Whatever happened to that happy-go-lucky, feckless, haughty, egotistical, self-important boob that the country elected a year ago? Okay, granted—that’s a loaded question. I concede that Barack Obama is not really happy-go-lucky.
The answer in any case is provided in a column by Charles Krauthammer, who summarizes some of the “then” and “now” highlights in what has made for the most interesting first year of any president certainly in my lifetime.
His column is worth reading if for no other reason than the laugh you are sure to get from some of the predictions made by loons on the left that Krauthammer cites. Example: “A year ago, he was leader of a liberal ascendancy that would last 40 years.” The point of view is attributed to James Carville, whom the world can also thank for 8 glorious years of Bill Clinton. Another example: “A year ago, conservatism was dead,” this keen observation courtesy of Sam Tanenhaus.
What has happened to change that picture is, of course, one of the dirtiest under-the-table-deal-making administrations ever to soil the good name of the American presidency. It is still highly likely that Obama will exact his pound of flesh from the American people by imposing on them his much-loathed health care reform so that he can continue to gloat about accomplishing what every president since Teddy Roosevelt has wanted to accomplish.
It is equally likely that the American people will exact vengeance of their own in the 2010 elections, thereby doing the impossible–viz., neutering a man who lacks cojones. Anybody with a brain could have predicted that Barack Obama would make a dreadful president. Could anyone have guessed he would conduct the affairs of state in a manner so unbecoming of the high office to which he was entrusted?
Cross-posted at Manhattan Conservative Examiner
Comments 25
Anybody with a brain could have predicted that Barack Obama would make a dreadful president.
So Howard,if the Dreadful one is reelected,who will get the blame,A Republican Party so incompetent that it couldn’t defeat Dreadful twice,An American populace so stupid they elected dreadful twice,or a malignant Democratic process in America that could allow such an outrage,twice.
“A year ago, conservatism was dead,” this keen observation courtesy of Sam Tanenhaus.
Conservatism is dead until our currency is ressurected from the dead. The Strength of Conservatism is directly related to the fiscal strength of the nation,which has been decimated by our political leaders,Conservatives along with their Liberal partners in crime. (Please Read Ron Paul’s interview with Steve Forbes in Forbes magazine for support of my opinions.)
January 15th, 2010 at 3:10 pm
@ Rex Caruthers:
Rex, I don’t disagree with your point one bit (though I’ll pass on the Ron Paul article, thanks). Both parties are to blame for the mess we’re in. Right now, the Dems are the dirtiest, especially the cretin they allowed to rise too quickly through their ranks. When all is said and done, however, the system needs a complete overhaul.
January 15th, 2010 at 4:36 pm
@ Rex Caruthers:Can you link us to that, dear Rex?
January 15th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
I’ll pass on the Ron Paul article, thanks).
Do you think that Steve Forbes was wasting his time interviewing Ron Paul? I will guarantee that you would be surprised by the quality of Paul’s answers to Steve Forbes very tough questions.
January 15th, 2010 at 4:50 pm
@ Rex Caruthers:
Go ahead, Rex. Work up a post about and including the interview.
January 15th, 2010 at 4:58 pm
fuster wrote:
@ Rex Caruthers:
Go ahead, Rex. Work up a post about and including the interview.
I’m no Pundit,just a harmless Gadfly. I would enjoy hearing the Zombies opine on the Forbes-Paul interview.
January 15th, 2010 at 5:02 pm
@ Rex Caruthers:
You can write about this endlessly and state your views quite well.
You have absolutely no trouble popping out five or six well-written and tight graphs.
Put up your post, Rex.
The Tsar will be happy to offer his bounteous help pre-publication.
January 15th, 2010 at 5:07 pm
Yes.
January 15th, 2010 at 5:15 pm
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/09/federal-reserve-audit-intelligent-investing-ron-paul.html
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/13/gold-standard-fed-intelligent-investing-ron-paul.html
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/08/forbes-federal-reserve-intelligent-investing-audit.html
January 15th, 2010 at 5:22 pm
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/13/gold-standard-fed-intelligent-investing-ron-paul.html
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/09/federal-reserve-audit-intelligent-investing-ron-paul.html
January 15th, 2010 at 5:24 pm
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/09/federal-reserve-audit-intelligent-investing-ron-paul.html
January 15th, 2010 at 5:25 pm
That can’t really be Dyer.
