Obama is heavy bored
Many of you may have already encountered this 2008 remark by Valerie Jarrett about Obama:
“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. ”¦ He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability ”” the extraordinary, uncanny ability ”” to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. ”¦ So, what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. ”¦ He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”
We talk a lot about Obama’s ego, and rightly so. But if Jarrett’s perception is correct (and she’s the adviser closest to him, and has been at his side for more or less his entire political life), then the worst sentence in her chilling quote may just be this one: “He’s been bored to death his whole life.”
Think about it. Jarrett is saying that as a compliment, not an insult. Boredom, however, is not a sign of intelligence (unless one is sitting in a classroom learning something one already knows). Perhaps Obama thinks he already knows everything? Perhaps he is depressed? What on earth could make a person bored his or her whole life, not to mention bored “to death?”
There’s the beautiful world of nature. There’s art and literature and love. There’s always-fascinating history. There’s friends and family. There’s the challenge of studying and observing people and their almost-endless foibles and crochets. There’s everything on earth and everything in the universe.
Of course, this is just Jarrett’s perception of Obama. But it’s hard to believe it doesn’t reflect a certain reality. What it really puts me in mind of, however (because I’ve got all those old poems floating around in my head), is poet John Berryman’s “Dream Song 14,” published in 1964.
Yep, that’s what I said. Take a look:
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) “Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have noInner Resources.” I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
Neo, now if the study of literature, art, history and nature all dealt with Obama and only Obama then Obama would not be bored by it.
It’s all those unimportant distractions that bore, can you blame him, being so superior et al?
Speaking as someone who actually was bored to tears through 13 years of public school, I can tell you that people who actually ARE smart (not people who just think they are like Obama) are the LEAST bored people in the world. There is always something to learn more about, and bored people are usually the dumb ones who just want more and better TV shows.
Obama clearly wants someone to entertain him, he can’t get out there and intellectually stimulate himself. Or maybe that is not true, it is just Jarrett’s impression of him. In that case, it speaks poorly of Jarrett’s intelligence. If she thinks smart people are bored, then she must be bored and think she is smart.
Smart people are never bored.
Boredom is a symptom of spiritual stagnation.Turning outward to the mystery of this life,one can only be amazed.Being turned inward is death.
He is bored by the world because it is not as interesting as he is.
Jarrett is the hand inside the puppet. She escapes scrutiny at our own peril.
“Boredom, however, is not a sign of intelligence (unless one is sitting in a classroom learning something one already knows). ”
Neo:
The problem may well be one of perception, or more accurately, arrogant perception. One may also be bored out of the conceit that they BELIEVE they already know. Is the man so deeply struck on himself that he concludes “I already know that” in which case arrogant perception becomes self-deception and self-imposed ignorance. What a pathetic human being. This is a man who imagines that every time he opens his mouth it is an opportunity for all in earshot to gain wisdom.
What is stunning is the way so many around him facilitate this conceit from the press to Valerie Jarrett to the Vice President. It’s the Emporer’s New Clothes in real time.
Boredom of everything is undisputed symptom of clinical depression, or of spiritual emptiness, which is essentially the same.
It’s downright frightening that someone could write that in a long drawn-out compliment! He certainly doesn’t surround himself with smart people, does he…
I’d vote for spiritual emptiness.
I’m with JuliB with this.
I see no evidence of high intellect with Obama. I don’t doubt he’s fairly smart, since he’s a lawyer and must have passed the bar, but beyond that he doesn’t seem to have much.
John Lott met him at the University of Chicago, and commented the Obama told him “you are the gun guy?” and afterwards pretty much avoided discussion. Obama did not persue debate or discussion. It was as if he was content to have a wall around his ideas, and not risk hurting those ideas in any contest of intellect.
There’s just nothing to admire about this guy.
Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t that the description of a teenager? As we mature, we learn that no matter how smart we think we are, there is always something we don’t know. No matter how perceptive we think we are, there’s always something we missed. No matter how well we think we read people, they’ll always surprise us.
Only the cloistered mind of those protected from the ravages of the wider world can entertain such certainty. For once you enter the mass of the unwashed, the only constant is change. The only certainty is that you can never truly know.
My father used to work for a state agency trying to place welfare clients in jobs. He said that without exception all the high school dropouts had the same excuse: “I was bored.” Evidently Obama feels the same way.
I want cosmic justice: I want Barack Obama exposed as the sham he is. I want his mask to fall off in front of everyone. I want his ignorance, stupidity, bigotry, and narcissism made plane.
Boredom is the last refuge of the sluggard and the coward.
Barry’s bored because he doesn’t have the intellectual resources to entertain himself.
