Is Obama joking?
I wonder what Obama meant by this—other than just a new way to attack Romney:
There was a woman in Iowa who shared her story of financial struggles, and he gave her an answer right out of an economic textbook. He said, “Our productivity equals our income.” And the notion was that somehow the reason people can’t pay their bills is because they’re not working hard enough. If they got more productive, suddenly their incomes would go up. Well, those of us who’ve spent time in the real world ”” (laughter) ”” know that the problem isn’t that the American people aren’t productive enough ”” you’ve been working harder than ever. The challenge we face right now, and the challenge we’ve faced for over a decade, is that harder work has not led to higher incomes, and bigger profits at the top haven’t led to better jobs.
Well, they did laugh.
[NOTE: A portion of Romney’s response is here.
And here is the context of Romney’s original remarks that Obama is referencing.]
Neither kidding nor not kidding. Just one of a thousand similar crapulous examples written for his blather dumps from now until he packs it in.
Well, those of us who’ve spent time in the real world …..
Coming from Obama, whose only “real world” experience in the private sector was a year working for a newsletter before he became a “community organizer,” this is a Bidenesque howler. When the POTUS is compared to Slow Joe, he has come down in the world.
I also view it as another attempt to attack Romney, this time as attacked as the child of privilege who is insulated from the “real world.” The attacks on Romney in the last month have pretty much backfired. What new attacks on Romney will the Demos have in September and October? It seems to me that by then they will have shot all their arrows out of their quiver. Elizabeth Warren can advise us on that . 🙂
Speaking of attacks and Slow Joe, consider the following.The Vice President recently said that private equity guys are no more qualified than plumbers to be president.
But what qualified Obama to be President? Four years ago I compared the job experience of US Senators who later became President, using the following metric: Vice President experience,Cabinet experience, House of Representatives experience, Governor experience, Military officer experience.
There was only one US Senator who became President who scored a 0 for having none of the above experience: Warren Harding. Very few consider Harding to have been a good President.
That also described Barack Obama’s experience.
At least Warren Harding had executive experience, as he ran a newspaper for about 10 years.
Vice President Biden ignored Romney’s term as Governor of Massachusetts. But no one ever accused Slow Joe of being able to think things through. What did Neil Kinnock have to say about the issue? Couldn’t he help Slow Joe through this? 🙂
I guess I’m dense. I had to read that a few times before it made sense.
I thought someone was quoting Obama, til I figured it was Obama quoting Mitt.
Just in case someone else is as dense as I am.
Obama’s campaign is very inept and incompetent so far, even experiencing important Democratic figures disagreeing with him publicly. Are they starting think it won’t harm them when they disagree because he won’t be in power much longer?
I’ve just finished reading “The Amateur” and I recommend it highly. In it, the author points out that many of Obama’s biggest mistakes have been the result of following the advice of Valerie Jarrett who has much influence over both Barrack and Michelle Obama. These mistakes have hurt Obama politically.
Usually Obama has no problem at all throwing someone who hurts him politically under the bus. He hasn’t done that with Jarrett. Makes one wonder what she may have on him that he can’t allow to be made public.
“Obama’s campaign is very inept and incompetent so far,”
Not at all. Quite wrong. The campaign realizes that no campaigning can be done on the “Bread” theme. As a result it is going for “All Circuses all the time.”
Obama’s campaign is very inept and incompetent so far
Isn’t it just characteristic of Reds, though? They show superhuman organization, discipline, and cunning in gaining power, but having achieved it, immediately put one in mind of Laurel and Hardy trying to paint out of the same bucket. (See, e.g., every Communist country that has ever existed.)
It’s as though they’re suited solely for the insurgency role.
Well, those of us who’ve spent time in the real world – (laughter)
Laughter, as well there might be. Obama’s now got a third career option in January besides news anchor or concierge (jobs for which he’s naturally and perfectly suited), he could try his hand at stand-up comedy.
Seriously, how much self-insight would it have taken to realize that he would sound ridiculous saying this to anyone, but most particularly to Romney? Romney made his money diagnosing the treating ailing companies; it doesn’t get much more real world than that. Except for “community organizing,” whatever that is.
““Obama’s campaign is very inept and incompetent so far,”
Not at all. Quite wrong. The campaign realizes that no campaigning can be done on the “Bread” theme. As a result it is going for “All Circuses all the time.””
