Economic Crisis May Not Be a Crisis After All

Today's posting concerns a few words of wisdom handed down to us undeserving mortals by the Olympians better known as "our compassionate and all-knowing federal government:"

1) "Fundamentally, the economy is weak."

2) "The fundamentals are sound in the sense that the American workers are sound, we have a good capital stock ... we have good technology. We know that temporarily we're in a mess. We've seen huge job losses, large falls in the GDP. So, in the short run we're in a bad situation."

And then, the obvious tie-breaker:

3) "The fundamentals of our economy are strong."

If you are so cynical as to think that the above statements seem to be self-contradictory, to some degree or another, then you are still able to make the intellectual distinction between "Change That We Can Believe In" and "Change That We Can Change Our Minds On Whenever It's Convenient."

As to # 1, I reply "So tell us something that we haven't heard at least hourly for the past eight months." Numbers 2 and 3 pose a true logical dilemma. Either # 2 and #3 are wrong, or #1 is wrong, since any given statement of "fact" can have only one of two possible attributes: it is either true or it is false.

The first two of the above pronouncements came from members of the Odumba Administration when they were asked if the economy was sound or weak. The first came from reputed "Watchdog" of federal spending, Peter Orszag, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the second came from alleged economic advisor Christina Romer. Both came within the past week and were made on national television with Romer's remarks coming during today's installment of NBC's "Meet (then Deceive) the Press."

And for those of you with a lousier short-term memory than my own, statement #3 came from John McCain and was constantly cited as "proof" of then-Candidate Odumba's "compassion" and "better grasp of the economic problems facing the nation."

There are, of course, the "true believers," meaning those that will believe anything said by President Odumba, or one of his trained pets, to be nothing less than a revelation from God, Yahweh, Allah, Gaia, Zeus, Karl Marx, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or some other equally important deity, that will immediately claim that the Odumba Economic Plan is so brilliant that it is already reviving the economy. When it is pointed out to this rabble that no money approved for the Odumba Plan by the Rubber Stamp Congress has yet been spent, and that any additional government money that is currently affecting the economy came from the Bush Administration's Bank and Wall Street Bailouts, they will invariably make accusations of "racism" or "right wing neo-con" (which is, at best, also self-contradictory since no "left wing neo-con" has ever been observed in its natural habitat or under laboratory conditions) before retreating to the nearest "urban forest" to participate in yet another Greenpeace-approved-as-environmentally-friendly communal sulk and thumb-sucking. This is also the same group that will claim that the Odumba 2-Year Economy Plan is 250% faster than Stalin's 5-Year Plan and almost as good as the Hitler Plan, which will be much easier to implement at gunpoint once gun ownership is restricted to those that have signed oaths of loyalty to Reichschancellor Odumba.

From here, it looks like President Odumba's next Economic Stimulus/Enema Plan should include a few hundred million dollars to relocate the "Western White House" to a place more consistent with the administration's seeming inability to decide whether the economy sucks, like Candidate Odumba said during the previous fall's campaign, or whether the economy is actually in fairly good shape, which by default would mean that John McCain was actually repeating an "inconvenient truth."

My suggestion for the Odumba administration's new western retreat: the Primate Exhibit at the San Diego Zoo. It already has an environmentally-friendly, "green," climate control system; has excellent security; comes with its own staff of employees and, even without evicting the former occupants, it would have the additional benefit of raising its new tenants' median IQ by at least 10%.