He knows exactly how smart he is. … He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is.
No wonder he’s depressed.
Believing one to be far, far above the hum-drum concerns of mere humanity is a sure sign of clinical narcissism.
Which is the same as being emotionally frozen at age six.
And spiritually dead.
I go with Sergey & JuliB on the “spiritual emptiness” option. When I read the John Berryman poem, it brought to mind the medieval concept of “acedia” – which is a kind of spiritual apathy. In Obama’s case, though, I think it’s an expression of his narcissism. Everything’s boring that isn’t him. At the core of him, he must know at some level, is a great emptiness and the world can’t really satisfy or fulfill it.
Seriously, Jarret’s encomium to Barry reads like a dullard’s notion of what an intelligent person is like.
It boils down to, “He’s always thinking thoughts and stuff.”
What on earth could make a person bored his or her whole life, not to mention bored “to death?”
Never finding that something that challenges you that you can handle that you don’t master then have to find another thing…
My whole life has been a fight against boredom.
However I KNOW that Jarret is wrong, and she is basically either lying or saying what she things she should say about someone SHE believes is a genius, or what people EXPECT them to be. real ones are never what you expect and often are odd or scary (if your the type to think that odd leads to knowing the wacko that does something).
remember the cargo cultists dont actually believe in differences or that genius is a real thing or talent etc… they believe we are homogenous. and so any position can be occupied by anyone and so all you have to do is construct the image and role. in this way, they make idiots into geniuses, and geniuses into idiots and crazies. (as said recently to a friend, if Einstein was never published would he have turned into that sad crazy man down the block no one understands and avoids?)
My knowledge comes from trying to tame the demon. its always hungry, never tires, and once it understands something or some puzzle, it wants some other one that it can work on. so its chewed on science, biology, chemistry, philosophy, religion, history, politics, economics, electronics, engineering, photography, journalism, fine arts, painting, languages, histories of other countries, and anything that i dont know that i can find…
you see.. if he really was that way, then he would have read and been through so many of those things… and so would never say 57 states, or share the wealth, or that Austrians speak other than German, bow, and lots of stuff.
Sociopaths/Narcissists are mostly cargo cult posers. They lie and fool too much to actually have the actual ability acquired through study, so they fake it.
They are very good fakes and funny enough, faking it often works when there are other semi competent people around to take up the slack (and are allowed to do so).
Also, those around them tend to vouch for them and they tend to avoid anything that reveals the game. when effective they build this clique of often defective people, who realize if they don’t uphold the sham, their sham falls apart too. Call it the sycophantic ladder.
when it happens in companies, the companies fails and does bizarre things to recover. gets into lots of lawsuits over its methods, games, etc. these types often will jump to something else before what they did is known, or to cover it. (Carly fiorina comes to mind)…
They rule, not lead.. but they don’t see a difference. they think all the great leaders were followed because of their title, or the fear of the punishment, not because they are great leaders…
they are very surprised when they achieve some office, or place, and the people below don’t snap to order, are difficult, have their own ideas, want to climb up too, etc..
By the way, another point is that the more i read and learn and feed the demon, the more amazing the world, and things in it, and all that stuff… NOT LESS…
to those feigning competency the details are noise, and the more complicated something gets, the mroe noise it is to them…
to those with real competency, the noise is music, it has rules, its surprises, its orderly. its constantly wispering new things to you. It shows you amazing things that others dont have time for, or are even able to see if someone else doesnt show them.
i have walked with people with cameras because they wanted to learn to take pictures like me… it never fails, that when we come back, i have amazing shots that they never saw, and only remember where they were in retrospect…
to be bored of the noise is to be bored with the music of life (because you dont understand it)…
this should excite him..
he wont be bored soon…
China, Russia quit dollar
China and Russia have decided to renounce the US dollar and resort to using their own currencies for bilateral trade, Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin announced late on Tuesday.
What Jarret is describing is someone incredibly devoid of creativity.
artfldgr,
Thanks for this insight into your personal space.
I had a school chum, they said his IQ was very high, who was bored because understanding things was too easy for him. Had there been advanced placement or had his parents been able to get tutors to present challenging information, his life might have turned out differently.
He spent his life as a misfit, became an alcoholic and died quite young. His only interest in his adult life was going to Mensa meetings.
It’s good to know you are listening to, and humming along with, the music of life. As long as there are new ideas, new theories, new things to study and learn, we can all try to hear the music and profit from its beauty.
Barack Obama seems unable to hear the music. Meh!
Too bad that when he got bored with being a community organizer, that he didn’t go work with the poor, sick, elderly, etc. I think he would find a lot in life to be of worth.
