Obama the hypothetical president
David Harsanyi makes some excellent points here about one of Obama’s favorite methods: comparing what he’s done as president with what others might have done, or what might have happened without him.
The economy? May be bad, but just think how much worse it would have been without Obama the Great.
Obama Bin Laden? Wimpy Romney would never have killed him.
This particular approach was Obama’s m.o. from the start. Remember how much and how often we’d hear about the mess he inherited from his predecessor? It was the preparation for this “could be much worse” technique.
As with quite a few things Obama does, I think this is unprecedented in a president, left or right, Democrat or Republican. If any previous president in my lifetime has used this technique with any regularity (or even at all), I simply don’t recall it. There is an immaturity and a lack of the ability to take responsibility in Obama that is really quite astounding, and I think it’s sincere and goes down very deep (if it’s appropriate to use the word “deep” for something so shallow):
Thanks
I want to offer an extra and very heartfelt thank-you to all of you readers who have continued to use my blog as their portal to buying stuff from Amazon. The orders keep dribbling in—at a slower pace than over the Christmas holidays, it’s true; but still, it adds up over time. So don’t think any item is too small to bother with. I know it’s hard to remember to do it, but I deeply appreciate every single effort.
I never know who you are, by the way, because only the items and the amounts come through, not names. But it’s wonderful to see.
Also, every now and then a Paypal donation comes in, even when I’m not having a campaign to pass the hat. That’s wonderful to see too!
Obama: boasts and innuendos
I know that there are plenty of braggarts and liars in politics, especially among so-called “surrogates”–i.e. advisors, campaign managers, official advertisements, PAC advertisements, supporters, and the like. And vice-presidents; perhaps especially vice presidents.
But I’ve never seen—or at least cannot remember—a sitting president sinking quite as low as Obama regularly does these days while campaigning (which is what seems to occupy an enormous amount of his time and energy). And he doesn’t need surrogates; he does it himself, bragging on his exploits and lying—usually in a very subtle manner, by innuendo rather than direct accusation—about his opponents.
What’s got me going this time? The “Mitt-Romney-wouldn’t-have-killed-Bin-Laden-like-I-did” meme that the Obama campaign’s been spouting off on lately.
The first problem is that it’s hypocritical, because Obama has criticized opponents for using this sort of thing for campaign purposes:
This is the same President who once criticized Hillary Clinton for invoking bin Laden ”˜to score political points.’
This is the same President who said, after bin Laden was dead, that we shouldn’t ”˜spike the ball’ after the touchdown. And now Barack Obama is not only trying to score political points by invoking Osama bin Laden, he is doing a shameless end-zone dance to help himself get reelected.
So, what did Obama actually say yesterday? Try this on for size; it was the president’s answer to a press conference question in which a reporter specifically asked about the controversy, mentioning Romney by name:
“I’d just recommend that everybody take a look at people’s previous statements in terms of whether they thought it was appropriate to go into Pakistan and take out Bin Laden.”
“I assume that people meant what they said when they said it. That’s been at least my practice,” Obama said from the East Room of the White House, during a joint news conference with Japan’s prime minister. “I said that I’d go after Bin Laden if we had a clear shot at him, and I did. If there are others who have said one thing and now suggest they’d do something else, then I’d go ahead and let them explain it.”
A particular pet peeve of mine is the use the weasel word “people” when the speaker actually means someone quite specific. In this case it’s undoubtedly Romney to whom Obama is referring, as is clear from the context. Here’s the video for that:
Obama knows that Romney will try to “go ahead and explain it,” but that most people won’t be listening to him. But here, for those who are paying attention, is what Romney said. He’s done plenty of ‘splaining already:
If you missed the origin of this controversy, it comes from an Obama campaign commercial that heaps credit on Obama for Seal Team Six’s raid on Obama’s house, and suggests that Romney wouldn’t have authorized the mission. The Romney quote is, “It’s not worth moving heaven and Earth, spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.” Of course, Romney didn’t say what Obama now claims he did”“that, if we knew bin Laden’s whereabouts and were prepared to kill him, Romney would decline to authorize the mission. Within a few days after the speech from which the quoted sentence came, Romney was asked about it in a presidential debate:
Romney: Thank you. Of course we get Osama bin Laden and track him wherever he has to go, and make sure he pays for the outrage he exacted upon America.
