More Bad People Criticize the Administration

Like the evil Warren Buffet, who supported Obama during the election.

Warren Buffett on CNBC’s Squawk Box, 9 March 2009:

BUFFETT: If you’re in a war, and we really are on an economic war, there’s a obligation to the majority to behave in ways that don’t go around inflaming the minority. If on December 7th, when Roosevelt convened Congress to have a vote on the war, he didn’t say, `I’m throwing in about 10 of my pet projects,’ and you didn’t have congress people putting on 8,000 earmarks onto the declaration of war in 1941.

So I think that the minority really do have an obligation to support things that in general are clearly designed to fight the war in a big way. And I don’t think before D-Day on June 1st you ought to have a congressional hearing and have 535 people give their opinion about where the troops should land and what the weather should be and how many troops should land and all of that. And I think after June 6th you don’t have another hearing that says, `Gee, if we’d just landed a mile north.’

JOE: You might not have fixed global warming the day after D-Day, Warren.

BUFFETT: Absolutely. And I think that the Republicans have an obligation to regard this as an economic war and to realize you need one leader and, in general, support of that. But I think that the Democrats — and I voted for Obama and I strongly support him, and I think he’s the right guy — but I think they should not use this when they’re calling for unity on a question this important. They should not use it to roll the Republicans all.

I think job one is to win the economic war, job two is to win the economic war, and job three. And you can’t expect people to unite behind you if you’re trying to jam a whole bunch of things down their throat. I would absolutely say for the interim, untill we get this one solved, I would not be pushing a lot of things that are contentious, and I also would do no finger-pointing whatsoever. I would not say, you know, `George’–`the previous administration got us into this.’ Forget it. I mean, you know, the Navy made a mistake at Pearl Harbor and had too many ships there. But the idea that we’d spend our time after that pointing fingers at the Navy, we needed the Navy. So no finger pointing, no vengeance, none of that stuff. Just look forward. [...] Well, I was going to mention to Joe that you've heard this comment recently from some Democrats recently that a `crisis is a terrible thing to waste.'

BECKY: Yeah.

BUFFETT: Now, just rephrase that and since it's, in my view, it's an economic war, and--I don't think anybody on December 7th would have said a `war is a terrible thing to waste, and therefore we're going to try and ram through a whole bunch of things and--but we expect to--expect the other party to unite behind us on the--on the big problem.' It's just a mistake, I think, when you've got one overriding objective, to try and muddle it up with a bunch of other things.