I only went to one Mensa meeting, and I was bored! They all wanted to play board games, which, in our family we call “bored” games.
When I was teaching Sunday School, I found that the kids who were bored were those who had too little background to understand what we were doing. It was a small class with a broad age spectrum, so I had quite a challenge, keeping them all stimulated, at their different levels. However, the more educated and intelligent kids were easier than the lower IQ and lower school achievement kids.e.g. Jesus was, among other things, a pretty funny guy, Who made puns in Aramaic and Greek. Since I don’t speak Aramaic, I had to rely on the work of others, but at any rate, the bright kids could understand them, and the slow ones could not. Likewise, the soap quality of a lot of the stories in Genesis and Kings made for a great deal of mirth, mingled (I hope) with piety, that only the sharp kids could appreciate. The current President’s idea of humor is the semi-secret middle finger salute. I knew that kind of kid, too, in school and elsewhere. The humor, such as it was, was the expression of anger, not joy. That anger is typical of people who feel themselves intellectually out-classed.
If he did not hold such power, I would truly feel sorry for him.
That’s it! Obama is Hedley Lamar (My mind is a raging torrent..) and Biden is Mr. Taggart of “Blazing Saddles”! We are the Johnsons of Rock Ridge. Oh where is Sheriff Bart?
“Believing one to be far, far above the hum-drum concerns of mere humanity is a sure sign of clinical narcissism.
Which is the same as being emotionally frozen at age six.
And spiritually dead.”
Someone who doesn’t have respect for others, Obungler doesn’t respect at least 50% of his American constituancy; like Marx, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and how many other radical leftists whose monstrously callous legacy in history began with incompetent, egotistical demagoguery and ended in catastrophic misery and destruction for millions of innocent. Said it before, I’ll say it again, Obama is moslem-communist operative posing as a Christian Democrat. From the age of six till he was returned to Hawaii around age ten, after some of his most emotionally formative years of inculcation by dedicated left-wing ideology and muslim indoctrination; it’s deeply embedded, his inheritance from the left-wing politics of envy to the muslim culture of supremacy, now “emotionally frozen and spiritually dead”.
But don’t blame him, blame all the people who enabled and promoted and used him, and who should have, and should now know better; starting with the criminally pandering MSM, ending with the lethargic masses…
Artfldgr beautifully says,
“By the way, another point is that the more i read and learn and feed the demon, the more amazing the world, and things in it, and all that stuff… NOT LESS…
to those feigning competency the details are noise, and the more complicated something gets, the mroe noise it is to them…
to those with real competency, the noise is music, it has rules, its surprises, its orderly. its constantly wispering new things to you. It shows you amazing things that others dont have time for, or are even able to see if someone else doesnt show them.”
A hint of the poet in that-
Thanks Art!
Now let’s return to The-Chucklehead-In-Chief and his minions…..
Joan of Argghh!
Are you aware of the connection between Frank Marshall Davis and Vernon Jarrett, formerly Valerie’s father in law?
If nothing else, it is an odd coincidence.
http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2010/02/obama-file-96-coincidence-obama-frank.html
http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2009/09/obama-file-84-why-was-obamas-brain.html
… starting with the criminally fawning MSM, ending with the lethargic masses… in between, the craven left-wing political opportunists of the Democratic Party with their pandering special interests…
“If nothing else, it is an odd coincidence.”
Not remotely a coincidence, actually…
Statements like this remind me of watching some kids I coach (shotgun and archery).
You have a few come in who talk about how great they are, no one they know can even come close to them. They won this, they won that, there isn’t anything anyone can teach them.
Invariably they almost always fail and when they do excuses come out. The two most often were they didn’t sleep well last night or the format was so easy that they didn’t bother to try – if it had been a challenge they would have beaten everyone instead of loosing.
Obama sounds like the latter – the Presidency has been so easy he is *really* bored with it and can’t really focus leading to poor results.
Yes, I know this was an adviser but I doubt she came up with that idea on her own. I hear parents say the same things about thier kids when they loose. It usually results in them quitting fairly soon.
Personally I expect either a blowup or a give-up on his part before long. The real whining has started and it is rare that goes on long. For whatever reason people with that personality seem to think everyone will fall over them if they whine about it, only the True Believers will do that, the rest roll their eyes and marginalize them even more. When it not only fails but makes things worse they either blow up or just quit. Indeed, with the amount of golf being played I’m not so sure we are not seeing him grapple with the question of how to quit and keep his “legacy” one that isn’t the worst President ever.
