Phil Gramm and Loral Langemeier on Whining

Much fuss is being made over recent comments by former Texas Senator Phil Gramm concerning the current state of American economic affairs. Now a Veep of Swiss banking giant UBS (which itself has been taking it on the chin lately), Gramm has been an economic advisor to the Presidential campaign of John McCain. In an interview with the Washington Times, Gramm made the following observation:

[He] expects Mr. McCain to inherit a sluggish economy if he wins the presidency, weighed down above all by the conviction of many Americans that economic conditions are the worst in two or three decades and that America is in decline.

Gramm, though, like your friends Wonker and Luther, knows the primary reasons WHY Americans seem to feel that our current economic plight is so desperate:

Mr. Gramm said the constant drubbing of the media on the economy's problems is one reason people have lost confidence. Various surveys show that consumer confidence has fallen precipitously this year to the lowest levels in two to three decades, with most analysts attributing that to record high gasoline prices over $4 a gallon and big drops in the value of homes, which are consumers' biggest assets.

"Misery sells newspapers," Mr. Gramm said. "Thank God the economy is not as bad as you read in the newspaper every day."

This is not pie-in-the-sky stuff. Gramm is a former economics professor. He's as smart as a whip and Conservative, too, a fact gleefully ignored by the MSM which is happy to portray him as a country-bumpkin ignoramus due to his famously thick and glue-y Southern/Southwestern accent. He knows that if you trumpet untruths long enough and loud enough, they become the truth in the minds of the people who are hearing them over and over again.

Gramm's conclusion, which comes mid-article, however, has caused that same MSM to gleefully seize upon it to deflect attention away from the entire thoughtful interview. Taking it out of context, they, and their pet Presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama (Socialist-IL), have been hammering the McCain campaign for a multitude of alleged sins, ranging from ignorance to callousness. Here's the quote:

"We have sort of become a nation of whiners," he said. "You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline" despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy, he said.

Republican spin? A little, sure. The economy, while not dead, is not exactly robust these days.
Consequently, unemployed workers in Cleveland, say, will be in a high dudgeon when they read this quote out of context in the Plain Dealer. But that's why socialist media organs take such quotes out of context and spin them leftward. They don't intend to engage in debate, which they'll invariably lose. They just like to set up neat little villains and then shoot them down with their popguns before anyone can grasp the context or the argument. Gramm's soundbite was tailor-made for this approach. Already, the McCain camp has pretty much disowned him, at least for now.

Gramm, in fact, is completely correct. We, or at least those who vote left, HAVE become a nation of whiners. Which is why I've offered a personal contrast in the blog entry below this one. Entrepreneur Loral Langemeier, in an apparently unrelated commentary on her blog, further explains how real Americans have historically reacted to perceived calamity:

Last week I ran across an article entitled ‘Lessons From the Great Depression’ written by Jim Jubak, an MSN Money contributor. It got me thinking about how many of us sit around and gripe about the current economy and allow the media to sway us into panic mode....

While we are in an economic downturn, looking back at the experiences of Americans in that day makes me feel as if we have nothing to complain about. Where is the spirit of true resilience?

We have abundant opportunities! We all have the power to create wealth even in the current economy. We must remember to ask ourselves what we can do today to create wealth.

Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Disney all started during economic downturns as did more than half of the 30 companies that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (Bankrate.com article ‘10 Reasons to Love a Recession’)

Come on folks! Let’s get real. These companies all started when times were tough. The entrepreneurial spirit is awakened in times like these. It’s that spirit of resilience that creates the change in the economy.

American NEVER used to be a nation of whiners. But it is fast becoming one, feeding off the nonstop socialist propaganda successive generations have been getting in mass quantities first in the public schools and then in the media. People are more docile and easily controlled by the elites if they become dependent on those elites for more and more things.

But Americans don't NEED the government to help them. If anything, they need to get the government, largely run by Democrat functionaries known as bureaucrats, off their backs, not ask them for help. (Who, after all, is preventing essentially ALL new drilling for oil in the continental and offshore U.S. oilfields, for example?)

But hey, never mind. Let's whine and complain. And let's shoot Phil Gramm for pointing out the pointlessness of this genuinely un-American behavior.