It’s going to be a long three years till the next presidential election. During that time, Barack Obama will do his best to continue to delay economic recovery by pissing away more and more of your grandchildren’s money (your and your children’s money is already earmarked for interest on our debt to China) on make-work programs and government jobs. He will also redouble his efforts to pass initiatives — such as ObamaCare and cap and trade — that the American people detest as much as some of us detest him.
I know, detest is a strong word. Then again, this is a pretty hateful guy. If it weren’t for the disgraceful dereliction of the mainstream media and the fairly transparent hope-and-change snake oil routine he performed before adoring crowds, his utter self-absorption coupled with his deceitfulness and ineptitude would by now have gotten to the masses. For me, it has already reached fingernails-on-the-chalkboard proportions. The combination of his bellicose stage voice, 12th-angry-man glower, and head swivel as he moves from one teleprompter to the other are now sufficient to driving me up a wall.
Yet, the words just keep coming. Along with them comes evidence that the presidency is just one of countless jobs that are above Obama’s pay grade.
Yesterday, out on the campaign trail (?!), he gave another doozy of a speech. As Byron York notes at the Washington Examiner, the speech began with a recitation of his administration’s “accomplishments,” followed by his pledge to keep fighting for health care reform. Obama, never starved for an anecdote, shared this:
I got a letter — I got a note today from one of my staff — they forwarded it to me — from a woman in St. Louis who had been part of our campaign, very active, who had passed away from breast cancer. She didn’t have insurance. She couldn’t afford it, so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed. And she had fought a tough battle for four years. All through the campaign she was fighting it, but finally she succumbed to it. And she insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt.
For some ambitious clothier, there is a marketing hook waiting to happen. “All of my men are buried in their Obama t-shirts.”
If true, this story is terribly sad — not because a woman died of cancer, but because there are so many dupes willing to put their faith in a man who is nothing but smoke and mirrors.
And sometimes even the smoke and mirrors are not enough to save him from the hapless boob he really is. At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Obama pronounced corpsman as “corpse-man,” not once but twice. Maybe he had thoughts of being buried in a shirt with his likeness on his mind.
Last week, the eminent and oh-so-appropriately named New York Times journalist Charles Blow diagnosed Obama’s problem as being too cerebral and failing to speak “in the plain words of plain folks.” Blow went on to offer this piece of advice: “The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, ‘Mr. President, we’re down here.’”
What Blow fails to recognize is that Obama is standing on his head looking down.
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Comments 17
for watching and being driven up the wall, you need some comfort
http://freshome.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/canape-crawl-up-the-wall-chair.jpg
February 6th, 2010 at 7:07 pm
@ fuster:
Thanks for the kind gesture, buddy. I’ll take my comfort in the form of Obama taking a powder.
February 6th, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Take heart, Howard. I share your distaste for our in our faces CIC, strutting his arrogance while saying ‘this isn’t about me’ while it is all very much about him.
Take heart, and watch Glenn Beck almost every day as I do. Every day Beck kicks 0bama’s butt, and has more listeners/watchers than those hearing or watching Mister Peanut’s daily pronouncements about how “this isn’t about me!”.
In addition, every day, we have Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage and a host of others on TV and radio kicking his obnoxious butt.
February 6th, 2010 at 8:06 pm
That IS a very cool chair, though.
February 6th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
@ Howard Portnoy:
gonna be a while, Howard. stay loose.
February 6th, 2010 at 8:19 pm
@ fuster:
and it’s all butt make-believe.
February 6th, 2010 at 8:21 pm
I’m still trying to process the “corpseman” event. How is it possible to get through a life including Harvard and Columbia to 45 years of age without once hearing of the Army Corps of Engineers, Lewis and Clarks Corps of Discovery – putting aside getting aboard a Marine Corps helicopter regularly? And, assuming it’s possible to get to 45 without once hearing “corps” pronounced; can he really be so stupid, arrogant, lazy and ill-organized as to go out each day without first doing a quick read through of his speeches in front of his head speechwriter?
The Dems made an industry of portraying President Bush as stupid, ill educated and manipulated from behind the scenes. I think in President Obama we have a real example of those traits. We haven’t seen any examples of his college papers and such because they would too much embarass the professors who graded them.
February 6th, 2010 at 11:50 pm
Sully wrote:
Yes.
They think he’s John Coltrane, and can whip up a “cut” for the ages without even practicing, just reading straight off the TOTUS. He and the people who handle him are the last ones to realize – though by now even they are realizing it – that he doesn’t measure up to his own reputation.
They don’t need a David Gergen to help them out. They need a Howard Portnoy – who’d, no offense Howard, take on the valuable role of Court Jester or Fool, constantly upbraiding the King and defending him against the dangers of arrogance and vanity.
Ø really is ill-educated – in a very modern-elite-university, Rocco Landesman way In addition, he really does have little knowledge of the military, and much disdain for it – also for European culture, something he’s demonstrated numerous times in ignorant and gratuitously boorish treatment of Europeans, in small ways and large ones. “Corpsman” is, of course, a French pronunciation. He doesn’t care about French and is not interested in it. He doesn’t care about the Marine Corps or any other Corps on its own terms. That probalby doesn’t mean that he doesn’t “know” the proper pronunciation. It’s just not second nature for him. He may never have used the term in conversation – ever. The word “corpse” may also have been rummaging around in his mind, given the subject under discussion. He’s probably also not functioning on a lot of sleep these days.