Bored to death…In A Preface to Paradise Lost, C S Lewis contrasts the characters of Adam and Satan, as developed in Milton’s work:
“Adam talks about God, the Forbidden tree, sleep, the difference between beast and man, his plans for the morrow, the stars and the angels. He discusses dreams and clouds, the sun, the moon, and the planets, the winds and the birds. He relates his own creation and celebrates the beauty and majesty of Eve…Adam, though locally confined to a small park on a small planet, has interests that embrace ‘all the choir of heaven and all the furniture of earth.’ Satan has been in the heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole immensity has found only one thing that interests Satan. And that “one thing” is, of course, Satan himself…his position and the wrongs he believes have been done to him. Satan’s monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament…”
One need not believe in a literal Satan, or for that matter be religious at all, to see the force of this. There is indeed something Satanic about a person who has no interests other than themselves. There seems to be a lot of this in Obama.
Bored to death indeed. John Berryman comitted suicide by jumping off a bridge. If this is what Obama is really like, there is cause for alarm.
In reading the Wikipedia article about Berryman, I couldnt help notice the lyrics to the song written about him… could they be about Obama as well?
After the line about being able to fly, I thought about all the heady talk “yes we can” talk about Obama being the one who could make everything prefect. And while “Washington” refers to the river Berryman jumped into, its another entity with the same name into which Barack took a dive.
David, this is what I was trying to say so imperfectly.Thank you.
Well, if being the leader of the free world just isn’t “taxing” enough for him, then I can’t imagine what would be. I guess we’re to infer that he’s failing miserably at this incredibly boring task because it just isn’t challenging enough for him?
Regardless of how close Jarrett has been to him all these years, the truth is probably a lot more mundane. Early on, she bought into the persona he’s been cultivating all his life and she now has a vested interest in maintaining it with the outside world. Whether it’s true or not.
Remember Jarrett’s ringing endorsement of Van Jones? It’s not like she has a track record for being extraordinarily perceptive.
I wonder if Obama is bored now. He has largely surrounded himself with sycophantic ideologues. The few who are not Obama worshipers are marginalized and assigned unimportant tasks. The important duties are turned over to like-minded czars directed by Obama personally. But his policy delusions, when implemented, seem to backfire on him and that should be anything but boring.
Yet I do not believe he is without intelligence of a certain type — the smarts of the cheat, the savvy of the con artist. He is heir to all the fantastic ideology of the Left and is determined to embed those ultimately impracticable principles into the fabric of our government and thus, into our society.
This task is made easier for him by the fact that for at least since the sixties that half the population has internalized many of the left’s cockeyed ideas through the gateways of the MSM, the academics, the intelligentsia and certain parts of our religious institutions.
Yet half the population still cling to the pre-revisionist version of American history, still believe in patriotism, still believe in free markets over socialism and object strongly to being misled and dragged into the socialistic paradise that history reveals to invariably morph into socialistic Hades. The current crisis in socialistic Europe is an historical truth revealing itself.
Socialism cannot sustain itself unless in time it becomes undemocratic and totalitarian in nature. But historically such rigid and ruthless control depends upon a compliant, passive society and America doesn’t quite fit into that template — there’s been too much freedom for too long and so it provides only temporary respite to the would-be tyrant. In the end it must fail and underneath that cool exterior I suspect that Obama is experiencing much anxiety and is bored no longer.
Barack Obama is not the kind of “bored” of a PhD in mathematics stuck in an introductory calculus seminar as his worshipers think. He is the “bored” of a 5th grader stuck in an advanced college class in differential equations who is bored because he doesn’t understand what is going on around him, and knows that he on an unstoppable trajectory towards failure. The job turns out to be much harder than he thought it would be.
I think that the comment about a cargo-cult presidency is dead on. The way Obama talked about the health care bill when he was campaigning for it. He kept saying that it would do all these wonderful things, like cut costs, you would get to keep your current plan, everyone would be covered, etc. And I don’t think he was lying. I think he believed it.
Why would he believe it? He has a cargo-cult view of the presidency. When George Bush said something would happen, it happened. Just like magic. Obama never saw the hard work behind what made it happen. He really thought that the office of the Presidency was so magically powerful that he could bring about change just by promising it. He thought that Congress and the bureaucracy were waiting, ears cocked, for him to tell them what he wanted to happen, and then it would just happen. Just like that. He thinks that way about all successful people. He thinks that CEOs just show up to work in their Cadillacs, putter around the office, then go out for a 3 martini lunch and take the rest of the day off to go golfing. Or at least he thought so.
