Roger Kimball Nails It

Here's Roger Kimball writing about Obama today, after the stock market meltdown:

But of course the big news today was a number: 512 — the number of points the Dow lost. Some one with a calculator can tell us how many billions of dollars that represents. You don’t need a calculator to know what it means about the people we’ve elected to lead us, above all about Barack Obama, the smooth-talking neophyte who thinks economics is about redistributing wealth instead of (what it is really about) creating wealth.

The American poet Frank O’Hara wrote a poem whose title I’ve always admired: “Meditations in an Emergency.” That’s where we are now: you can tell it’s an emergency by the panic you smell in the air. It will get worse. And as it does more and more people will recognize an important fact: that Barack Obama is presiding over a Potemkin Village. He hasn’t a clue about what to do to salvage the U.S economy. How could he? He was brought up on the anti-growth, statist nostrums that forsake basic human psychology for the sake of utopian schemes...

Barack Obama . . . It was a good show while it lasted. If you closed your eyes and said “spread the wealth” he might have seemed, for a moment, like a serious politician. Really, as everyone sees now, he is a Gatsby-like figure who smiles and smiles but is imploding before our eyes.

On a summer-stock stage, it might have been an illuminating melodrama. Alas, we threw caution to the winds and elected someone who resented this country, was suspicious of wealth, and whose reflexive commitment to left-wing nostrums would gravely damage the most productive economy the world has ever seen. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people will suffer because of our naïveté and Barack Obama’s malevolent stupidity.

As I noted earlier today, I don't hear anyone defending Obama anymore.   It's like they're all embarrassed at what they've done.  Unfortunately, we're all going to pay the price for another eighteen months.   I only hope that America will still be salvageable by January 2013.