PrintMarch 11, 2009
Voters' Obama Folly Coming Home to Roost
It's only been 7 weeks since the man whose resume fits nicely on the back of a postage stamp became the most powerful human being in the universe. As Presidents go, Barack Obama has proven at least one thing true: change is like the flip of a coin. Change can bring the best of times; change can bring the worst of times. And anyone over the age of twelve ought to have known that. Instead, 52% of the American electorate has run around like a bunch of howling ninnies for the past year chanting like a horde of Jim Jones' followers, who can't get enough of the poison kool-aid.
So much for progressive enlightenment.
With an economy in shambles, slinking toward all-out depression a little further each day, the President doesn't know the difference between a popularity-based political tracking poll and the confidence meter of the stock market, which represents the actual savings and pension funds of millions and millions of ordinary Americans. Heck, the golden boy of campaign one-liners doesn't even know that P/E ratio stands for price/earnings, not profit/earnings.
If only he had once had a paper route instead of all those pick-up games with the hoops.
That famed transition team -- the team that was given greater inside access than ever in history by a more-than-gracious out-going President, is about to go down as the most incompetent bunch of nincompoops ever produced by a university system. Those fancy degrees are evidently not worth the paper upon which they're printed.
In a time of mounting economic peril, even as the transition team dithered, one would have thought that fully staffing the Department of the Treasury would have been top priority. Not for this bunch. Timothy tax-cheat-TurboTax-challenged Geithner is a one-man Treasury Department and is so out of touch that he spent precious minutes in front of a Congressional panel scolding our own gas and oil companies for damaging the environment, even as a record 31.8 million Americans sign up for food stamps.
Earth to Tim: You won't get the Country out of this mess by slamming the companies that hire us so we won't need to be on the dole.
Is there a single business enterprise in America that this administration doesn't hate with a death wish?
Some of those folks now lining up to get food stamps and the like probably worked in the domestic tourist industries that have taken a whack from President Obama. Every time the President slams a trip by so-and-so from such-and-such company, real people lose the jobs they would have had providing services to these executives.
Las Vegas isn't known for anything but catering to out-of-towner, is it?
Evidently, a teleprompter attached to each of one's hips does not guarantee even a single gaffe-free moment. For all the rhetorical hit jobs perpetrated against Governor Sarah Palin, this woman got up and delivered one of the best speeches of this entire campaign with teleprompter glitches and a set of notes scribbled on by several others, all without so much as breaking a nail or missing a beat. President Obama's motto: have 2 teleprompters, will travel.
So much for Mr. Erudite.
When it comes to the very few jobs with which our federal government is actually commissioned by the U.S. Constitution, this Administration is coming up on empty every single day. While this President calls committee meeting after committee meeting (he calls them summits) for more well-educated nincompoops to sit around and B.S. their way through our domestic problems, our foreign policy is looking like the Keystone Cops high on M&Ms.
Foreign policy is actually in the Constitution; health, education and welfare are not.
President Obama has evidently decided that Israel and Great Britain are quite dispensable allies, but the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the Syrians and Hamas are going to be our new best friends.
Obama dispatches Madame Secretary Clinton to the Chinese to beg them not to stop supporting our debt, but not to worry about those prickly human rights issues because we're not going to fret over those millions and millions of human beings kept under the brutal boot of communism any more. China answers with a wink and a nod and announces they're upping military spending by 15%. Several days later the Chinese surrounded one of our unarmed naval vessels as personnel charted the ocean floor and demand we leave international waters.
On the flip side, President Obama stuns the British and American publics with the most flagrant snubs between our two peoples since the Revolutionary War. First, foregoing the customary joint press conference with the flags and ceremony. Then the obvious denial of even a nice lunch for the Brit. Then the cake-taker of bad manners, a tacky, cheap gift in exchange for the exquisitely tasteful gifts from the British people. Their press is agog from it and declaring that the U.S. will be sorry for this. When President Obama sent back the bust of Churchill, given right after the 9/11 attacks, without so much as a note of explanation, perhaps the Brits should have known something sinister was afoot in the Oval Office.
Back to our newfound friends, President Obama moved swiftly after the Israelis' attempt to destroy rocket-launching sites in Gaza to offer $900 million in assistance to the Palestinians -- read Hamas. And Secretary Clinton made sure to take note of the damage done by those nasty Israelis while she toured the West Bank, taking the opportunity to publicly scold Israel (our heretofore friend), causing Israeli leaders to sneer, "She's not the Hillary we knew." Hillary was barely out of the region before Iran test fired a new long range missile and made certain to notify the Israelis that the new missiles are fully capable of hitting Israel's nuclear facilities.
Now, when are we going to get to see all that "smart power"?
Not with the Russians, apparently. When Mrs. Clinton made her "smart power" debut there last week, she carried a gimmicky little gadget, resembling the Staples "Easy Button." Only Mrs. Clinton's perfectly cutesy-pie idea was to inscribe the Russian word for "reset" on the button. Instead our State Department academic wiz kids put the Russian word for "overcharge" on the little button, making mincemeat of Hillary's "smart power" before she even got out of the gate.
Meanwhile, the Russians guffawed at President Obama's offer to trade missile defense systems in Eastern Europe (he had already pre-announced his intention to scrap missile defense systems, remember?) for help with the Iranian nuclear "problem," saying "haggling" over such things is unproductive.
Shades of JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis are making my skin crawl.
The North Koreans are acting up a storm too, and blithely threatening South Korean civilian airliners, while they prepare to launch a far-reaching missile that they're calling a "satellite." As if that weren't enough, the North Koreans are also brazenly uttering war threats - not asking to come to the negotiating table where all the "smart power" folks are in charge now.
Not to worry, though, because as Gallup, Rasmussen and Zogby remind us every day, this President is still one popular, cool dude to the 52% who drank his kool-aid from the campaign trail -- plus a few Americans who probably didn't even vote but love to talk to pollsters on the tele. And as gloom and doom stalk every hardworking American, the Obamas party hardy, feasting on delicacies, toasting celebrities and stick us with the check.
Anyone in Obamaland ever hear of cognitive dissonance? Tar and feathers?
So, what will the campaign slogan of the other party be for 2012?
I'll have a whack at it.
Obama lied; hope died.
The Iranians got the A-bomb, the Russians got their jive back and the Chinese own everything.
Vote for the un-cool, work-experienced, good-without-a-teleprompter guy or gal who knows a friend from a foe and can add 2 + 2 and get 4 every single time.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.
