Listen to R. Simon, fecklessly approving the Obama move into the auto business:
On Monday, in a calm and forceful statement, Obama made clear his reasons. “Our auto industry,” he said, “is not moving fast enough to succeed.”
Calm and forceful = I love that man.
Made clear his reasons = I believe that man.
Not moving fast enough = I trust (hope in) that man.
All three theological virtues in one column paragraph.
Finally, someone punished for business failure!
In a startling departure, the Obama administration has decided that the price of failure in America should be failure.
O. fired Wagoner, “simply because Wagoner was doing a terrible job and had run GM into the ground. Wall Street was aghast.”
Now isn’t that silly? Investors don’t like the national CEO’s firing the auto CEO, and it’s because an exec is at long last paying for his mistakes?
If Simon would sneak off the (crowded) lefty newsies’ compound for even a few minutes, he would know that stock traders punish failure routinely, daily, hourly.
Investors, that is, people who watch the long arm of the White House reaching into their midst and swatting one of their own, and are aghast — as Simon would be if he weren’t harboring ingrained suspicion of business and inexplicable trust in government.
Blithe Spirit 
I’ve got to say, Jim, this guy has some talent as a sophist. He takes the truth, and flips it neatly into its opposite.
“But now Obama is changing the rules! He is showing a different kind of audacity! He wants companies that get taxpayer dollars to perform as if they operated in the real world and not the Land of Oz.
“In the real world, if you build a better car, people will buy it — and if you don’t, they won’t.
“That has never been the operating principle in Detroit, where automakers made clunkers and the Japanese cleaned their clocks.
“Wagoner is the guy who axed GM’s electric car program and decided SUVs would carry GM into the future. He has been the CEO since 2000, and GM has not shown a profit since 2004.
“In fact, it has lost $82 billion in that time.”
He makes it sound as if SUVs destroyed GM, and it would have made mucho dinero, if only it had produced tiny electric and hybrid cars, when I read recently that “light trucks” (including particularly SUVs) ar ethe only profitable sector for GM. Simon doesn’t want GM run more profitably, he wants the opposite. He wants to force Americans to buy the sort of cars that the prisoners of the East Bloc were forced to buy — Yugos! This has been the Party talking point ever since the election. (Come to think of it, this guy is valuable if for other reason than as an exact gauge of the Party’s momentary talking points.)
At the end of his new column, which he opens with a skillfully buried mention of background talk in Spanish in 1980, as if it were the most natural thing, he says, “We’ll always have America.”
Decoded: “We’re stealing your country from you, and by the time you wake up and smell the coffee, it’ll be a done deal.”
This guy is a handy socialist-communist weather vane. “Red Caucus.”
LikeLike