Andrew Sullivan: The Big Lie II

Here's MoDoBro giving us the Full Fox Jacket (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/opinion/10dowd.html?ref=opinion)

The voters left no doubt about their feeling for his super-nanny state where the government controls all aspects of their lives and freedoms.

Not just nanny, but super-nanny! And in just eighteen months "the government controls all aspects of voters' lives and freedoms". Again: all aspects of voters' lives and freedoms. I'm not even sure totalitarian states achieve that; China doesn't achieve that. Maybe Burma and North Korea qualify under that standard. So in 18 months, one president has ended the constitution and turned American citizens into North Korean subjects?

Where is this remarkable claim substantiated in the column? Does MoDoBro offer a single piece of evidence? Here's the substance graf, so far as I can find one:

Instead of focusing on jobs and turning the private sector loose to provide them, he insisted on giving the American people things they did not want: expensive health care, more regulation and higher taxes. He clumsily interjected himself on behalf of the mass-murdering Muslim Army major, the ground zero mosque, the civil trials of enemy combatants and the lawsuit against Arizona.

Let's examine the first claim - that Obama has not focused on jobs. The stimulus, which almost every economist, even critical ones, believes saved jobs, and spent a third of its money on tax cuts to boost demand in the private sector is left out (except, of course, to buttress the claim that the government now controls everything!). The auto-bailout - which, amazingly, has steered GM to a remarkable comeback, saving countless jobs in related industries - is ignored. Then we get the private sector canard. The latest data show private sector growth in employment and public sector decline:

Overall, the private sector has now added more than a million new jobs over the past year — a good start, in the wake of the 8 million job losses we saw over the course of the recession. And 400,000 of those new jobs have come in the past three months. For people with jobs, wages and hours are rising, too. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings are up 1.7%, while average hours worked are up 1.8%, resulting in a rise in average weekly earnings from $753.20 to $779.64. That’s a raise of $1,375 per year — pretty healthy, given the state of the economy and the large number of people out of work ... But government employment is down

See more....http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/11/the-big-lie-ii.html

Maureen Dowd has obviously been watching alot of FOX News lately. Really sad that people who read the NY Times are going to read this shit and believe it. FOX News is now making its way to the editorial page of the NY Times.

It's full of strange oppositeworld blatherings.

(Edited to make my comment a complete sentence).

otherwise smart people believe the narrative from the right/FOX News/Hate Radio.....Never thought I would see the day that a republican (Andrew Sullivan) would be the voice of reason.

I've heard her speak. The woman's a borderline illiterate.

another disappointing mess from MoDo.