Mark Steyn gives Obama’s “American Jobs Act the thrashing it deserves

The president has taken to the campaign trail to promote his ‘American Jobs Act.’ That’s a good name for it: an act. ‘Pass this bill now!’ he declared 24 times at a stop in Raleigh, N.C., and another 18 in Columbus, Ohio, and the act is sufficiently effective that, three years into the Vapidity of Hope, the president can still find crowds of true believers willing to chant along with him: ‘Pass this bill now!’

Not all supporters are content merely to singalong with the prompter-in-chief. In North Carolina, a still-devoted hopeychanger cried out, ‘I love you!’

‘I love you, too,’ said the president. ‘But … ‘

Oh, no, here it comes: conditional love. ‘But, if you love me, you’ve got to help me pass this bill!’ You’d be surprised how effective this line is: I tried it on Darlene in the back of my Ford Edsel when I was 17 and we didn’t get home till two in the morning.

Pass this bill now, or I’ll say ‘Pass this bill now!’ another two dozen times! With this latest inspiration, Obama has taken the post-modern phase of democratic politics to a whole new level. ‘Pass this jobs bill’? Simply as a matter of humdrum reality, there is no bill, it won’t ‘create’ any jobs, and it will be paid for with money we don’t have. But the smartest president in history has calculated that, if he says the same four monosyllables over and over, a nonexistent bill to create nonexistent jobs with nonexistent money will be yet another legislative triumph in the grand tradition of his first stimulus (the original Dumb and Dumber to the sequel’s Stimulus and Stimulusser).

The estimated cost of the non-bill is just shy of half a trillion dollars. Gosh, it seems like only yesterday that Washington was in the grip of a white-knuckle, clenched-teeth showdown over whether a debt-ceiling deal could be reached before the allegedly looming deadline. When the deal was triumphantly unveiled at the eleventh hour, it was revealed that our sober, prudent, fiscally responsible masters had gotten control of the runaway spending and had carved (according to the most optimistic analysis) a whole $7 billion dollars of savings out of the 2012 budget. The president then airily breezes into Congress and in 20 minutes adds another $447 billion to the tab. That’s what meaningful course-correction in Washington boils down to: Seven billion steps forward, 447 billion steps back.