has been doing yoeman’s work documenting the dissent from the policy prescriptions that Paul Krugman has been hawking from the editorial pages of the New York Times; suffice it to say that neo-Keynesian stimulus doesn’t command anything close to unanimous support among economists, Nobel laureates or otherwise.  Cato went so far as to sponsor an ad in the Times signed by more than 200 economists in opposition to the stimulus proposal.

Lie #2:

“What it does not contain, however, is a single pet project, not a single earmark, and it has been stripped of the projects members of both parties found most objectionable.”

Let’s grant that about $100b of pork was stripped out of the bill in the Senate (though it’s almost certain to be added back into the reconciliation bill by the House-Senate conference committee).  But, honestly: just looking at the “Most Active” list at stimuluswatch.org reveals things like $600m allocated for an African-American Ethnic Heritage Trail in Natchez, MI; $500,000 allocated for construction of a dog park in Chula Vista, CA; $300,000 for improvement of tennis courts in Shorewood, MN; and $2.1m for construction of an animal rescue building in Superior, WI.  The stimulus is larded with billions of dollars of this kind of thing, whether or not any of it falls within some hypertechnical definition of “earmark”.  Obama’s assertion is such a pantload that even the normally-supine Associated Press was moved to call shenanigans.

Lie #3:

 “What I won’t do is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place…”

The “failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place” were a Republican president’s profligate spending, loose monetary policy by the Federal Reserve, and steadfast unwillingness on the part of congressional Democrats to impose some regulatory oversight on GSEs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).  Passing a pork-laden monstrosity of a “stimulus” package is the very definition of returning to those failed theories; actually breaking from them would require some fiscal austerity and a willingness to rein in the political patrons of the Democratic Party.

Lie #4:

As I said, the one concern I’ve got on the stimulus package, in terms of the debate and listening to some of what’s been said in Congress is that there seems to be a set of folks who — I don’t doubt their sincerity — who just believe that we should do nothing. Now, if that’s their opening position or their closing position in negotiations, then we’re probably not going to make much progress, because I don’t think that’s economically sound and I don’t think what — that’s what the American people expect, is for us to stand by and do nothing.

To be perfectly fair, there are some people “who just believe that we should do nothing”.  Say, for example, the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates that the stimulus package will, as the result of debt servicing, be a net drag on the economy over the long term.  But “in terms of the debate and listening to some of what’s been said in Congress,” not a single congressional Republican has demanded that we just do nothing.  They’ve been all over the cable talk shows floating alternative proposals; the problem has been that they were locked out of drafting the House version of the bill by the Democratic leadership, and had only a little more say in the Senate.  Most of them would enthusiastically support a stimulus that legitimately met Larry Summers “timely, targeted, and temporary” criteria; what they object to is the Democrats using the economic crisis to force through a decades-long wish list of liberal spending in the guise of economic stimulus — kind of like how Democrats complained that Republicans used 9/11 to force through a decades-long law enforcement wish list in the guise of fighting terrorism (i.e., the PATRIOT Act).

Lie #5:

I think that what I’ve said is what other economists have said across the political spectrum, which is that if you delay acting on an economy of this severity, then you potentially create a negative spiral that becomes much more difficult for us to get out of.

We saw this happen in Japan in the 1990s, where they did not act boldly and swiftly enough, and as a consequence they suffered what was called the “lost decade,” where essentially for the entire ’90s, they did not see any significant economic growth.

This is all completely true, except for the part about how Japan didn’t act boldly and swiftly enough and suffered the “lost decade” as a result.  In fact, Japan acted too boldly and too swiftly, running up massive debt on infrastructure projects that didn’t do anything to stimultate the Japanese economy.  Even the New York Times, that house organ of the Democratic Party, must concede that:

In the end, say economists, it was not public works but an expensive cleanup of the debt-ridden banking system, combined with growing exports to China and the United States, that brought a close to Japan’s Lost Decade. This has led many to conclude that spending did little more than sink Japan deeply into debt, leaving an enormous tax burden for future generations.

Those who remain ignorant of history, or who lie about it, are doomed to repeat it, Mr. President.