Treason Lobby Aspirant Mitch Daniels Has Friends...And Enemies
04/17/2011
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF
When last Fall the Establishment Webzine Politico decided to create a position for liberal media princeling Michael Kinsley by having him be the Left side of a pair of columnists, the obvious thing to have done would have been to recreate the old Crossfire 1989 -95 format and have the still delightfully-active Pat Buchanan supply the other side once again.

But there is a price for being too effective a spokesman of the Right. As we observed some years ago in the case of Victor Davis Hanson, that is forbidden by MSM management protocols. So the position went to the usually trivial and boring Joe Scarborough.

However, somewhere on the Inside-The-Beltway social circuit Scarborough must have been snubbed by Mitch Daniels, now gaining momentum for 2012 as I noted on Friday in Presidential Hopeful Mitch Daniels Touts For Treason Lobby Support.

Scarborough responded by demonstrating that he does have polemical talent, even if he usually deems hiding it prudent. In Buried in Washington as Cairo: Tumult reigns at CPAC Politico 2/15/11 he lashed out:

…the caucus representing Northeast elite media outlets swooned in unison over Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Indiana’s answer to Adlai Stevenson has long been adored by a slew of national media types who almost certainly have never voted in a Republican primary.

Politics Daily columnist Walter Shapiro was even thoughtful enough to compose an early Valentine’s Day note to Daniels, calling his CPAC speech ”eloquently crafted” and ”intellectually compelling.” The self-described liberal found the Indiana governor’s rhetoric so moving that he claimed the lofty address ”inspired careful listening rather than pep-rally applause.”

Overlooked by Mr. Daniels’s Upper West Side coterie was the fact that before he was sworn in as governor, Daniels was director of George W. Bush’s Office of Management and Budget during the years that the national debt exploded to record levels. While the media dutifully reported on Daniels’s dark warning concerning the new ”red menace” of debt, they somehow overlooked the fact that Daniels himself was a central player on the economic team that led us directly into that very crisis.

Scarborough had found a good source:

Daniels was used by Donald Rumsfeld to discredit cost estimates on the Iraq War that embarrassed the White House. OMB Director Daniels mocked Lawrence Lindsey’s $200 billion Iraq estimate as ”very, very high” and assured Congress that the costs would reach only between $50 billion and $60 billion.

In Daniels’s defense, it was only a trillion dollars or so off his original estimate. He was not 100 percent wrong about Iraq. His estimate was actually 1,000 percent wrong. But no matter. It was mission accomplished for Bush’s OMB director, as America went along with the invasion, Lindsey got fired and Daniels moved on to the governor’s mansion.

Meantime, the fruits of Daniels’ Treason Lobby subservience appeared today as the Real Clear Politics news agglomeration site picked up CNN’s overhype: Undeclared candidate Mitch Daniels becoming the big man on campus By Jim Acosta and Erika Dimmler, April 14,2011

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is getting some presidential buzz at colleges across the country.

Daniels, a Republican, can thank Yale University students Max Eden and Michael Knowles, who launched the Students for Daniels website

"I owe them an answer," Daniels said in an interview with CNN. "I've been more affected and moved, you might say, by their activities than any of the others."

Two of the three students quoted are Democrats. It figures.

Print Friendly and PDF