Obama: don’t blame me for stopping the White House tours!
Obama’s tendency to pass the buck was one of the very first things I ever noticed about him. It’s one of his strongest and deepest character traits, and one of his least attractive. But apparently, it’s always worked for him.
For some reason, it all makes me think of this:
Obama spent the past 4 years blaming the evil Bush and will spend the next 4 years blaming the evil republicans. All the bad things that happen are not his fault. He’s just an innocent bystander. He continually plays the victim card. I concluded the media gives him a pass because of his color. Innocent black man victimized by evil white man fits the liberal narrative. You believe the narrative and ignore the facts.
President Obama is getting a bum rap for cutting Whitehouse expenses by canceling tours of the Whitehouse. His golfing weekend in Florida, also paid out of Whitehouse expenses, has been cruelly portrayed as a ‘vacation’ when it was really a charitable act to help rehabilitate Tiger Woods. For anyone who may doubt this, please note that shortly after receiving the support of President Obama, Tiger Woods won the WGC-Cadillac tournament. The school children who are complaining that their vacation plans for visiting the Whitehouse have been cancelled should be made to realize how selfish they are being.
To accept blame is to appear weak
“Strong Men” cant appear weak – ESPECIALLY TO WOMEN
ergo Putin and every socialist showing their own machismo. Passing the blame is a sign of strength, when it doesn’t stick. Nothing sticks to a powerful man, which is a indication of their power.
Don’t believe me? Ask the Teflon Don…(Jon Gotti)
Now who taught you that telling the truth and being contrite in a leadership role was good?
If you work through proxies, there is always someone else to take the fall, and you can always take the credit… and nothing sticks.
i brought it up LONG ago…
Big man (political science)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_man_%28political_science%29
Examples: (not comprehensive, as there are many that belong on it, that are not on it, including Prime Minister Raila Odinga (related to the president), General Idi Amin, and many more)
Mobutu Sese Seko
Papa Doc Duvalier
Saparmurat Niyazov
Saddam Hussein
Nicolae CeauÅŸescu
Suharto – President of Indonesia from 1967 to 1998.
Big man (anthropology)
A Big Man’s position is never secured in an inherited position at the top of a hierarchy, but is always challenged by the different big-men who compete with one another in an on-going process of reciprocity and re-distribution of material and political resources. As such the Big Man is subject to a transactional order based on his ability to balance the simultaneously opposing pulls of securing his own renown through distributing resources to other Big Man groups (thereby spreading the word of his power and abilities) and redistributing resources to the people of his own faction (thereby keeping them content followers of his able leadership).
a formalization of a natural system our biology bows to.
Dictatorship may take the form of authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
Authoritarianism is a form of social organization characterized by submission to authority as well as the administration of said authority. In politics, an authoritarian government is one in which political authority is concentrated in a small group of politicians. It is usually opposed to individualism and libertarianism.
neopatrimonial state
Neopatrimonialism is where patrons use state resources in order to secure the loyalty of clients in the general population. It is an informal patron-client relationship that can reach from very high up in state structures down to individuals in say, small villages.
Neopatrimonialism may underlay or supplant the bureaucratic structure of the state in that only those with connections have the real power, not those who hold higher positions. Further criticisms include that it undermines political institutions and the rule of law, and is a corrupt (but not always illegal) practice. Neopatrimonialism also has its benefits, however. Neopatrimonalism can extend the reach of the state into the geographical and social peripheries of the country, provide short term stability, and facilitate communal integration.
It is a system in which an office of power is used for personal uses and gains, as opposed to a strict division of the private and public spheres.
Prebendalism
Richard A. Joseph used the term to describe the sense of entitlement that many people in Nigeria feel they have to the revenues of the Nigerian state. Elected officials, government workers, and members of the ethnic and religious groups to which they belong feel they have a right to a share of government revenues.
Joseph wrote in 1996, “According to the theory of prebendalism, state offices are regarded as prebends that can be appropriated by officeholders, who use them to generate material benefits for themselves and their constituents and kin groups…”
As a result of that kind of patron-client or identity politics, Nigeria has regularly been one of the lowest ranked nations for political transparency by Transparency International in its Corruption Perceptions Index
and all this is nothing if you don’t know Max Weber
Maximilian Karl Emil “Max” Weber was a German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself. Weber is often cited, with é‰mile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as one of the three founding architects of sociology.
how many know about this guy?
want to bet the leftists in leadership positions do?
lets see if this gives ya a tingle up the back:
Weber was a key proponent of methodological antipositivism, arguing for the study of social action through interpretive (rather than purely empiricist) means, based on understanding the purpose and meaning that individuals attach to their own actions. Weber’s main intellectual concern was understanding the processes of rationalisation, secularisation, and “disenchantment” that he associated with the rise of capitalism and modernity and which he saw as the result of a new way of thinking about the world.
Weber is perhaps best known for his thesis combining economic sociology and the sociology of religion, elaborated in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism….
