OK, so I didn’t watch the SOTU last night, I listened to it in my car. Then I listened to Governor Daniels’ response. I promised not to comment, so I’ll outsource one part that I would have posted on – I almost punched a hole in my car window when I heard it. The second part is a fantastic rhetorical play by Daniels.
(1) President Obama made some pretty generous claims about how good for the energy economy he has been, particularly when it came to oil and gas production. I cannot believe he actually tried to take credit for this boom, and right on the heels of the Keystone fiasco. Here is the relevant detail. Note to my students: the IER will be coming to campus for an event in March.
(2) Governor Daniels used a term I am mad at myself for not adopting years ago: “trickle-down government.” I couldn’t imagine a more apt ridicule.
I missed Mitch Daniels, but thanks for highlighting a great metaphor, or is it synecdoche? Nevertheless, trickle-down, which FDR’s spin doctors popularized, has been a favorite metaphor of the left to describe their understanding of how free people act among themselves when not under supervision of wiser men. Somewhere in the discussion they insert a chart like the one WC provided recently on income rank.
We know that argument is fallacious, but think about it: doesn’t “trickle-down government” perfectly describe the progressive argument? They would say, “Yes, but we are able to regulate how all that money flows through all the cracks and pores and fissures so it flows to the people we know are the most deserving.”
Regarding energy, I will lose no sleep over whether WC’s students will be uninformed.
I didn’t watch it fully but I did flip to it occasionly during commercials. The thing I did notice was that in the beginning of the speech, Obama mentioned the bailout of the auto industry as pure awesomeness. “We bet on Americans!” Hooray! Then later on in the speech he was yelling about “no bailots or handouts”. So which is it? How do presidential speech writers miss this? Or how do they purposely put this in and simply get away with it? That’s less than a C in a high school class.
It’s noteworthy that when President Obama visited Scranton last month, he did not mention the low unemployment in northern PA where the Marcellus Shale is.
Now that Kodak will be undergoing the pain of bankruptcy, are there fewer no shale signs in the Rochester area?