WhatsAPundit

On January 20th, President-elect Barack Obama will take the oath of office using the same Bible upon which President Lincoln was sworn in at his first inauguration. The Bible is currently part of the collections of the Library of Congress. Though there is no constitutional requirement for the use of a Bible during the swearing-in, Presidents have traditionally used Bibles for the ceremony, choosing a volume with personal or historical significance. President-elect Obama will be the first President sworn in using the Lincoln Bible since its initial use in 1861.

My reading of Mr. York's commentary is that he's mocking Obama's hubris:

Obviously, I buried the lead. It should have been "Obama Joins Distinguished Predecessors Harding and Carter in Choosing Bible Used By A Previous President." (OK, Eisenhower too, but just half.)

Me, I think Obama is paying tribute to a man who did a pretty good job in handling the worst crisis this country has ever faced. The Emancipation Proclamation was a pretty big deal. York needs to lighten up.

Byron, if it helps, remember that Lincoln was the first Republican President, too.

... to "It's not my fault!"

In his inaugural address, President Obama proclaimed "an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics."

It hasn't taken long for the recriminations to return -- or for the Obama administration to begin talking about the unwelcome "inheritance" of its predecessor.

Over the past month, Obama has reminded the public at every turn that he is facing problems "inherited" from the Bush administration, using increasingly bracing language to describe the challenges his administration is up against. The "deepening economic crisis" that the president described six days after taking office became "a big mess" in remarks this month to graduating police cadets in Columbus, Ohio.

Hope. Change. Whatever.

From ABC News, via Sister Toldjah:

The president said he understands the sergeant who arrested Gates is an "outstanding police officer." But he added that with all that's going on in the country with health care and the economy and the wars abroad, "it doesn't make sense to arrest a guy in his own home if he's not causing a serious disturbance."

What everyone who says "the rest of the world has socialized medicine" forgets is that the rest of the world they admire was bombed into abject poverty during WW2. No one in it could afford anything for a generation, and governments stepped in. (Canada being the exception. I'll come back to that.)

We were the only non-communist (or soon-to-be communist) country left with an infrastructure. And when an infrastructure works the wise polis focuses on maintenance and not on plow-it-under-and-build-anew approaches.

Downside: wrecked economies get to build with state-of-the-art technologies, while those not-so-wrecked muddle through. (This is why Japan and France have bullet trains, and England and the U.S. do not. Of course, neither does the former USSR or did the pre-capitalist PRC. Some things simply can't be done unless people can actually make money doing it.)

But the United States HAS the state-of-the-art health care already. That's why top Canadian politicians come to the U.S. for heart surgery. (Canada having decided years ago that what was good for the Queen was good for her, I guess; now they pay the long-term cost.) And if you were really screwed before Obamacare, we had Medicaid, which is why visits to the emergency room have been so damned expensive.

The irony is of course that our current economy is so bad that fracking (translation: throwing 3000 pages of legislation at something) a sixth of it could really lead to a Great Depression scenario. But then again, one should never let a crisis go to waste, and if the political situation is dire, hell, one can always create a crisis.

Good luck, everyone. We'll need it.