The Empty Vessel Obama has been foundering of late as a leader. This should be completely unsurprising–after all, if you look at his history, why would he be a leader? Obama is experienced in several things: campaigning, oratory, community organizing…

I am headed for the beach and the healthy cold salt water for the weekend. Beach scenery by Theo, who has tons of good stuff posted.
A. Elmer Crowell’s Cape Cod decoys
Dalrymple: There is no right to health care.
Population of illegals is drop…

Don’t forget ACORN. He is still giving support to that lovely group. He must approve of their method of intimidation, which involves turning up the noise volume so high that no one can think.

I think those farther to the left are hardcore for single payer because they are at heart nanny-staters. They want the state to control the people and not the other way around. Publicly they’ll talk about helping people or whatever, but it’s a cover for their deeper (perhaps even subconcious) reason – they don’t believe in individual freedom. It’s too chaotic and scary and dangerous. They only want freedom within bounds they understand (and can control).

“They’ve not gone well, especially the last one, which featured vague platitudes…”

My own personal nickname for Obama that I use in my head when I hear him speak (which, mercifully, is not very often) is “Captain Platitude”. Ever since the campaign, that’s what I’ve thought of his speeches. Just a bunch of pretty platitudes. And contrary to some popular opinion, I don’t think he delivers them particularly convincingly. To me, he sounds like an earnest high school debater doing his best to imitate a great speaker, with only partial success.

““I like being President… and it turns out I’m pretty good at it.”

It will be interesting to see the shelf life on this one. It could turn out to be one of the most embarrassing lines ever uttered by a president. Especially if he turns out, as i think is a possibility, to be Carter II.

As to him being bored, I thought that was a possibility even before the election. He has shown no evidence in his entire life of ever really putting his nose to the grindstone. I’m not surprised he thought his time in the Illinois Senate was a bore. I also thought it was a great possibility that he wanted the title of President much more than he wanted the job (those HLR anecdotes are perhaps instructive). God help us if he can’t bring himself to apply his energies to it properly. I would say it’s not absolutely outside the realm of possibility that if he found the job sufficiently distasteful he might not finish his term (or a possible second term).

Although I wasn’t leaning toward him anyway, he lost me permanently (not just my vote but my respect) with the whole Jeremiah Wright thing (with an assist from Bill Ayers). Despite the media’s attempt to cover for him, there is no good reason for him to have been in that church for twenty years. Or, to be more accurate, there is no good reason for him to be president if he was comfortable in that church for twenty years. You can’t go to a church like that and be a great uniter and a post-partisan and post-racial president. It’s simply impossible. And the bald-faced lie about Bill Ayer’s just being “a guy in my neighborhood” permanently wrecked any claim to truthfulness he had.

It’s hard to imagine a two-faced liar, with disdain for most of the people he was elected to lead, and an only occasional acquaintanceship with hard work wouldn’t make a good leader. Who could picture that?

Maoism contains the idea that the rural unwashed are the key to overthrowing the bourgie capitalists–that collective action by the non-industrial workers (post-industrial workers in our case) are the vanguard of the Revolution. That demonstrations of the powerless can “speak troof to power”. Community Organizing, Direct-action by the powerless, all that rot….

So when groups of Republicans protest in groups to appeal to the Great Unwashed to join in solidarity against The System, it only validates the idea of collective protest and validates Maoist ideas. Rugged individualists collectively protesting to gain adherents among the rural populations is not only an oxymoron, its a demonstration of the power of Maoist ideas in modern America.

The original Tea-party had a point–to economically damage the government who would rapaciously tax. It wasn’t Maoist political theater of the Powerless like the modern “tea-parties” are. The American Revolution was top down–led by those who had the most to lose, not by those at the bottom who had the most to gain.

Inherent to Maoism is the idea that every personal choice is political; that every deed is either pro-communist or anti-communist: what you wear, what you eat, what you drive, what you drink.

Sound familiar?

The personal is not political!

What I find so delectable is this public, or, now, non-profit option to “give the insurance companies competition.”

Unlike a government entity, which can exist for centuries without ever doing anything right a private company, to survive, has to please its customers in order to make a, er, profit.

If the company makes a profit it has to pay taxes.

Some of the taxes will go towards subsidizing its competition, which is trying to put it out of business.

That’s a better Catch 22 than anything Joe Heller came up with.

Gray, would you please elaborate? Thanks.