What’s Obama got against Vegas?
Twice he’s spoken out against going to that city. Why? Here’s my PJ article in which I speculate on why Obama might have it in for Vegas.
[NOTE: On looking at the comments over at PJ, I notice that some of the commenters find the article trivial and/or petty. And here I thought it would be a relief from my usual heavy weightedness! But I don’t find the topic trivial. I didn’t see it as all that interesting when Obama trashed Vegas once. But the fact that he saw fit to trash it a second time, after having seen the negative response from Las Vegans and the state of Nevada the first time, gave the second incident more significance.]
It’s all about the nanny state. Barry knows what is best for us, and he is going to give it to us good and hard.
I hadn’t really given it alot of thought — I just figured it was an unfortunate gaffe. But after reading your article, I think you may be right. He’s the professor. He’s big on “teachable moments”, so he’s probably using Vegas to impart his wisdom about the virtues of frugality to the unwashed masses.
Part of the stimulus package is intended to be spent on high speed trains, like the proposed magnetic levitation train from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. This is a project long pushed by Dingy Harry, who must own land just under the right-of-way, and somehow (I can’t imaging how) it just crept into the stimulus.
Perhaps Obama’s derogatory references to Las Vegas are nothing more than back handed slaps at Dingy Harry for being a little too aggressive in seeking to skim funds from the stimulus for his own pockets.
Perhaps they were meant as nothing more than a means to putting Dingy Harry in his place. After all, Dingy Harry was one of the first proponents of Obama’s running for the presidency and for that he deserves to be punished. Especially if he has the gall to remind Obama from time to time how he got where he is.
On looking at the comments over at PJ, I notice that some of the commenters find the article trivial and/or petty.
Hahahaha! You ran into the non-libertarian, “big-government”, religious Republicans.
I believe that what is driving the Big-government Republicans so forcefully is their desire to be a preachers/teachers to the great American unwashed, superior moralizers who like to lecture inferior others on what they should do with their money and souls.
I don’t think your point is trivial.
What someone thinks about Vegas is what they think about Freedom: If you can’t trust them with money, booze and lapdances, how can you trust them with guns, votes and free speech?!
It’s the idea that liberals in general have that THEY know better what to do with your money than you do.
Sometimes… that is they case. There are idiots out there doing the following:
1) Getting interest only 100% LTV loans for their homes (well not anymore)
2) Buying more car than they can afford
3) Pulling equity out of their homes to send their kid to college for some non-degree like “International Relations”
4) Buying Pot
5) Paying Barbara Streisand for her music… (kidding!)
So – yes sometimes the government does know better right? 🙂
BUT!
America allows us the freedom to make these mistakes with our money and learn from these mistakes.
This nanny state mentality of liberals comes out in ∅bama’s rhetoric daily.
I think that it’s valuable to learn what our leaders are thinking, and you are trained to read into offhand remarks. You made a good point through analysis.
It’s true that Obama has contempt for Las Vegan and the people who enjoy going there. He was speaking to a Northeastern audience, which is worlds away from Vegas.
You’d easily spend as much going to a Broadway show, but he’s not going to slam that.
He made a mistake, failing to realize that the remark would have a negative effect, but that doesn’t mean that the remark is any less revealing.
He reminds me of the commissars in ‘Dr Zhivago’ saying that Zhivago’s poetry is “personal, self-indulgent and petit bourgeois”.
Now he gets to pick how we spend our free time. And like the Left, he does so through mockery and ridicule, as he did with the clingers. You nailed it; the comment on PJ missed it.
I’m with you, Neo. These Vegas mistakes do tell us something about The World According to The Won. The social signals that divide the unwashed masses from his peers are firmly planted in his brain and they pop out at inconvenient times when he is trying to lecture us.
This is not a trivial issue because you can’t deal with Obama on major policy issues. He takes all sides of all of them. You have to deal with how he is likely to act. Obama is Jello that can’t be nailed to a wall. You have to try to catch him as he slithers, before he falls and ruins the rug.
Bill West: Obama was speaking in Nashua, New Hamphsire, which is a bit different than New York or Boston, although it does have its share of transplants. But I bet there are a lot of folks in Nashua who wouldn’t mind a little Las Vegas action right about this time of year.
Of course, come to think of it, that might have been the ones least likely to attend Obama’s Town Hall meeting.
Maybe Obama is punishing Reid for not passing ObamaCare.
This is how Obama tries to do populism- by building up anger against an activity or group of people. See: Banks, bitter gun-clingers, Republican obstructionists, insurance companies, and now going to Las Vegas. He doesn’t know any other way to connect other than trying to rally everyone against something. In grade school, he was likely the kid who hid his insecurities by pointing out others’ insecurities and rallying everyone to make fun of them. How cool he must have been.
He’s blowing it bigtime. If he actually understood American culture, and respected it, he would know not to be derogatory about Las Vegas. Americans love Vegas. Everyone wants to go there for three days, even I would love to go to Vegas, especially now that it’s freezing, and I am terribly snobby and am often insufferably highbrow. But hey Vegas! Wohoo, I’m there!! But he doesn’t understand this. So he thinks he’s getting points, and being cute and funny and satirical and blah blah blah, and oh so sophisticated and urban, but he’s just alienating people. And for someone who has completely mortgaged our economy to the Chinese government, of all things, well, he’s hardly one to talk about thrift.
I noticed he doesn’t seem to be talking to the folks who bought houses with no down payment, iffy income, and mortgages they couldn’t afford. I seem to remember something about the democrats demanding people who couldn’t afford houses be given bank loans anyway because that would more “fair”. No, he didn’t seem to talk about any of that. And so it goes.
Julia NYC Says:
If he actually understood American culture, and respected it, he would know not to be derogatory about Las Vegas. Americans love Vegas.
He may not even fully know it, but I’m afraid Obama’s proven intent is to treat America and Vegas just like he’s been treating, say, the Marine “Corpse”.
Obama’s America is far different from what the majority of Americans experience or know. His America can be found in a very few area codes scattered about the map. He speaks to and for those folks. The rest is to him like that New Yorker magazine cover showing New York, Los Angeles and a couple of points in between and identifying the open areas as no-mans land.
It is interesting that he’s chosen to rag on Vegas. Given Vegas’ origins, and connections to AFL-CIO and eastern based organized crime, and his own connections to a somewhat diluted form of the same, one would think he might have picked another locale to disparage. Also, he’s become a saint to a culture that has a well earned reputation for the reverse Midas touch. So for him to be lecturing “America” about wise usage of money and how it’s spent, well…I guess you have to be a fan of his to understand what he’s talking about, because I certainly don’t
J Peden,
Obama was referring to a corpsman which is not a Marine.
It’s a Navy person who is equivalent to a nurse – provides medical care (lots of training).
Obama is mispronouncing the word big time. It sounds like coreman.
Your points were not trivial in the slightest. In fact, they caused me to ask: Is Barack our Strelnikov?
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