I agree that they are trying to distract voters away from the failures of this administration on the important issues, but they aren’t even handling the “Circuses” themes well.
Fortunately. Romney isn’t letting them get away with what they are trying to do. He keeps refocusing attention on the lousy economy, the unpopular Obamacare bill, and the ineffective stimulus package. Reminds me of Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign against Bush Senior.
I like Romney’s “He’s a nice guy, but he’s out of his league.” approach. Eventually, that’s gonna get to the egotistical Obama and it will cause some harmful Obama errors and gaffes. And it lets independents, young voters, and Reagan Democrats “off the hook” for voting for him before so they can feel emotionally comfortable with voting for a Republican this time.
The real world? Democrats either want to pretend the economy is great ,a href=”http://ajwink.blogspot.com/2012/05/happiness-index.html” title=””>even though it’s awful, or they admit it’s not great only so they can try to blame Bush for Obama’s awfulness.
(Sorry about the broken link above, not sure how that happened… let me try again.)
The real world? Democrats either want to pretend the economy is great ,even though it’s awful, or they admit it’s not great only so they can try to blame Bush for Obama’s awfulness.
Democrats either want to pretend the economy is great
Read last week’s Newsweek. Boom times, baby, boom times!
I keep wondering if Mitt has a mole or three at the highest levels of Obama’s campaign. Hmm, let’s go after bullying, then Bain, then, capitalism. It is like Mitt’s campaign is not just prepared, it seems to be getting attacks directed right where it wants them. What are they going to attack next, that Mitt is actually a pleasant man? Wo-wo-wouch! I’m not even going to vote for Mitt, if I truly dislike Zero. It just seems so calculated. Is Zero trying to simply retire without actually retiring? Is it the D’s turn to lose? Dunno.
I think I’ve seen this before. Bull, red flag, sword(s), meat for the poor. Who is waving the red flag though?
BHO is counting on the MSM to carry his water. He’s betting that at least 50.01% of the voters are spellbound by his messiah image and therefore the content of his campaign speeches is far less important than his messiah image. However, the MSM has lost much of its ability to shape public opinion and I think more than 50.01% see the naked messiah. By October there will be more than a few democrat incumbents who will not want to be seen within 100 miles of BHO. This election is Romney’s to lose and right now he is running a competent campaign.
Off-topic, but I’m just checking in to let everybody know I’m still alive. I’ve been living at NASASpaceflight.com for the last few days.
The fun thread is here: OMG it’s the SpaceX Party Thread!
Here is the current update thread: LIVE: SpaceX Dragon COTS Demo (C2+) FD2 and FD3 UPDATES. A Flight Day 4 update thread will be created sometime tonight. This will be the big day, when Dragon will hopefully berth to the ISS. It has been performing beautifully so far. It’s a brand-new spacecraft on a very complex mission.
They tend to frown on commenting on the update thread unless you have actual information to contribute. Hence the party thread.
I got about two hours of sleep last night, and then had to work today. I took a vacation day for tomorrow.
One of the pleasant side effects of following this mission is that I’ve been too busy to think or care about depressing political crap.
We wouldn’t need higher incomes if the government was capable of restraining itself. I wonder what Obama thinks will replace over 10% of the economy currently financed through debt accumulation. His sleight-of-hand is unsustainable. He seems only capable of understanding how wealth is consumed and not how it is produced.
OK, one more and then I’ll leave you alone.
Here is a link to a comment I made at PJM on launch day. Forget about my own blatherings, I’m calling your attention to the two videos I linked there. Watch them. You won’t be sorry.
It’s just easier to link to that one comment than link to the two videos again.
n.n,
If you take into account not just the DC annual deficits, but also include state and local government deficits, plus private annual debt accumulation; you find that 25+% of GDP is the creature of debt. This is unsustainable. Its currently only sustainable because of artificially low interest rates and Uncle Ben’s purchase of 60% of all short term T-bonds. Its all Greek to me has been replaced by we are all Greeks. A rough beast approaches.
As i point out, they speak with forked tongues to two groups… to one group, its confusing, to those in the know who have read the same things for the same interests and so on, know what he is saying…
someone has finally gotten around to write about it being written about. 🙂
Obamish By Keith Riler
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/05/obamish.html
Saying “Paul Kengor claims”:
ergo my constant missives to learn what they know to understand the inside jokes that confuse the public, or why they make a move that everyone cant help but say is idiotic, but then forgets where they are.
this has been a stable of the left since the 1800s… where certain words, phrases, images, and symbols reveal things to those in the know, and confuse others, or just through sheer cultural familiarity attracts them now.
