In his State of the Union speech, the president puffed up his chest, fixed his Mr. scornful face, and once again pulled out the populist’s handbook to bash those evil, monstrous lobbyists.

Obama mentioned lobbyists seven times in his address and in every case they were used as a scapegoat to explain away Washington’s inability to get one thing or another done.

Obama promised — again and for the thousandth time — to “end the outsized influence of lobbyists” in Washington. He then praised himself for excluding lobbyists from jobs in his administration and he proposed even more limits on them.

This attack on lobbyists is cathartic and makes for great populist boilerplate, of course, but there isn’t much truth in Obama’s attack on them because the fact is K Street — the D.C. street where many lobbying firms are located — has made more money off the Obama Administration than from any previous president.

And Obama has been pretty blatant about ignoring the obvious disconnect between his populist harangues against lobbyists and his coddling and sidling up to them. Obama’s big paydays to lobbyists at nearly every level has been nothing short of breathtaking. It has been like this since day one.

One is tempted to call the president a prevaricator on the issue.

Obama didn’t even let his TelePrompters get cold before he was snuggling up to lobbyists. The Hill reported that the very next day after Obama attacked the evils of lobbying in the SOTU speech, his administration invited a bunch of them to private briefings.

The Hill quoted one lobbyist’s frustration with Obama’s habit of talking out of both sides of his mouth where lobbyists are concerned. “Bash lobbyists, then reach out to us. Bash lobbyists [while] I have received four Democratic invitations for fundraisers,” The Hill reported this lobbyist as saying.

Meanwhile, back in December, Politico reported that Lobbyists were on pace for a record year. It was estimated that lobbyists would spend $3.3 billion lobbying the federal government in 2009.

“We’ve never had as good a year,” said one lobbyist whose shop deals mostly with financial services and health care issues. “It’s been a tremendously busy year, and it’s going to keep getting that way,” the lobbyist said, noting that both health care and financial reform will remain active as congressional action moves from drafting legislation to implementation to the inevitable fixes.

Never had as good a year? I thought Obama was the veritable Jack the Lobbyist killer?

During the SOTU, Obama wanted brownie points because he “excluded lobbyists” from important jobs in his administration. This has been a longtime refrain from this president. Even as he began his term last year he claimed he was instituting the “strictest ethics rules ever applied” to lobbyists in Washington. The truth, however, shows that his back patting does not quite ring true. As early as February 2 of 2009 it was becoming clear that quite a few lobbyists had, indeed, been hired into the Obama Administration. It was so obvious that Politico began tracking the number of lobbyists that Obama was hiring — and waiving his new “rules” for. Politico discovered at least a dozen had been hired by the end of January, 2009.

The lobbyist’s big payday didn’t end there. In March Chris Frates reported that former Democratic legislative aides were “hot commodities” for lobbying firms as Obama’s new rules became increasingly dense and hard to understand. By May 30 Roll Call was reporting (subscription required) that the Obama Administration was lifting some of its bans on lobbyists so that they could get their hooks more easily into the stimulus spending. Last August Obama even “gave a seat at the table” of healthcare negotiations to a former Congressman turned healthcare lobbyist.

If I can paraphrase Chico Escuela, former faux baseball great, the truth is that Obama has been berry, berry good to lobbyists. So much for the hopinchange and the end of lobbyist’s influence in the era of Obama.

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The problem with fires is that they can blow in any direction. Consider the White House, which is seeing a backdraft from the anti-Wall-Street flame it has been dousing with gasoline.

His agenda on the ropes, President Obama made a calculated decision to pivot to populism. The Massachusetts Senate race highlighted a fed-up public. The White House strategy: Channel that anger away from itself and to easier targets. Its opening shots were a new tax on banks, new restrictions on banking activities, and Mr. Obama roaring, “We want our money back!”

The president fed the fire with his State of the Union address. Americans are angry at “bad behavior on Wall Street.” It is time to “slash the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas.” Lobbyists are trying to “kill” financial regulation. American “cynicism” is the result of “selfish” bankers, CEOs who “reward” themselves “for failure” and lobbyists who “game the system.” (No mention of Cornhusker Kickbacks or backroom union deals, but never mind.)

Of course, Obama doesn’t get that the anger from the majority of Americans is not at banks and Wall Street, but, at the fat cats spending money at historic, unprecedented record rates, as well as trying to jam unpopular legislation down the public’s throat.

For an administration that claims to know its political history, the White House appears to have misread at least one decade. FDR was re-elected in 1936 for many reasons, but among them was his fiery denunciations of “economic royalists,” “economic tyranny,” and “economic slavery.” Business knew it was in the president’s crosshairs and put its capital on strike. The economy didn’t recover until the war.

