Fisking Webb

A light fisking of Senator Jim Webb's response to the president last night:

When one looks at the health of our economy, it’s almost as if we are living in two different countries. Some say that things have never been better. The stock market is at an all-time high, and so are corporate profits. But these benefits are not being fairly shared. When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it’s nearly 400 times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day.

Damn that Bill Gates, Jack Welsh, those oil, manufacturing and airline execs that keep America running in spite of onerous government regulation. I wonder how many Americans are so petty that they ignore their own good fortune to wallow in class envy about the family in the big house across the street. I guess we now know that Jim Webb does. Since he’s taken on class envy as his cause celeb, I guess he’ll be calling out all of the Democrat millionaires like Pelosi, Kennedy, Rockefeller, Kerry, Schumer, Clinton, Tester etc.


Wages and salaries for our workers are at all-time lows as a percentage of national wealth, even though the productivity of American workers is the highest in the world.

I admit I don’t know what that means. I guess it’s something like, “Sure I’m doing great, 8 TVs, 4 cars, a big house, IPODS, computers, two vacations a year, but damn it the boss is doing better and until I make more than he does this is an unfair system!”


Medical costs have skyrocketed. College tuition rates are off the charts. Our manufacturing base is being dismantled and sent overseas. Good American jobs are being sent along with them.

Medical cost have skyrocketed on the back of two events, government intervention into the system through Medicade and Medicare and phony malpractice law suites. Anytime the government steps in and tries to regulate and/or subsidize a market you can bet fraud, mismanagement and over spending will follow. It’s amazing how one’s appetite and tastes change anytime a person thinks someone else is footing the dinner bill. This is what happens when government gets involved in medicine. Every common cold becomes life-threatening, every scrape a serious threat to loss of limb. Common aliments that would have cost us a $15 run to Walgreens now cost our neighbors a $1,500 trip to the clinic. Why $1,500? Well if the doctor doesn’t order every test possible and the patient that comes in with a scraped knee then has a stroke a year and half later, that patient will sue the clinic and some jury, thinking that nobody is really paying, will give the “victim” $187 million dollars.

College tuition increases faster than any service in America but goes largely unchallenged in the hallowed halls of congress because colleges are liberal darlings. Oil prices go up a nickel after a hurricane shuts down gulf drilling and transport and the oil execs get hauled up on the hill, read their rights and the riot act by a bunch know nothings that couldn’t keep a single BP station running through the morning rush. College tuition increases 600% over ten years and the same know nothings want to subsidize the obscene costs without a single question as to why that cost is so high. That subsidy by the way will only cause cost to go higher, because after all, it’s the government not mom and dad footing the bill.

Manufacturing being dismantled? I don’t know. What’s the option? Isolationism? Fords and Chevys that cost 2 times what a foreign manufactured car costs and lasts half as long – is that the answer?

I want to share with all of you a picture that I have carried with me for more than 50 years. This is my father, when he was a young Air Force captain, flying cargo planes during the Berlin Airlift…I recall the words of former general and soon-to-be President Dwight Eisenhower during the dark days of the Korean War, which had fallen into a bloody stalemate. “When comes the end?”

Did Truman and Eisenhower quit, ceding Berlin and South Korea to the enemy? Jim? Webb? Class? Anyone? No. Anyone?

The President took us into this war recklessly.

How great it would be to be a Liberal unencumbered by silly little things like facts when making an argument. I wonder if Webb knows that in his run up to the Iraq war President Bush made essentially the same arguments as President Clinton did on Feb 17, 1998 in an address to Pentagon personnel. I wonder if Webb knows that President Bush’s arguments essentially echoed the thoughts of such Democrat luminaries as Carl Levin, Jay Rockefeller, John Kerry and ten other Democrats supporting military action against Saddam in an October 9, 1998 letter to President Clinton.

How great it’d be to be an uninformed Liberal, then I could call this “George Bush’s war” because I’d be totally ignorant of comments and votes in support of the war by Senators John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards et al. How great it’d be not to know that the Iraq War Resolution Passed the House 296-133 with 126 Democrats voting Yea and passed the Senate 77 to 23 with 28 Democrats voting yea. If I were a Liberal, I’d probably have forgotten or never knew that public support for the war was over 70% at the start.

Now things are a bit tougher and the sunshine patriots and summer soldiers want to quit. That's very Truman and Eisenhoweresque, don’t you think? Jim? Webb? Class? Anyone?