Here’s a letter that I just sent to WTOP radio, here in the D.C. area:
I forget the name of the guest you interviewed earlier today who, praising last-night’s speech by President Obama on health-care, described Mr. Obama as being “a courageous leader.”
Please contact your guest and ask her to read the editorial in today’s Washington Post entitled “Slashing Tires” – and in particular its opening lines: “President Obama has maintained a conspicuous ambiguity about trade policy, sympathetically absorbing and sometimes restating the arguments both for and against free trade but not really committing himself on any particular issue.”
The Post describes here a man neither courageous nor leading-the-way but, rather, a standard-issue politician – which is to say, a shark as duplicitous as he is pompous, and as skilled at fraud and flattery as he is hungry for power and glory.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
l cannot for the life of me understand the appeal that politicians have for many people. Nearly all successful politicians — approximately 999 out of every 999.00001 of them — strike me as being, at the very best, buffoons. Through less-romantic lenses they are accurately seen to be shameless ego-maniacs driven by gluttony for power and celebrity status.
