Obama's March To Socialism (1)

This is part one of a three part series. Read part two here, and part three here.

A few days ago, a senior Republican shared with me a private email he’d received from another senior Republican. The email angrily denounced President Obama’s “march toward socialism.” I have to stress: this was a private message, not a rant on talk radio, not a fundraising letter from a congressional candidate.

My friends who think this way will see corroboration in yesterday’s news: stocks slumped on fear of a federal bank takeover.

A federal bank takeover is a bad thing obviously. I wonder though if we conservatives understand clearly enough why it is a bad thing. It’s not because we are living through an enactment of the early chapters of Atlas Shrugged. It’s because the banks are collapsing. Obama, Pelosi, et al are big-spending, high-taxing liberals. They are not socialists. They are no more eager to own these banks than the first President Bush was to own the savings and loan industry – in both cases, federal ownership was a final recourse after a terrible failure. And it was on our watch, not Obama’s, that this failure began. Our refusal to take notice of this obvious fact may excite the Republican faithful. But it is doing tremendous damage to our ability to respond effectively to the crisis.

MORE TO COME