Obama: ‘…all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones…’

By David McElroy · October 19, 2011

Politicians don’t make mistakes. If you don’t believe me, just ask them. They’ll have serious trouble coming up with examples of anything they’ve done wrong.

In 2004, Democrats howled with laughter and amazement when George W. Bush couldn’t come up with any examples of mistakes he had made since the terrorist attacks in 2001. “Dumb ol’ Bush is making mistakes all over the place, but he won’t admit it,” was the prevailing attitude among Democrats then.

Well, the tables have turned and Republicans are able to howl with laughter at Barack Obama’s blindness about the same issue. After three years in office — and with the economy continuing to fall apart instead of performing as he told us it would based on his “stimulus” spending — Obama is still convinced that he’s made all the right economic choices.

In an interview with ABC News’ Jake Tapper, Obama concedes that the election next year is going to be close because of the economy, but he’s not willing to take any responsibility for having made things worse:

“I guarantee it’s going to be a close election because the economy is not where it wants to be and even though I believe all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones, we’re still going through difficult circumstances. That means people who may be sympathetic to my point of view still kind of feel like, yeah, but it still hasn’t gotten done yet.”

The economy is in the toilet because of decades of mismanagement by politicians from both parties. They share the delusion that economists can accurately measure everything in an infinitely complex system and then tweak it to perform as they want it to perform by pulling knobs and levers, as though the economy were a machine. This is economic alchemy. It’s based on nothing but faith in mathematical models. It’s never been shown to be reliable in the real world, yet politicians and most economists continue to pretend they can turn economic lead into gold.

In his 1988 book, “The Fatal Conceit,” Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek pointed out that there are too many variables in a complex system to be able to control it from the top. The book explained the fallacies of state economic planning:

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

People such as Obama and his advisors mean well, despite the fact that many of their opponents would rather assume malevolence. But they have faith in economic ideas that don’t work and never have worked. It’s odd how so many people will make fun of others’ religious faith when they themselves show a faith that’s just as strong in ideas that are mere economic religion.

State intervention in the economy doesn’t work. It never has worked, whether the intervention is from a Democrat or a Republican. Obama has followed the prescriptions in the Keynesian playbook, so he can’t believe he’s done anything wrong. That’s because he doesn’t understand he’s expecting alchemy to start producing gold.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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