Silly commentary

So Michael Steele described Afghanistan as a war of Obama's choosing, and Jack Kelly quoted a CMU professor who said that Obama is using different tactics to fight a recession than Reagan used to fight stagflation. The Republicans are probably not happy that silly comments are flying around.

On Steele, well, the only thing I will say is that so many conservative blog commenters have picked up the Republicans whine that Democrats/liberals should stop blaming the nations problems on Bush. Steele has taken that to an absurd degree, obviously. Those same commenters held Steele up in the past as proof that the Republicans had people of color in the upper levels of power in the party.

As for Kelly's column today, first Kelly takes shots at Obama's worldwide popularity among other world leaders, and Kelly has some new obsession with Obama playing golf. I am not going to try to research this silliness, but I will say it is transparent. Kelly wants Obama to be as unpopular as Bush was, wants Obama to be seen as un-serious as Bush was.

Looking at (CMU's) Alan Meltzer's comments that Kelly quotes, first, if you don't know the difference between stagflation and a straightforward recession, you need to go back and read history. And Meltzer spins the Reagan legacy much the way Republicans have ever since. "Reagan reduced marginal and corporate tax rates and slowed the growth of nondefense spending". And yet Reagan set new records in spending and debt. The reason, that little qualifier, "nondenfense". Actually there was spending in the Reagan administration (perhaps more than Obama), in the are of defense, even as the Federal Reserve tightened up on the economy to rein in inflation. By the way, bringing up Reagan undermines the rest of Kelly's column, since Reagan totally ignored deficits and debt.