Pockeestan.
Corpseman.
The two pronunciation sum up his cultural “problem” with the rest of us pretty well.
February 7th, 2010 at 12:06 am
@ fuster:
Maybe so, maybe not. At the rate he’s ticking off even Democrats now, there’s still hope of him making an announcement, say, six months from now that he has learned he has serious health issues and has decided to vacate his office effectively immediately.
And before you retort, “But Biden,” I would say, “But Biden’s butt.” The Dems will keep that blatherer on a very short leash while they confab on how to resuscitate their image.
February 7th, 2010 at 7:01 am
They have a gaggle of jesters, Biden, Gibbs, Napolitano, Sebelius, oh you mean intentionally
February 7th, 2010 at 7:06 am
@ Zoltan Newberry:
Zolt, you’re absolutely right about Beck and Co., but especially Beck. Beck is doing more to educate the public about the dangers of Pres. Cretin than anyone. It doesn’t hurt that Dumocrat commentators continue to shoot themselves in the foot. After Palin’s speech last night, I happened to catch Bob Shrum on MSBNC calling her a “merchant of hate.” No there’s what Democrats want to be doing right now. Throwing out the hate and racism lines while their leader removes his foot from his mouth only long enough to get the other one in.
February 7th, 2010 at 7:08 am
This is one for JED, but I get the feeling we are making progress in PakAfghanistan and Yemen and even against the pirates off Somali.
Remember the Navy Seal snipers who saved an American ship captain, and the increase in deadly drone warfare?
Am I right to assume that 0bama made a very realistic decision that he would really be political toast if he just pulled out of these theatres? He may also have been told that Petraeus and his best generals would resign if he tried to micromanage their decisions, so he is giving them at least some freedom to win.
Now, that doesn’t make Mister Peanut any less dangerous at home.
February 7th, 2010 at 8:01 am
@ Howard Portnoy:
Howard, I think that the plan is to irst have Biden resign and replace him with Glenn Beck and then have Obama announce that he’s found his birth certificate and that he’s not really gonna be able to …
then human voices wake you
February 7th, 2010 at 8:08 am
@ CK MacLeod:
I’ve worked closely enough to high execs to know that if that’s true it can only be the result of stupidity or stupid arrogance as you say. Smart men and women on a mission to achieve power and do something with it narrow their lives down and build staffs to ensure that they’re always functioning at the top of their game in the important dimensions. There was a story I think in Esquire about President Clinton being given a fresh shirt in the limo between appearances. It was seen as indicative of pampering by some. It made me remember the closet of regularly refreshed formal clothes, suits, golf outfits, etc. the high development partners at a big eight accounting firm had in their offices. Powerful people dependent on image go out of their way and spend to make maintaining that image as effortless as possible.
He of all presidents knows, or should know, that optimum use of that podium with the lights and cameras focused on it got him where he is and is critical to achieving his goals, whatever those are. Going out there unprepared to give a good speech selling the decision and maintaining his clout to sell future decisions is more important by far than the actual facts behind the decision or the content of the speech since it’s always a 55/45 decision anyway, and one better made by folks with the time to truly command the facts in a narrow sphere.
Knowing that and being ruthless about organizing around it is what enabled Ronald Reagan to succeed.
February 7th, 2010 at 8:15 am
@ Zoltan Newberry:
We’ll see where it all goes, ZN. It was better than it could have been that OSlash at least cut McChrystal 30K additional troops, instead of the 10-15K that were being kicked around in the lengthy spitball sessions.
But I am extremely leery of this stand-off drone attack campaign. Bush used it rarely, and I thought it was disquieting then too. It becomes very hard to distinguish morally from assassination, and is much closer to producing a downward spiral of “death for death” type gang warfare than anything Bush ever did.
Obama has made it clear that the core US commitment is to use AfPak as a sniper perch. That’s not sustainable. The backlash from Afghans and Pockeestanis will have to kick up at some point.
A couple of months ago, WaPo had an article about a gap between the expectations of the White House about the surge in Afghanistan, and the expectations of the military; and the media seem to be doing their best to foster public misunderstanding in that regard. That’s probably because the media don’t understand the situation themselves.
The bottom line was that the military intends to take the 30K troops and secure the areas of Afghanistan McChrystal had proposed to secure last summer. The White House, on the other hand, wants to temporize on this approach, and literally said things like “We’re looking for a lesser level of security, and to tolerate more terror attacks rather than act in the committed way the military commanders want to.”
I don’t like the reflexive approach of saying everything’s “like Vietnam,” but unfortunately, this conceptual gap is exactly like Vietnam. It might as well be Robert McNamara at the helm.
We may just get lucky, but testing our luck is never a wise approach. We’re doing some wrong things in Yemen too — another venue we want to set up as a sniper perch. That one may come back to bite us sooner than AfPak (although the Pockees are restless over our continued secretive use of their territory). Our neck is stuck all the way out in Yemen, with no plan for what to do if our operations there make it one of the main battlefields.
February 7th, 2010 at 9:11 am
Forgot to append the piece I wrote at NZC about the WaPo artilcle:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/j-e-dyer/205731
In case you’d like to visit the original story and see my extended comments on it.
February 7th, 2010 at 9:19 am
Could you clarify which lengthy spitball sessions you mean?
February 7th, 2010 at 10:54 am
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