Analysis of all past messaging indicates that brevity is unlikely, and a message condensed to three characters has never been logged.
Likely this is another Chinese cyber-probe.
January 15th, 2010 at 5:29 pm
@ Rex Caruthers:
Did someone say dreadful? Puhleeze check this out:
That’s a very long article that appeared in the Boston Globe more than four months before the 2008 election. Possibly many of you have heard of its contents before today (I hadn’t), and even if you have already read it, it’s worth revisiting if on;y to appreciate the scandalous question it poses today: How did this crook ever get elected president? The level of corruption revealed here – in the friggin’ Boston Globe! – is staggering.
During the campaign, I personally knew that when Obama was “organizing” in Chicago, one of his projects was getting rid of asbestos in a public housing complex, at which he failed spectacularly, as I recall, but I didn’t know anything about the details of his further adventures in public housing after becoming state senator in Illinois. The link lays this all out in great and damning detail. As I said, it’s quite long and full of names and dates that can be confusing, but it is well worth perusing slowly and carefully.
It beggars belief that this one article wasn’t front-page news for the rest of the campaign. That’s how corrupt the media have shown themselves to be.
January 15th, 2010 at 5:38 pm
@ Joe NS:
Nice link, Joe NS. I was aware of much of the detail in the Globe article, but it’s all tied together in an absurdly telling way.
The dynamic:
1. Taxpayers get mugged over and over.
2. The poor don’t get helped.
3. Crony politicians and “businesses” get rich off the take from the taxpayers.
Americans should repeat to themselves again and again and again:
“We, the taxpayers, funded everything that happened in this tale.”
January 15th, 2010 at 7:33 pm
@ Rex Caruthers:
I’ve read the Forbes-Paul interview, and it’s a good informal summary in a language that Obama notoriously does not speak – Austrian – of our economic situation and recent economic history. I’m not sure if I have an informed or timely enough statement to make about it beyond what I’ve argued many times before – which is that we have some major adjustments to make, penance for our sins or if you prefer trade-offs of the last 40+ years (I’d date the change more to LBJ than RMN, btw, based on some recent reading I’ve done) – and that we’ll either grasp the proverbial bull by the horns or try to dust ourselves off after it’s done running us over… probably a lot of both…
Nothing wrong though with a post that goes something like “Ron Paul, not sounding at all like a scary insane crank, except for the scary part, on auditing the Fed and dealing with American bubble economics….”
Glenn Reynolds has built a virtual internet empire on not much more than that.
January 15th, 2010 at 7:51 pm
No, that was a very sober measured piece, except he leaves out the fact what popped the bubble, the newly reset APR’s that went up 18 times between 2004 and 2008, and the concurrent oil spike to $147
a barrel
January 15th, 2010 at 8:31 pm
@ J.E. Dyer:
JE, I am a painfully dull naif, no dispute, yet I still cannot get my head around the lack of attention this news story, not opinion piece, received when it most mattered. Sure, as with most people, I sort of knew that Obama was close – too close – to people like Rezko. But it was all sort of vague and came across primarily as an off-putting odor, a miasmic ambience that surrounded him; but the general tenor of the President’s Chicago connections that I was left with over the course of the 2008 campaign was not damning. The media tutorial concerning that epoch in Obama’s career presented Obama as some sort of lotus flower, which flourishes in muck uncontaminated. It’s too bad, but so what? Just politics, bud, so forget it.
Uh-uh, sez I.
As I now and at last understand it, that was pathetically stupid of me. The nuts -and-bolts mechnics of corrupt machine politics revealed in the Globe article is no miasma. Reading the details is – I imagine, not having the courage to do this myself – reading it, I say, is possibly like observing a sonogram of an abortion. You know going in that it’s going to be dreadful, but exactly how much of an understatement is “dreadful” cannot be appreciated without actually seeing the precise step by step of it.
January 16th, 2010 at 3:15 am
@ Joe NS:
Joe N.S., Joe N.S., Joe N.S.–what a link! Wow. Where you been?
