Age of Obama? More Like the Age of Pork

Charles Krauthammer thought it would take months for Barack Obama to lose his magic. Instead? “It took two and a half weeks,” he writes in the Washington Post. Obama’s promise to “banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple,” looked pretty hollow when he let Nancy Pelosi and company write the stimulus, resulting in “perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington.”

The resulting bill “was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.” It’s not just that it’s full of pork and waste, though it is. “It’s the essential fraud of rushing through a bill on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus—and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus.” So much for choosing hope over fear. (More Barack Obama stories.)