Phil Gramm’s whiner remarks explained

In Wednesday’s Washington Times, former Senator and McCain adviser Phil Gramm was quoted as saying;

“You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession,” he said, noting that growth has held up at about 1 percent despite all the publicity over losing jobs to India, China, illegal immigration, housing and credit problems and record oil prices. “We may have a recession; we haven’t had one yet.”

“We have sort of become a nation of whiners,” he said. “You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline” despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy, he said.

“We’ve never been more dominant; we’ve never had more natural advantages than we have today,” he said. “We have benefited greatly” from the globalization of the economy in the last 30 years.

Mr. Gramm said the constant drubbing of the media on the economy’s problems is one reason people have lost confidence.

That’s the same thing I’ve been saying here – CNBC was advising people to “invest” in their homes, and then they act shocked when people start losing their homes after they sink their savings into home improvement. When the stock market jumped 35% in 2003, where were cheerleaders from the 90s?

Regardless, the intellectually vacant Obama writers decided to create a comedy sketch  out of Gramm’s remarks for the intellectually vacant Obama to perform in Virginia last night;

  “Today one of his top economic advisers … said that we’re merely in a mental recession; that’s what he said,” Mr. Obama said, chuckling. “He didn’t say this, but I guess what he meant was it’s a figment of your imagination, these high gas prices.”

He paused for comic effect while the voters digested the Texas Republican’s remarks, which Mr. McCain denounced when reporters asked about the story.

“Then he deemed the United States, and I quote, ‘A nation of whiners.’ Whoa,” Mr. Obama said. “A nation of whiners?”

“I believe that the person here in Michigan that just lost his job isn’t suffering from a mental recession. I believe the mother here in Michigan and around America that is trying to get enough money to educate their children isn’t whining,” Mr. McCain said while campaigning in Belleville, Mich.

“America’s in great difficulty and we are experiencing enormous economic challenges as well as others,” Mr. McCain added.

Um, ah, Mr. Obama, you called us whiners. You said we cling to our guns and our faith out of ignorance and helplessness. Remember that? And Phil Gramm wasn’t talking about us, he was talking about you.

Mr. Gramm expanded on his point in a telephone call to The Times on Thursday.

“When I spoke of whiners at my breakfast with The Washington Times on Wednesday, I was talking about American leaders who whine instead of lead,” Mr. Gramm said in the phone call.

He said he was talking about American “leaders who blame speculators and oil companies for high oil prices and yet have no proposal to produce more energy here at home.”

The former senator also said he was referring to “leaders who think we can’t compete with even Mexico and believe that we should build a wall around America and go hide under a rock somewhere.”

“Certain too many members of Congress and the Barack Obama campaign fall into the category of whiners,” he said. “We don’t need whining. We need leadership.”

You can throw in that group of people who think that Obama, or any politician can rescue us from our own excesses and vices. Those fainting Marys and cheering imbeciles that think Obama’s crafted and refined rhetoric will translate into better lives for us all. Those vacant stares and gap-toothed grinning mugs that hang on every sculpted phrase and justify the venom and hatred that lies under the campaign’s exalted, beatified grandiloquence.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Politics