PrintMay 3, 2009
Obama's Whack-a-Mole Politics
Years ago, along a familiar midway, between the Amazing Headless Woman and the Matterhorn, the Whack-a-Mole hungrily waited for quarters amid blinking lights, clanging bells, and the cacophony of nearby barkers. To a kid, both the summer sun and a pocketful of change seemed like they would last forever. If, somehow, our future selves could tell us that forever would amount to the blink of an eye, we wouldn’t have believed it.
The Whack-a-Mole was a large box-like contraption with multiple holes, through which a plastic mole would pop in and out of, in rapid and random fashion. The object was to hit the moles on the head with a rubber mallet as they emerged from their holes. Of course, just as you were=2 0in the process of hitting one, another would pop out somewhere else, and there was no way to keep pace for very long. Ultimately, you would lose. Drained of our money and our dignity, our only option was to find our parents and plead for a small bailout. If they wanted to continue eating their gyros in peace, they were forced to fork over enough of an economic stimulus to at least allow us to go buy some curly fries.
Fast forward to the frenzied first 100 days in office of our Carney Pitchman in Chief: the sheer volume and frequency of gaffes, cons, misguided solutions, outrageous abuses of executive power, and repeated episodes of bad judgment, make it difficult for a rational individual to come to grips with any specific untoward development before they are assailed by yet another one. Today’s vast left wing Whack-a-Mole machine doesn’t even have the decency to let you catch your breath between games: while you are on your hands and knees trying to figure out exactly where on the floor your jaw last fell in20response to, say, the President of the United States subserviently bowing to a foreign prince, you might miss a panic-inducing New York City fly-by, the firing of a CEO of a private company by the President, or the President shamelessly marketing our purported national shame to the rest of the world.
The youngest generation of Americans likely won’t be playing arcade games like Whack-a-Mole when they are old enough. It might be because the America of carnivals and boardwalks has faded into history and no longer exists, or it might be that today’s tech-savvy children are interested in different sorts of games. Or quite possibly we’ve spent all of their quarters before they ever had a chance to jingle in their pockets.
