Thursday, January 14, 2010

Obama's Tame Professor

So now we know how all the rosy predictions of bending the cost curve on health care got put together. The Obamis had a bribed apologist of a college professor feeding them the objective, unbiased truth. His name? Jonathan Gruber, MIT economist.

The Wall Street Journal edit page reports.

The press corps is agonizing, or claims to be agonizing, over the news of Jonathan Gruber's conflict of interest: The MIT economist has been among the foremost promoters of ObamaCare—even as he had nearly $400,000 in consulting contracts with the Administration that weren't disclosed in the many stories in which he was cited as an independent authority.

Why is this not surprising? It is just what we would expect the Obama administration to do.

The disclosure of the Gruber non-disclosure ties in with David Brooks's oped last week about the disconnect between the Tea Party movement and the educated class. This week Michael Barone weighed in on Brooks's theme. He discussed how the Tea Party people are right on the substance of the issues, and the educated class is wrong.

Gun control? More citizens with guns means less crime. Climate? Educated-class scientists have been cooking the books.

On these issues the educated class is faith-based and the ordinary Americans who increasingly reject their views are fact-based, just as the Obama enthusiasts are motivated by style and the tea partiers by substance.

Actually, I think that Michael Barone is being too kind to the educated class of Obama enthusiasts. He equates the educated class and the Tea Party movement as if they are equals. This, of course, is wrong.

The educated class is the power elite in America today. The Tea Party is a grass-roots movement with no power except its enthusiasm and its numbers. What the educated class believes in is its power. The Tea Party movement believes in limited government. It believes in limiting the power of the elite, educated or otherwise.

I know which side I am on.

1 comment:

  1. In the old, unlamented, People's Paradise, aka the Soviet Union, the people had a saying: They pretend to rule, we pretend to obey.

    The elite here may still pretend to rule, but the second part of that equation seems to be losing credibility.

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