All one has to do is look to a list of their groups and committees (soviets. A soviet is a committee the way meme is an idea and vpered and voorwarts is forward) names…
in case you haven’t noticed, many of them are multilingual and love word games, symbol games, icon worship or hinting, and so on.
the paragraph has a completely different meaning depending on what you know or dont know about the terminology and the definitions they use…
think of it this way, most of us know one kind of double speak…. but this is another form of double speak based on double definitions that they have and most others don’t.
think of it as these verbal additions give them an expanded vocabulary, and allows them to pretend they are superior for their knowing the meanings and others just not getting it.
next post… the translation…
The first sentence containing the phrase: “Our productivity equals our income.” is recalling December 2011, in Mason City Iowa… To those watching the game in detail it brings up a CLASSICAL marxist position. The woman’s company moved from where she lived to five hours away and she wanted to know how to keep jobs where they were…
To which Romney said: “Sometimes it’s counterintuitive the term is called productivity. Output per person, our productivity equals our income.”
To “those in the know” this is a Marxist story illustrating the dialectic and the failure of capitalism.
Romney is hinting at the concept discussed by Schopenhauer — capitalisms “creative destruction”, and there is no easy way for him to explain that what is efficient for the company may not be what is good for all the entities that participate in it.
He is speaking to those in the know who can hear his language, and making fun of “Schumpeter’s gale”, he and the others are reveling in their “duping delight” and that they are special, smarter, and “in the know” (And these fools remain fools and do not even try not to be). That because they can hear this other set of threads they feel they are “more aware”, and have a “higher consciousness” and so anointed.
To those in “the real world” Shumpeter was wrong, and Hegel was right with his concept of sublation . When thesis and antithesis interact, what happens is called sublation. Aufhebung
Mikhail Bakunin: “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!”
And point out that Marxists think destruction comes first, and then creation happens.
Schumpeters idea is different temporally, in that the creative act comes first, and the destruction is caused by a shift to it. (and so the outcomes to people are unavoidable if one is to move forward — so in Hegelian fashion forwards means stop)
Suggested reading: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Schumpeter
And suffice it to say that they are cargo cultists and so believe the destruction can cause creation, not that creation causes the destruction… so like the twelvers and others, they believe that they can create conditions and those conditions spontaneously create outcomes. Ie. if they create the destruction of the world for told would occur when X arrived, then X will arrive. NOT that they will just create extra desctructive events and X will arraive when X arrives.
They have a clue as to emergence, but their actions to create the outcomes verge on magical. They are what they claim the other side is as they know nothing else.
[edited for length by n-n]
“..for those who spend time in the real world..”
Y’all tell us’suns whut all that Real World s**t’s about, Yer Majesty. The Ass’t Night Shift Mgr. position you held at that Circle-K Mini Mart taught you about leadership, budgets, follow thru and ‘hood holdups…Right, Bamm-o? Ohhhhhhh.. My Baaaad..You never had THAT MUCH experience!!
You, Mister Boy King, are a punk, a liar and a pig. We can smell that desperation to hang on to that cool Oval Office for 4-more catastrophic years. So, the slime is going to be continuous, ain’t it? Doesn’t matter, Mr.Messiah, cuz you’re going down in November by 40+states.
Double speak conversations are common among humans all through history and all over the place. It was common among the wealthy to refer to things in literature, which they would know, and the unwashed masses of uneducated dolts would not.
Most people do not even realize this… at least not in a way in which they incorporate it into their thinking on issues. They may have been shown it, and seen it as a cool curiosity, and then that is it. However, it is literally all over the place.
this ART of doing this is called STEGANAGRAPHY…
“Hiding a secret message within a larger one in such a way that others can not discern the presence or contents of the hidden message.
So when someone asks… What is the sound of one hand clapping… all the uneducated dolts come up with what amounts to comedy of the intellectual sadistic kind of watching a fish flop around. (Something I never enjoyed and thought of it for what it was, sophisticated bullying and self-aggrandizement, creating US vs THEM along intellectual lines).
