Squirrel-Hair is not some kind of economic wunderkind

Two pieces I've come across this morning that illustrate this.

A Bloomberg editorial looks at his unsettling picks for trade-policy positions:

Trump's nominee for commerce secretary . . . appears to believe in the top-down management of trade: "We should treat ourselves as the world's biggest customer and treat nations that are selling to us as suppliers to us," Wilbur Ross told the Financial Times. The global economy, according to this thinking, is not about myriad firms competing across borders to give consumers everywhere the best products at the lowest cost; it's a zero-sum battle between two monolithic collectives: us and them.

Trump's other trade appointments aren't reassuring. Peter Navarro, named as head of the new National Trade Council, seems opposed to imports on principle. He says they subtract from economic growth, which is nonsense. The nominee for U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, brings his experience as an advocate for restrictions on imports of cars and steel -- restrictions that made U.S. consumers worse off and impeded the ability of U.S. manufacturers to compete.

David Leach at RedState  looks at the tweets S-H has issued bragging - with his characteristic vulgarity on steroids -  about keeping jobs in the US and debunks the claim that it was his doing in each case. The Ford plant in Louisville? Ford wasn't going to move those jobs in the first place. The Fiat-Chrysler expansions in Michigan and Ohio? Negotiated during 2015 contract talks with the UAW. GM's billion-dollar investment in US facilities ostensibly in response to S-H's threat to slap a 35% border tax on Chevy Cruzes made in Mexico? Made "well before Trump's tweet."

I don't care how giddy his slobbering slavish devotees like the New York Post's Michael Goodwin say he is. (He entitles his latest column "Don't Believe the Tweets - Trump Is One Cool Customer"; who the hell does Goodwin think puts those tweets out there? They are the clearest glimpse into S-H's true nature we have.) He is still the same S-H we have been documenting here at LITD since he descended the escalator in July 2015.

And, no, lefties, don't get your hopes up. Where I'm coming from is the deep sadness stemming from the inescapable and haunting thought that we could have had Ted Cruz.