Antipositivism
Antipositivism (also known as interpretivism or interpretive sociology) is the view in social science that the social realm may not be subject to the same methods of investigation as the natural world; that academics must reject empiricism and the scientific method in the conduct of social research. Antipositivists hold that researchers should focus on understanding the interpretations that social actions have for the people being studied.
see Occam? they are not failing science, they have a whole science that shows they have to reject empiricism so they can get to the real interpretation underneath.
now, if you dont know that this is their rational basis, and you try to argue them back to empiricist thinking, and you have no idea of this stuff, and they do.
they will look down on you as not having any rational arguments in the context of what they academically know that is beyond empiricism…
cute… eh?
now how you going to teach them to regress when you have no idea they have gone forwards?
Positivists typically use research methods such as experiments and statistical surveys, while antipositivists use research methods which rely more on ethnographic fieldwork, conversation/discourse analysis or open-ended interviews. Positivist and antipositivist methods are sometimes combined.
see? its not crazy, its all well thought out and explained IF you had attended the courses you would know… and if not, well, your not worth listening to as the absence of including all this in discussion, would show you as not edumacated properly and so really cant contribute.
anyone who writes papers and contributes knows that your work has to extend current thinking, not ignore whole branches of it… right?
anyway… that should be interesting reading for most
He’s been doing this a lot for quite a while, and somehow he seems to be betting worse at it. Could it be that a number of the rest of the people are catching on to him?
Some percentage, perhaps not as high as Romney’s 47% will never hold BHO accountable for anything. But I think more and more people are realizing he’s not a leader and instead is a perpetual campaigner.
“This game is getting f*cking stupid.”
http://www.ace.mu.nu/
Obama: The “It Wasn’t Me” President
–LauraW.
Four years without a budget, vastly spiraling debt, credit downgrade, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the sequester…you can ask an Obama supporter about numerous recent actions and events of this government and they will deny that Obama had anything to do with it.
Then if you ask this person if Obama is doing a good job, they will express giddy support for all his good work for which he cannot be held responsible.
Previously, Janet Napolitano smarmily said that sequester cuts left the administration no choice but to release waves of illegal immigrants who had been detained for breaking other laws.
Then when that decision sparked a backlash, she said it had been made by some faceless drone “…in the field.”
And now that the decision to close White House tours has been called out as a similarly obvious (but less dangerous) ploy, Obama again deflects responsibility.
——
It’s your sequester and you live in the White House, but you have nothing to do with childishly cutting off tours to punish people?
Please.
President Obama said his administration was looking at ways to resume White House tours for school groups.
“This was not a decision that went up to the White House,” noted Obama in an ABC News interview aired on Wednesday, saying the directive came from the Secret Service.
——
The Secret Service says the White House made the decision to cancel the tours. The White House says it was the Secret Service’s idea first.
This game is getting f*cking stupid.
It’s the major press, of course, constantly reframing everything and keeping Obama’s own actions from tainting his record.
They cannot report on an issue without also building in an excuse or cover for Obama within the same article.
It has become reflex now to look for the excuse or fall guy in every news story about this administration’s dysfunction.
Sam L.: you can fool some of the people all of the time.
“Obama’s tendency to pass the buck was one of the very first things I ever noticed about him”
Me too, I’ve been saying for a long time he has a sign on his desk, “The buck passes here”. It’s one fo the most disgraceful traits to have for someone claiming “leadership”.
I was going to write that I don’t understand why nobody in the White House realizes how much it diminishes Obama’s stature to do this over and over. After all, in the real world, most of us know exactly what to think about a boss who blames his subordinates when things go wrong.
However (though, of course, I did write it after all) the problem is that the people who WANT to be fooled about Obama have not gone away and are happy to believe that nothing bad is ever his fault. Plus, there were enough of them to re-elect him. So: he keeps doing it because it’s working really well for him, most of the time.
I’ve been trying hard not to yield to complete cynicism about the American people — but man, it’s getting tough.
neo-neo. not enough people know that Lincoln quote applies to them.
Mrs. Whatsit wrote “I’ve been trying hard not to yield to complete cynicism about the American people – but man, it’s getting tough.”
Go ahead and yield, it is better for one’s health to say nothing of avoiding constant disappointment.
And you know what else is fun? Making up stories about how marvelous Obama memorabilia is when in conversation with Obamites. For instance you can mention that you had an upset stomach once but put a picture of Obama on it and the pain went away. Likewise with toothaches and cancer. My favorite is telling people that I have homicidal tendencies but carrying Obama’s picture around helps me control them and that I know many others who do the same.
Well put. Mrs. Whatsit. Them who want to be fooled will be fooled.
Bob from Virginia Says
And they don’t realize you are putting them on? So much for Demos being the Party of the Intelligentsia. OTOH, that says something about those who consider themselves one of the Intelligentsia.
OK –
More G&S
More Dance
Less Obama
Less Dieting
pleeeese.
Gary Rosen,
Close but no cigar. From http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-harry-truman-said-buck-stops-you_648541.html
Ear Leader has a different take on the holder of the buck at the end of musical chairs, YOU.
Not me! The buck stops >> over there.