The following is what I posted on a forum at lancasteronline.com, in response to an item still making the rounds about the elimination of Michelle Obama’s $317,000/year job at the University of Chicago Hospitals. A comment about it in the Chicago Daily Observer is here. National Review has apparently questioned how important the job was if there was no need to fill the position when she left. (I say apparently, because I don’t have access to the issue in which this point was allegedly raised.) In response to critics, I said:
Besides, the 317,000 is well under the 500,000 that her husband thinks should be the maximum for senior executives at banks that received federal funds. And I’ll bet if you look at her time logs, you’d see she worked at least 63 percent as hard as a banking executive. And she probably did a lot to save on health care costs, too.
I admit it, those comments were intended as bait. But all I caught was a possibly racist Obama-hater who seemed to think I was one of the Obama faithful.
I’m used to people not noticing my sarcasm. Sometimes I even like it that way.
I wish, though, that people would wonder how Barak Obama can possibly know that $500,000 is the proper maximum compensation level for a senior banking executive. There are any number of people on his side who without batting an eye will tell you why Michelle Obama was probably worth $317,000/year. Some of those people responded in the same forum in which I did. Couldn’t those same people apply their apologetic skills to the salaries of bank executives?
I also wish people would question why it is that we have to pay $317,000 a year so someone can develop programs to encourage people to use local health clinics rather than hospital emergency rooms. If people aren’t motivated to make those choices on their own — if we need “programs” to convince people to do that — something is terribly wrong with our health care system, and that something is only going to get worse if we get the kind of universal health care being promoted by the Obama crowd.
Back to my bait, though. I think we need some kind of contest — to see who can come up with the lamest, most pitiful rationalization to excuse Obama behavior — and have that rationalization picked up and used by Obama’s supporters.
This would not be an easy task, because these people come up with some very lame rationalizations on their own. Those who are old enough got a lot of practice during the Clinton years.
Now you might ask if it isn’t just going to poison our political discourse if we go around saying things we don’t mean. I say no, that well has already been poisoned beyond repair. When you have people who can switch faster than the speed of light from defending certain behaviors to hating Bush for the same things, and then without slowing down switch back to defending them when Obama is elected, there is no point using anything but ridicule on them.