Team Obama is already witnessing a repeat. The U.S. economy ought to be flying out of recession. Yet bank lending is sluggish. Companies refuse to hire. Business is going elsewhere to raise capital: China last year outstripped the U.S. as a center for initial public offerings. The market gyrates on Washington’s latest political drama.

A venture capitalist recently remarked to me that the uncertainty the administration has created is “nothing short of paralyzing.” Nobody will invest in an industry that might be the next to be overtaxed, overregulated, or publicly disemboweled.

Companies are concerned and unsure. Will they be slammed? Will the words of Obama turn into actual policy? Cap and trade? Healthcare? Restrictions on banks and Wall Street? Will taxes go up? Will Congress allow the 2001/2003 tax cuts expire? Tax credits for hiring? Which segment of the economy will Obama go after next? If you are unsure about what legislation could come from Washington, but, know that if it does come, it will harm your business, you hold off on hiring and upgrading your business. You become careful with your money, and extremely cautious. You have no idea if your money will be degraded soon, and do not want to hire someone you may have to turn around and let go soon.

Words have consequences, Obama.

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Such thinking was once dominant in Anglo-Saxon philosophy schools but the great expansion of tertiary education in recent decades has meant that many less rigorous thinkers have been employed as philosophers, some even being third-rate enough to find enlightenment in the words of an obsolete economist called Karl Marx. So philosophy schools are now replete with people who seem to think they are being profound when they say: “There is no such thing as right and wrong” or “There are many realities”. To an Anglo-Saxon empiricist, such statements are simply confused.

Such confused thinking is usually described (rather fancifully) these days as “postmodernism” but for historical purposes it is probably best subsumed under the broad category of “existentialism” — and there were many prominent existentialist thinkers in the first half of the 20th century, particularly in Germany. And many existentialist thinkers at that time were sympathetic to National Socialism (Nazism), just as their counterparts today are solidly in favour of all sorts of Leftist thinking. So existentialist thinking and Leftism have always been intimately associated among many who call themselves philosophers. And it should therefore be no surprise that prewar existentialists sound very profound to existentialists today.

The Nazi connection is however embarrassing. Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, DeMan and others sound very good and wise and profound to Leftist philosophers today so how do you cope with the Nazi connection? Easy: In the traditional Leftist way of dealing with all inconvenient facts — by ignoring it.

One of the holier of today’s existentialists has however recently upset the applecart by pointing out that the great god Heidegger was a Nazi and calling for all Heidegger’s thinking to be denounced and renounced. Leftists are not letting go of such an inspiring (to them) figure as Heidegger, however. What Heidegger says is central to what they say, so to denounce Heidegger would be to denounce most of their own thinking. And there the matter rests at the moment. A small excerpt from a NYT story about the matter below. That Nazi thinking is one subset of socialist thinking is, of course, never acknowledged:

For decades the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been the subject of passionate debate. His critique of Western thought and technology has penetrated deeply into architecture, psychology and literary theory and inspired some of the most influential intellectual movements of the 20th century. Yet he was also a fervent Nazi.

Now a soon-to-be published book in English has revived the long-running debate about whether the man can be separated from his philosophy. Drawing on new evidence, the author, Emmanuel Faye, argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy. As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as “the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.”

First published in France in 2005, the book, “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy,” calls on philosophy professors to treat Heidegger’s writings like hate speech. Libraries, too, should stop classifying Heidegger’s collected works (which have been sanitized and abridged by his family) as philosophy and instead include them under the history of Nazism. These measures would function as a warning label, like a skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of poison, to prevent the careless spread of his most odious ideas, which Mr. Faye lists as the exaltation of the state over the individual, the impossibility of morality, anti-humanism and racial purity.

The book is the most radical attack yet on Heidegger (1889-1976) and would upend the philosophical field’s treatment of his work in the United States, and even more so in France, where Heidegger has frequently been required reading for an advanced degree. Mr. Faye, an associate professor at the University of Paris, Nanterre, not only wants to drum Heidegger from the ranks of philosophers, he wants to challenge his colleagues to rethink the very purpose of philosophy and its relationship to ethics.

At the same time scholars in disciplines as far flung as poetry and psychoanalysis would be obliged to reconsider their use of Heidegger’s ideas. Although Mr. Faye talks about the close connection between Heidegger and current right-wing extremist politics, left-wing intellectuals have more frequently been inspired by his ideas. Existentialism and postmodernism as well as attendant attacks on colonialism, atomic weapons, ecological ruin and universal notions of morality are all based on his critique of the Western cultural tradition and reason.

I go into some detail about the confusions of “postmodernist” thinking here

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After Newt Gingrich declared that DeDe Scozzafava’s exit left and out of the NY-23 special election was the “statesmanlike thing to do,” DeDe be-itch slapped the brilliant Newt with her endorsement of Democrat David Owens.

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