It never occurred to him that Congress and the Federal bureaucracy have their own agendas, and that he might have to work long and hard to get the things he wants. Now that he has discovered that accomplishing things takes a lot of work, he has lost interest in the job. He doesn’t have the skills to succeed in his job, he doesn’t have the motivation and drive, and he is bored.
And we have to live through two more years of this.
jms: Your comparison of the POTUS’s boredom to the boredom of a fifth grader stuck in a differential equations class is good one. He had never managed even a Dairy Queen, so he had no idea what being POTUS entailed. While he knows how to ride a bicycle, such a skill set is of no assistance in piloting the ship of state.
Sad, but true. And 53% of the country voted for him.
When I read this stuff about Obama’s boredom, for some reason I was reminded of something (the wise and unfortunately neglected) Walter Bagehot once wrote about Thomas Carlyle, in his book “Physics and Politics.” I managed to dig it up – here it is in all of its astute and surgical glory:
“Mr. Carlyle’s books are deformed by phrases like ‘infinities’ and ‘verities,’ and altogether are full of faults, which attract the very young, and deter all that are older. In spite of his great genius, after a long life of writing, it is a question still whether even a single work of his can take a lasting place in high literature. There is a want of sanity in their manner which throws a suspicion on their substance; and he brandishes one or two fallacies, of which he has himself a high notion, but which plain people will always detect and deride.”
Replace “infinities and verities” with “hope and change;” add “or American statesmanship” to “high literature;” and you have, I submit, a pretty good dissection of our man.
The line that always got me was the one about the want of sanity in the “manner” of Carlyle’s writings casting doubt on their “substance.” The thing that rarely ceases to baffle those of us who were never mystified by Obama’s rhetoric is how anyone with the slightest bit of sense could have failed to detect the almost Aguirre-like megalomania in his speeches, and then failed to draw the appropriate conclusions as to their substance.
Maybe we’re just “plain people” (a phrase Bagehot obviously did not use derisively) – and people ensorcelled by the verities and infinities are probably prone to boredom with anything lacking the luster of their “one or two fallacies.”
James wrote “That’s it! Obama is Hedley Lamar (My mind is a raging torrent..) and Biden is Mr. Taggart of “Blazing Saddles”! We are the Johnsons of Rock Ridge. Oh where is Sheriff Bart?”
Perhaps this is the real Obama:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzGPVE7L2iM
jms…”When George Bush said something would happen, it happened. Just like magic. Obama never saw the hard work behind what made it happen. He really thought that the office of the Presidency was so magically powerful that he could bring about change just by promising it.”
Very true, and true not only of Obama but of many of his core supporters. People who have never run anything often fail to understand that executive management is actually a nontrivial skill.
Unfortunately for Obama, we are all becoming bored with him. The same thing, different day. Spend money on that, nationalize this, speak one way and do something else, blame Bush, yada yada.
He is starting to be tuned out, and in two years he will be turned out. And then we’ll see how bored he is with the rest of his life, when he isn’t the center of it all.
BDH wrote “in two years he will be turned out.”
Everyone assumes that Obama will be finished in 2012. I pray for it but 1) after two years of being the worst president in US history and one of the worst leaders of a free people in world history he still has a steady 45% popularity 2) the Republicans right is probably going to nominate Palin, a person unacceptable to the vast majority of the public and guaranteed to motivate a turn out vote for Obama. Say good bye to Pennsylvania and probably OH, CO, NM, MN, MI, WI, along with the mid-Atlantic, New England and the west coast and say hello to four more years. Finally the bad guys know better than disturb what popularity he does have by a hostage like crisis that finished Jimmy Carter. A member of the Iranian government early on said they will not make that mistake again because they want Obama re-elected.
Am I missing anything? I hope I am.
Just to clarify: the Jarrett quote was from 2008, before Obama was elected. There’s been no indication that Jarrett thinks Obama has been bored since becoming president. But she thinks he was “bored to death” all his life before then.
If poetry is to be consulted for a clue in the what’s wrong with this picture? bored game Edward Arlington Robinson seems to pop right out.
Ok. I’ll bite. He was bored when he was the President of the Harvard Law Review? So bored with every single aspect of the law? So bored that he never exercised his privilege of office and published an article?
Or did he know deep inside that he was so far out of his league that he didn’t dare publish an article, or people would find out.
How boring it must have been, like sitting on a gilded throne in an empty room.
To a certain extent, he appears to be a victim of other people’s good intentions. The balance is his own lifetime willingness to play the starring role in a dishonest game.
Boredom is a very bad spiritual sign. Very very bad.
The old monks knew it well. It was acedia.
