Ezra Klein needs drug treatment

Ezra Klein in today’s Washington Post presents his case that President Obama is really a moderate republican of the 1990s;

We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal health care; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans have staked out before.

First, Ezra, in case you didn’t notice, the moderate Republicans of the early 1990s lost most of their elections. Secondly, those intrusive, debt increases that you want to set aside to prove your point are the main reasons Republicans oppose him. Thirdly, I haven’t heard one Republican call for universal health care like the Obama model, nor have any Republicans called for cap and trade, nor even tax hikes.

So, I think the Post should mandate a urinalysis for Klein so we can find out WTF he’s smoking these days in order to arrive at those intellectually vacant conclusions and we should all get free pipe-full.

Category: Media