Mr. Hirsch’s fifth paragraph starts off with two sentences that should earn him a medal for (a) understanding the obvious and (b) outstanding declamation of insipid platitudes. But then Mr. Hirsch gets down to his business of being wrong by raising the spectre of inflation when all relevant measures of inflation show a complete absence of inflation. Mr. Hirsch then non-sequituriously declares that an ordinary man would make a great president. That’s an interesting strategy for suggesting that President Obama is not the right man for the job of US president in difficult times – he’s not ordinary enough. Why not skip Mr. Daniels and go right to Joe the Unlicensed Plumber?

Paragraphs 6 and 7 are two of the wrongest paragraphs the persistently wrong Mr. Hirsch has ever written. Mr. Daniels did not forewarn anybody about the Red Menace of red ink (i.e., metaphoric and poetic synonym for deficit spending). He merely joined the chorus of born-again deficit cutting chicken littles who previously assured us that deficits don’t matter, when a Republican president was growing the deficit at a record pace. (I do like the allusion to the previous Red Menace of communism, which was likewise overstated and led to counter-productive policy decisions.) (And by the way, what is the difference between being “forewarned” and being just plain “warned”? Is there such a thing as being “after-warned”? Such are the peculiarities of English.)

For information about Mr. Daniels’ deficit-cutting expertise, we need look no further than Comment No. 3, 4th paragraph, which points out that on Mr. Daniels’ watch as budget director, he turned a big budget surplus into a bigger deficit. Mr. Hirsch, of course, evidently does not believe that his opinions should be connected to facts.

9th paragraph, last sentence reads: “He [Mr. Daniels] might be too modest and humble, but four years of arrogance proved to be worse.” The last president to have served at least 4 years was George W. Bush. And I agree that he was arrogant – no other Yale shoo-in, lazy, ignorant legacy has used his family’s prestige and influence to inflict himself on the American people as its president. But I thought – perhaps wrongly – that Mr. Hirsch was a supporter of Mr. Bush. Perhaps Mr. Hirsch was referring to Mr. Obama but messed up when he counted Mr. Obama’s tenure as president. When facts don’t matter, I guess counting years of tenure doesn’t matter either.

I have grown tired of explaining why Mr. Hirsch’s nonsense is nonsense. I’m starting to feel that I am competing with Mr. Hirsch for that obviousness award I referred to above. What I truly would like to know about Mr. Hirsch is his credentials for calling himself a “political analyst.” For now I would only suggest that until he does present such credentials to YWN’s readers, he should be described as a “yenta without portfolio.”

The author states, in the first paragraph: “Abraham Lincoln stood up to a divided country on the brink of civil war and improved America’s tarnished image by abolishing slavery.” Emancipation was not an image makeover. Mr. Lincoln did not order emancipation at the start of the war but in the second year of the war, to become effective on New Year’s Day 1863. Lincoln’s initial purpose was to weaken the confederate states – emancipation did not apply to the slave-holding states that were not part of the Confederacy. The Emancipation Proclamation led to the 13th Amendment, which settled the debate over slavery that was left open by the founders in the constitution. Enactment of the 13th Amendment was an act of justice and humanity, notwithstanding that Lincoln ordered emancipation it solely as a military strategy to weaken the confederate rebellion. A real political analyst would know that. Perhaps someday, the author will present to YWN’s readers his credentials as a “political analyst.” For the present, he sounds, merely, like a yenta without portfolio.

Now, here’s a mistake I would not expect even from Mr. Hirsch or YWN: “Franklin D. Roosevelt finally acknowledged Nazi genocide and acted to stop it before it was too late; the war also helped the United States climb out of the Great Depression.” Regrettably, Roosevelt acted to stop Nazi genocide long after it was too late – if Roosevelt acted “before it was too late”, 6,000,000 Jews – a vast majority of the Jews of Europe – would not have died. If there is anything that diminishes the greatness of FDR’s presidency, it is surely his insufficient response to the Nazi genocide. FDR had strong political opposition that may have impaired his ability to address the genocide, and the American public may have been indifferent to the genocide, but Mr. Hirsch is giving credit where credit is not due.

