Most conservative writers these days pretty much just throw the kitchen sink at "Obama's policies"--many of which are simply a continuation of Bush's. But, you cannot wish away the financial crisis. You cannot reject decisive action in the face of it because that action happens to conflict with some narrow ideological prejudices. Even the Bush administration was constrained to engineer a massive government intervention in the financial system and to take over Fannie and Freddie. Why does the kitchen sink approach trouble me? The problem is that, by casting up such an indiscriminate cloud of details and false claims, it obscures the serious threats Obama's agenda poses; also, it confuses the general audience and discredits the sink-throwing sources. The Republicans have already cried wolf so many times in the last few months that when, his hour come round at last, the beast finally arrives (as surely he will)--no one will be paying attention. Instead of playing these childish ideological games, what the Republicans ought to do is to adopt a pragmatic approach to oppose forcefully two or three key policy threats--and, also, ideally, to concoct some form of constructive agenda of their own, which, at present, they seem, signally, to lack.
Perhaps, on the other hand, the propaganda strategy here is to so associate Obama with failure, incompetence, corruption, etc. so consistently, so insistently as to render his aura, the atmosphere he inhabits in the imagination, permanently infected and impervious to any rational defense. This may even work on a large portion of the idiocracy.
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