For edification, the “right” answer is “enlightenment” and refers to a Zen Koan where the subject in the story gains enlightenment but loses his arm…
If tree falls in the forest does it make a sound, has to do with being properly educated in the MEANINGS of terms and using them correctly… most will argue wrongly on it, or argue that the wrong is right RATHER than accept they were not truly understanding what was being said because their definitions of the words are blunt, where these intellectual bullies use language as a sharp weapon. Ergo my disdain for (what passes for) wit (and tends to be sadism).
Since words don’t actually hurt… sticks and stones and all, a smart person can flay a person in front of a crowd of which only those in the know can see the slicing and dicing, and the others can’t…
Here are other examples of inserting messages or things into other things for only those in the know, illustrating the common penchant of the intelligent to play games and have inside jokes.
But as with inside jokes, the descent into cruelty is easy if ones sense of humor is at others expense (and the joker is too chicken to act openly).
Thoreau: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation
Pink Floyd: Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
Take a look at Holbein’s portrait of the Spanish Ambassadors…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hans_Holbein_the_Younger_-_The_Ambassadors_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
its one of the more obvious versions of this kind of thing… in the painting you see two men, and what amounts to a still life arrangement on a table. In the center of the image on the bottom is a horrid swatch of brown, black and ivory…
well, if you can take that image and rotate it to see it a certain way, this is what you see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holbein_Skull.jpg (there are other amazing things inside his paintings too, like real music in the books, the map on the globe being accurate for its day, etc)
the skull was rendered in anamorphic perspective… it’s a visual puzzle, but also was a way for artists to insert opinions, a “momento mori”, and such without necessarily getting killed by the people who could not see it. there are other examples where if you put a shiny cup or cylinder in the right place, you see the image correctly.. here is an more modern example which illustrates how the work has to be done… you don’t look at the work, you look at the reflection, and it takes quite a bit of practice before your brain builds up the ability to transpose well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anamorphic_art_toy_by_OOZ_%26_OZ.jpg
here is another… take a look at the excerpted image from the Sistine Chapel titled, “the Creation of Adam”… on the left you have Adam, and god giving adam a “soul” (the power to reason)… what is the shape around god and that makes up his form? Michealangelo illegally dissected bodies, so unlike other contemporaries who did not do that, he knew what parts inside looked like… the image is thought to be that of the brain and its stem… reinforcing the idea that the soul of reason — is what god gives us..
And before you say its just coincidence.. it has a lot MORE in it that one knowing more would know… the green sash of god, follows the vertebral artery… the optic chiasm can be seen as well.
[I don’t know if anyone notices it, but what I am fighting here is the idea that if someone knows more they are superior… so to those that call me arrogant, I am arguing that my knowing more is NOT something that makes me superior in anything but knowing or memorizing more. It does not give me or someone else the right to control others lives, and so on!!! our CONDITIONING in equalism has us reflexively attacking any slight expression of something without details or reason. Ie. we instinctually jump to the conditioned response given to us without thinking and parrot what we should do… if someone challenges us to think, we may “wake up” and realize that, that si what we are doing… the speech is about celebrating knowing, but the conditioned actions and response is to cut down the tall poppy!!!! We respond to the physical more than the lingual as that came first]
Here is another fun one (and maybe I will inspire neo to do a side post on great works of art with stuff in them that people just don’t know…)
The statue of David is 13 feet tall… so why is his penis 5 inches long? Well, its DAVID… as in DAVID and Goliath… the secular forget that is the reference… if you can see a close up image of Davids face… he basically is scared out of his wits… and so anatomically, he is correct (at least until the fight starts).
One of the most famous paintings to see things in is the Last Supper…
Mark off where the dinner rolls in the painting (as well as the hand of Christ and others) are… its is thought that they may be a musical arrangement. Much as Irish woven designs were also music arrangements in another form! Also, the knits and knots on a sweater can tell a story and or the name of someone. When sailors went to sea, the sweater they wore would allow them to be identified like dog tags (and if you have EVER seen a real body that’s been in the water, thank Hollywood for saving you from THAT realism).
[edited for length by n-n]
Those of us who have spent time in the real world know how easy it is to get paid millions for an autobiography we didn’t write about a life we didn’t live.
But don’t blame Obama. All of us in the real world know how a meal of undercooked dog can ruin your whole day.
stan…Correction: TWO autobiographies of his meaningless life.