Yes, the war helped end the Great Depression, but FDR did not enter World War II for that purpose, and I am not even sure whether he or his advisers appreciated that the war would have such an effect until after it was over. And surely, war cannot be justified as an economic policy, but that is what Mr. Hirsch’s inartful prose implies.

Yipes; it took me 3 paragraphs just to recite the major errors in Mr. Hirsch’s first paragraph.

The second paragraph starts with the Reagan-lovers’ favorite boast: Ronald Reagan, without any contributions from his predecessors going back to 1948, defeated Communism. Maybe Mr. Hirsch can take some of that credit he wrongly applied to FDR and apply it to Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. I omit Nixon because, in his words, “we got snookered on that wheat deal,” referring to the time that there was a Communist crop failure, and Nixon enabled the Soviet leaders to cover up the failure of their economic system by giving them a cut rate on the wheat they needed to feed their subjects. Perhaps I am being too harsh on Nixon, but given what he did to America, he has earned some harsh treatment.

As for George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” he truly taught us that you can spend a trillion dollars on something and have nothing to show for it, other than improved technology in prosthetic limbs, and growth in the number of young men and women who need them. Does Mr. Hirsch consider this a shining example of a free market matching supply with demand? Well, it wasn’t a free market, and it wasn’t necessary. Mission not accomplished.

Mr. Hirsch’s third paragraph deserves an award for bad drama. He alleges that America’s chief antagonist isn’t a Mullah hiding in a cave in Afghanistan, but ” a Western civilized man in a black tie[,] a bureaucrat in Washington”. And who is this bureaucrat in Washington in a black tie? Mr. Hirsch never tells us. In the following paragraph, he suggests that Bernie “Madeoff” (an fitting misspelling, but undoubtedly not intended by the unwitty Mr. Hirsch) might be the villain, but then he tells us that someone other than Mr. Madoff is running a Ponzi scheme. Mr. Madoff never warned anybody about any Ponzi scheme, until he came clean to his sons and turned himself over to federal authorities, but that was only because he ran out of suckers to keep his Ponzi scheme afloat. There is no Ponzi scheme about to explode. There are federal programs which, if not modified within a reasonable time – about the next 10 years or so – will present serious problems, but nothing is “about to explode,” and it can all be fixed if Congress addresses the problems realistically and in good faith. Instead, we have a Republican House of Representatives bent on symbolic gestures like “repealing Obamacare.” The president’s health care reform law is a good-faith and, if not repealed, effective, good first step to get a handle on growing Medicare costs, but the Republican majority in the House denies that fiercely with false information. The balance of Mr. Hirsch’s 4th paragraph is more gibberish than I can deal with at this time.

Mr. Hirsch then tells us that the current Indiana governor and former federal budget director under George W. Bush is the man who can save America from Mr. Hirsch’s imaginary crisis. I do not know much about Mr. Daniels, but if he was federal budget director under George W. Two-Wars-No-New-Taxes Bush, he clearly knows nothing about fiscal responsibility. I do know that many respectable economists have looked at Mr. Daniels’ proposed federal budget and found it unsound if not actually laughable and/or contemptible. I hope that others better-schooled in economics and fiscal policy can give a detailed explanation of why Mr. Daniels’ proposal is hokum.

Good grief. I’m only half-way through Mr. Hirsch’s latest bout of nonsense, and already I’m falling asleep just reading my own tedious prose. I’ll give us all a rest and leave an explication of Mr. Hirsch’s nonsense to others with more stamina.

True. He did it by raising the state’s sales tax and selling off a major highway!

He also raised taxes to fund a sports arena and a convention center.

While Bush’s budget director, he say a $200+ billion surplus turn into a $400+ billion deficit.

Daniels also has no foreign policy experience.

“However, Obama doesn’t recognize the threat and repealed DADT while instructing the DOJ to stop defending traditional marriage instead.”

From the beginning, DADT was always a stupid policy. There is no reason to permit someone to escape military service by claiming to be Gay. The IDF certainly doesn’t allow such nonsense, nor do most if not all of America’s NATO allies.

And there is no obligation for the government to defend a law (DOMA) they think is certain to be overturned in court. Talk about a waste of money!