Obama, quit crying 'crisis'

From Jonah Goldberg in USA Today via Instapundit:

Politicians and journalists have a common interest in crises. When there’s a crisis, people buy newspapers and turn on the news to learn how our political leaders will fix the problem. Indeed, crises give politicians more power, which is why so many politicians are fond of the phrase “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

President Obama has been particularly fond of fomenting a sense of crisis — environmental, economic and social — because he thinks doing so will advance his agenda. But every now and then, the truth comes out.
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Indeed, at times it seems as if there’s an inverse relationship between the scope of a problem and the hysteria around it. For instance, today, college campuses are in a panic about a “rape epidemic.” Meanwhile, forcible rapes are down 80% in the U.S. since 1973.

Another source of anxiety these days is “white supremacy.” No doubt there is still racism in America — both structural and intentional — but can anyone outside the hothouse of racial paranoia at MSNBC really dispute that there is less today than there was at any other period in American history? And let’s not even dwell on a “war on women” that is largely defined as opposition to unnecessarily subsidized birth control.

Rahm Emanuel; current Mayor of of Chicago, former Obama Chief of Staff; once say to never let a crisis go to waste.