It is not depression. Depression is a response to it; a self-defense against it. It is worse than that. It is the noonday devil whispering in your ear and you listening and being lulled to sleep and not being rousable and hating what the devil hates which is everything including the existence of things.
That this man leads America is the single greatest threat she has ever had.
Not from him. He is a poor, sad case.
But that people voted for him. That so many still support him. That many think he has not gone far enough.
It is like we are almost the United States of Mordor.
Never has our danger been greater. It may already be too late.
I think Adrian Day has an important piece of the puzzle — he really does think he knows everything.
I can’t find the quote right now, but before the election, Barack Obama was quoted as saying that he could write better speeches than his speechwriters, that he knew foreign policy better than his foreign policy advisers, and so on. The whole thing came off as incredibly arrogant, and I’ll bet he didn’t even know it.
And I agree that the man had no clue how incredibly difficult the Presidency would be. (It remains my favorite Obama quote: “I like being President. And it turns out I’m pretty good at it.” — Feb. 2009) He’s always been on the outside looking in at executive decision-making, so naturally, it looked easy to him.
I wonder what inanities the man will come up with for 2011. And I wonder if the Congressional Republicans will have the guts to stand up to him.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
To Daniel and the author
I am pleased to find others who see through the farce. Here is mine:
http://ikejakson.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/obama%e2%80%99s-divorce/
OK, your Post tells me that I may as well go the whole hog.
Obama is a fraud and fake combined. The man is a machine with no emotion. I hope that I am not boring you with my musings but this is what I said the other day. It was partly in jest and the other part in disgust:
http://ikejakson.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/obama-was-born-on-a-comet/
Thanks for all your efforts to rid the World of this Imposter.
Anybody read Mike Pence’s speech in Imprimis on “The Presidency and the Constitution?” Quite good! (from hillsdale.edu)
Richard Epstein, who knows him well from U. Chicago and through his next door neighbor, says that Obama does not change his mind! Obama claims to be “a student of history” but knows little, and gets that wrong.
He doesn’t seem to read much. On the Law Review at Harvard, was unusual in publishing nothing. At Chicago, never participated in the faculty discussions at lunchtime –always too busy.
And I’m beginning to think that he–what?– doesn’t seem to distinguish between what is true and what is false. Can this be right? But he says things, and repeats them over and over, that are patently false.
The number of comments on this subject suggests that a lot of us are trying to figure him out.
Daniel in Brookline: I remember this line from Obama that you cited: “I like being President. And it turns out I’m pretty good at it.”
I have not been able to find it in a primary source on Google. That leads me to believe that it has been erased from the site that originally reported it. Which is one problem with the WWW: airbrushing.
Check it out.
I have had the pleasure of spending a few hours perusing your Site and the work that you do; you have my compliments on an outstanding record and I would like to email you, with your kind permission, to discuss how we may benefit from each other, on the one hand, but even more so how we can advance the cause that we both believe in.
In anticipation of your response may I in the meantime offer my link to another aspect which is vital if we want to understand the Obama phenomena? It is rarely touched on by others but I believe it to be at the core of the matter.
http://ikejakson.wordpress.com/2010/10/17/genes-from-his-father-and-his-mother-that-formed-barack-obama/
In both Christian and Hebrew religious tradition ennui is a sin, not just a malady: a show of ingratitude to Creator.
Hasn’t Obama himself said that he was bored by the suburbs and bored by his work in the Illinois legislature? And wouldn’t it be easy to be bored by his leftist circle who haven’t had an original thought in over a century, to say nothing of the Sally Quinn/wagyu beef crowd? It is so much better to hover over all this, convinced of your own superiority. Why lower yourself to an honest exchange of ideas with people who show sympathy with all the clingers? Why sully your grand ideas with the messy contradictions of the real world? Why worry about the messages you are sending to the unwashed of the world? Why should His Brilliance try to creep inside the minds of such people to understand their concerns, their prejudices, their desires, and their plans? Isn’t it far better to simply pronounce the truth and have them fall in line?
Not being of such brilliance, I concern myself now with a few obscure areas on a tiny part of one dimension of the chess board mentioned by Art: Russia. Here are a few things I’ve noticed:
Germany is dependent on Russian gas.
Russia has decoupled its currency from the dollar (along with rival, China)
Russia is now proposing a free trade agreement with the EU.
Russian demographics stink; its AIDS rate is climbing rapidly; its thugs are cracking down on any opposition.
Russia is at the table in dealing with Iran and North Korea.
The independence of Georgia and Ukraine has been curtailed.
Faith in the US has been dented in Eastern Europe by our reneging on the missile defense agreements.
The START treaty disagreement is sucking up a lot of oxygen in the US.