January 16th, 2010 at 7:06 am
One could add, the Cantor piece in the Times on his teaching at the U. Chicago, which was illustrated by a diagram of Alinskyite power relationships, instead of you know, law school cases, the syllabi of several sources, including the lack of reliance on first hand sources, but a Derek Bell (the Jeremiah Wright of the law) primer, and the
tendentious nature of the exams therein. That told me no good could
come of this
January 16th, 2010 at 7:13 am
@ Joe NS:
Joe,
I take it you’ve never lived in Chicago for any sustained period. That kind of shenanigans fills the Tribune regularly. The secret to sustaining the machine is that it ensures (virtually) everybody in politics gets a taste and is thus unable to blow the whistle.
It would have been a miracle for Obama to achieve the office of dog catcher without first “making his bones” by proving himself dirty enough to be trusted.
It’s not impossible that feeding the details (just short of indictable material) to the Boston Globe four months before the election was a jerk on the leash, meant to remind Obama how much skin he already had in the game and ensure his understanding that Daly would rather have him beaten than elected president without knowing his place.
January 16th, 2010 at 7:28 am
@ Howard Portnoy:
Howie, actually, after a long and involuntary absence, I resurrected here a few weeks ago with a couple of blog posts. One of them, “A Tale of Six Cities,” brought some needed “Page Six” – sans fotogs, alas – atmospherics to Zombiedom. I conclude that you did not read it, especially because in it I ventured a description of the true Howard Portnoy, as well as a number of others, using nothing more than a Ouija board and dowsing rod, to which you never responded, as others did, that I was hilariously full of it! You were conspicuously preoccupied at the time with the heavy burden of TV celebrity, as I recall.
narc, your post reminds me that the only other initiative worth remarking on from Obama’s state-senator tenure was the work he did with Billy Ayres on bringing the Regis Debray approach of turning community school boards into guerilla fuocos to tackle the problems besetting the Chicago public-school system. The Annenberg Foundation, chaired at that time by Obama IIRC, simultaneously had a brainstorm – or grand mal seizure, you pick – Let’s give an SDS Weatherman $150 million to set parents, teachers, principals, and, as it fell out, students at daggers drawn. Three years later, after the dust had settled, the blood congealed, and Obama and Ayres had moved the wrecking ball elsewhere, the schools were objectively in far worse shape than before and the 150 mill no more than an indistinct memory.
With that record to recommend them, one is permitted to wonder why Biden and not sweet William ended up on the 2008 ticket. I’ll admit that running with Ayres might have shaved four or five points off Obama’s winning margin, but, given the Pentacostal, to-hell-with-anything-that-makes-sense hysteria that seems to have gripped the electorate that year, he still would have pulled it off.
Sully, brilliant conjecture. Thank God I have never lived anywhere near Chicago. Unless it was New York. They were right next door to each other at one time, come to think of it.
January 16th, 2010 at 7:43 am
@ Joe NS:
Surely New York has some fun and games also. Philadelphia had its Move Houses, built twice to replace the original row houses the fire department and police burned down. I don’t want to get depressed so I’m not going to go and find that story.
City burns out neighborhood to eliminate troublesome radicals. City replaces homes. Those homes prove structurally unsound. City tears those down and replaces them with homes that are now sinking.
January 16th, 2010 at 8:06 am
narciso wrote:
No, that was a very sober measured piece, except he leaves out the fact what popped the bubble, the newly reset APR’s that went up 18 times between 2004 and 2008, and the concurrent oil spike to $147
a barrel
The first prick of the needle into the Bubble was the blockage of the Spigot of the Japannesse Carry Trade due to the higher valuations of the Yen vs the Yuan. (Once again featuring the destabilizing aspect of our “Floating” world Fiat Currency System). Once the Yen stopped flowing in the Summer of 2007,the Dominos started to fall.
January 16th, 2010 at 8:09 am
@ Joe NS:
Joe, I did miss your piece, though I will go back and check your archives for it. I myself took a brief hiatus owing to some personal issues which I was able to work through. Anyway, great to have you back among the fold.
January 16th, 2010 at 9:43 am
@ Joe NS:
Not bad at all, Joe. I’m from Pennsylvania (which is at least next to NJ), and I never supported Kahane, though I like to think that my Zionism, such as it is, is purely beneficent. Or at least as beneficent as it can be with all them A-rabs running around sploding things.
January 16th, 2010 at 9:59 am
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