Putin asks the Russian public to suggest names for his new puppy.
Putin is starting an initiative to save the tiger that is playing well with lefts, greenies, and schoolkids in Germany.
I hope I haven’t bored anyone except Barry with my list of unconnected information.
Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone.
So far here, I’ve seen pages and pages of explanations that could essentially be boiled down to…
“Full of himself.”
–
If he’s so goddamn intelligent, why can’t he put himself in positions where he is not bored?
I withdrew from a lot of my high school education, but I can’t say I was ever bored. I simply found books, films and ideas that interested me more. Obama seems to have an incredibly passive way of going through life.
That’s what makes my skin crawl. It’s the idea that the world has an obligation to entertain him, and that he has no corresponding obligation to rouse himself and find something that interests him.
It’s, as if, Ms. Jerod is speaking of a deity.
You will NEVER here a conservative talk about any living being in a similar manner.
This odd Cult of Personality comes so fluidly and so naturally from the left, and it is so foreign and disturbing to us on the right.
The Newsweek Cover we see as being a joke. They take quite seriously.
urrhh…’Jarrett’ not Jerod
Jarrett’s comment could simply have been another brick in the wall of the marketing campaign to appeal to the intellectual pretensions of hipsters. Call it the “Starbucks strategy.”
I can hear it now: “Hey, bro, I get it, I’m smart enough to understand all these great thoughts and stuff Obama has, man, but I guess you’re not. He’s, like, playing 3D chess, maybe 4D now (but at least 3.5 D),and you’re like playing checkers, man. He’s just so far above you, bro, that if you don’t get it, I can’t explain it to you. You just gotta be cool and smart to get him, man.”
Congratulants to all you Folks of America of the 50 States. It does my ancient old heart a lot of good to see so many of you telling Obama and his 57 States to behave.
May I add a bit of humor at this point about FLOTUS getting bored too? She is of the opinion that The Great Barack “must finish what he started” but I get the impression that she ends up sending a few more votes to the GOP every time she opens her mouth. See HotAir Post:
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/11/24/michelle-obama-on-a-second-term-its-important-for-barack-to-finish-what-he-started/
Obama remains his normal arrogant Self and needs to be informed that he must cease with his “Up you, America of the 50 States — I won” attitude.
When someomne like Jarrett who is so close to the President says something we can count on what is actually being said being said to disseminate information that has little regard for accuracy. What is valuable about what is said is what it tells us about Jarrett who just might be the President’s closest advisor. What I hear is a woman who is barely intelligent merely because she actually thinks that the public is going to accept what she says as true. Those who think that Obama is not a very bright guy are partisans whose judgment is affected by their partisinship. Obama is a very bright guy but it is nonsense that he is so much smarter than everybody in every community that he has been involved with (and lets be clear at Columbia, Harvard the U. of Chicago and the upper echelons of the executive branch of the USA there are plenty of men and women who are very, very bright people). And what Jarrett’s bare intelligence tells us is that Obama has a serious emotional problem if he has her so close to him. To my mind, its scary that she has his ear.
BDH:
I quibble a tiny bit with your point that ” in two years he will be turned out”. Out of office, yes; but not out of our lives, not out of our faces. We will turn around and Baraq will be there, always. We are never going to be free of that SOB.
He and Michelle the Wretched will outdo the Clintons and will have perhaps 30 years in which to do it. They’ll be Black icons, hung around all our necks.
> Boredom, however, is not a sign of intelligence (unless one is sitting in a classroom learning something one already knows).
Indeed — I am reminded of a scene in the excellent movie, American Beauty:
Lester’s teenaged neighbor, Ricky Fitts, is talking to Lester’s daughter about a video he filmed, which he’s showing to her. It’s a simple video, nothing more than a lightweight disposable plastic shopping bag, caught in a dust devil or wind eddy and drifting idly this way and that, spinning about randomly.
Ricky, though, sees the magic in the world, and points out that it is as though the bag decided to dance for him, and him alone, so he could capture that tiny bit of the world’s magic for others, and he then points out how wonderful the world is that has such subtle magic in it.
Ricky Fitts: It was one of those days when it’s a minute away from snowing and there’s this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. And this bag was, like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. And that’s the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and… this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video’s a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember… and I need to remember… Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to cave in.
Ricky is the one who is intelligent, not Obama. That Obama cannot look around the world and see how much true magic there is in it — call it God’s hand or just the beauty of the universe’s inherent mathematical intricacy — is the sign of a complete dullard, not a brilliant genius.
> e.g. Jesus was, among other things, a pretty funny guy, Who made puns in Aramaic and Greek. Since I don’t speak Aramaic, I had to rely on the work of others, but at any rate, the bright kids could understand them, and the slow ones could not.
I’ve had this argument with others, and it’s really amazing how many Just Refuse To Get It.
Puns are not “juvenile” — they are INTELLIGENT.
Stupid people don’t make puns. Idiots don’t understand puns.
They are a sign of a mind that is constantly playing with ideas and sounds, manipulating them and juxtaposing them in endless combinations. And English, with all its words and subtly variant idiomatic usages, is perfect for making them.
I’ve always found it interesting that Japanese culture encourages intelligence — While Kanji (pictograms) are fully outmoded (all Kanji can be represented by a short sequence of hiragana/katakana “letters”), it is considered a Good Thing in Japan to know more and more of them — a typical person knows 2000-3000 Kanji, while a “smart” person knows up to 10,000 of them.
Anglo-English culture, however, pooh-poohs its own inherent linguistic sign of intelligence in stark contrast…
Boredom is never experienced by a person who is a problem-solver because, whatever a person’s situation in life, there is always a potential infinity of problems to be tackled, e.g., become a profitable trader, develop a novel scientific theory, grow your own food.
Be very afraid of Obama. If he is bored, he cannot be interested in solving national problems. Certainly during the past two years we have seen little evidence of such interest.
Paul_in_Houston has a three-word explanation for Obama — “Full of himself” — and while I agree, I also find him weirdly empty of himself.
Consider ObamaCare: for months he hectored Congress to come up with something and hectored us to support it — but where were his ideas? He’d supposedly worked toward this achievement all his life — shouldn’t he have had a thought or two as to how it should be done? But no, he had none. Congress was detailed to come up with “His” plan and we were instructed to embrace it. Obama’s only contribution was to complain ad nauseum about how long it was taking the rest of us to accomplish his signature achievement for him — and ever since, to complain about our failure to fully appreciate its brilliance.
No wonder he’s bored. There’s just nothing at all inside him.
“”but where were his ideas?””
Mrs Whatsit
Can anyone imagine Barak helping his daughters make a scrapbook or anything of the sort that required a playful and creative mind? I don’t see any there there.
Gringo; Here’s the source of the quote you were looking for:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/215bpfvr.asp
Mrs Whatsit Says:
November 26th, 2010 at 8:42 am
Paul_in_Houston has a three-word explanation for Obama – “Full of himself” – and while I agree, I also find him weirdly empty of himself.
…
No wonder he’s bored. There’s just nothing at all inside him.
Mam (if it should be “Senator”, I apologize 🙂 ):
I don’t think our assessments are contradictory.
I suspect that when one is so full of his own greatness, there’s simply no room for ideas on how to actually implement his superficial notions of “Wouldn’t it be great if…?”
–
Obama has been chickafied. Something like this:
“Men’s poetry has grown into a gentle art. . . . Perhaps it was Robert Bly who called men inside themselves. Certainly it was Billy Collins and Li-Young Lee who challenged men to notice their vulnerable natures and the intimacy of their relationships. In this fine new tradition lies Bart Edelman. In his latest collection, The Gentle Man, he captures the complexity of the roles men play today. . . .”
Who wouldn’t be bored drinking this kind of vomit.
Ike, what do you think, will Obama bring down the North Korean’s?
Maybe we are about to find out what he’s made of
when the going gets tough.
Cheech, if all else fails take my word North Korea will reduce Him to size and China will applaud with great mirth. And BTW, don’t worry too much about North Korea. They are mere little puppies [which is why it is so funny hearing them calling the Chosen One out] but in the end China will pull the strings on the little puppets in North Korea.
Watch out and stay out of North Korea. China will handle them. You know the Texan saying “Don’t mess with Texas” well, little red North Korea know they can’t and will not mess with China.
In the meantime though, they will work as a team on the boy President and bring him down to size.
Pingback:Ed Driscoll
You may find it interesting that Ed Driscoll has now also weighed in with more highly illuminating views and sources on Obama’s boredom. See:
http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2010/11/26/sleepwalking-through-history-5/
Maybe our Host at this Site can do a Post on the boredom of FLOTUS; only mention it. Hehehe ….
Pingback:The Boredom of Obama « Is This Blog On?
Obama is boring, and stupid.
It was Valerie Jarrett who also said, “Obama is ready to rule” in an interview right before the inauguration.
The reporter corrected her, saying words to the effect of, “Don’t you mean ready to lead”? and she agreed with the reporter, but her first statement is far more telling of how both she and her boss view the Presidency.
Ella Fitzgerald said that she was never bored because she was never boring. No wonder Obama is so bored…