Moderator: Can we move heaven and earth to do it?
Romney: We’ll move everything to get him. But I don’t want to buy into the Democratic pitch that this is all about one person ”” Osama bin Laden ”” because after we get him, there’s going to be another and another.
This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and Al Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate.
They ultimately want to bring down the United States of America.
This is a global effort we’re going to have to lead to overcome this jihadist effort. It’s more than Osama bin Laden.
But he is going to pay, and he will die.
I’m not sure why this particular episode has galled me so much. It isn’t just that Obama engages in this sort of thing—which, after all, is hardly unheard-of in campaigns—but that with so many people his reputation for honesty and uprightness and integrity remains unbesmirched. How does he pull that one off?
Does the allegation that Nancy Pelosi…
…lied about and disguised her prior knowledge and approval of waterboarding surprise anyone?
The people who care and who disapprove are almost certainly those who washed their hands of the abominable Pelosi long ago. People who think she’s great probably could not be dissuaded from that position no matter what they found out about her, and certainly not for something like this;
In his new book, “Hard Measures,” [ex-CIA counterterrorism chief] Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ”˜wrong.’”‰” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
Humor and presidents and aging and…
Now that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has passed, this might be the best time to state that this stuff is undignified and bothers me whoever does it, Democrat or Republican. I’m all for presidential humor, but it used to be a class act. Whatever JFK did in his private life, his jokes were actually funny, and very very tasteful. Same for FDR.
But I suppose that only marks me even further as the old fuddy-dud I have become.
And speaking of age (we were speaking of age, weren’t we?), John Hawkins has a post on what it’s like to turn forty.
I’ve got a reflection on what it’s like to turn—well, whatever it is I’m about to turn: you don’t remember what it’s like to turn forty.
Although, actually, it’s not too dissimilar from turning forty as Hawkins describes that process:
At 40, you actually start to see the trajectory of your life from the present day, all the way to the grave and you start asking yourself some hard questions. Did I pick the right career? Do I want to stay on the same path from now until I die? Am I ever going to fulfill those childhood dreams? What legacy am I going to leave to the world when I’m gone? Am I missing out on anything?…You start to realize that health is a finite resource. So is opportunity. So is energy. So is time.
Except now it’s getting serious.
Kelly Ayotte for VP?
There’s speculation that NH’s Senator Kelly Ayotte might be named as Romney’s VP.
Don’t think so. First of all, that would be an all-New England ticket, not exactly a winner around the country. Secondly, Ayotte—although smart and telegenic and, of course, female—is very inexperienced. I don’t think Romney would go there, just in order to have a woman as running mate and finesse the “Romney is a Mad Man dinosaur about women” routine.
Or would he?
You may or may not remember that, back in January during the New Hampshire primary campaign, I wrote about a Romney-Christie rally I attended. This was the photo I took, and Ayotte is featured prominently, in the red sweater:
WTC: going up!
Today the new and not-quite-finished World Trade Center, called the Freedom Tower, outstrips the Empire State building in height.
That is, if you don’t count antennae. Antennae are a bit problematic in the building-height sweepstakes, and if the Empire State’s antenna is counted, it would exceed the height of the new WTC today but not when the latter is finished.
And then there’s the spire (are you still with me?). A spire is more ambiguous, sometimes counted and sometimes not, depending on the school of counting-thought and whether the spire contains an antenna.
Sheesh.
Here’s a projection of what the new skyline will look like:
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It’s come to this: vote for Obama, he’s cool
Obama’s big campaign talking point is that he’s the cool one. And the MSM seems to agree.
Ah, but you heard it first at neo-neocon. Back in early June of 2008, in a post entitled, “Wanting a cool and sexy prez,” I wrote:
Maybe it’s come down to this: choosing a President is now mostly about style rather than substance.
Obama is cool.
I guess he’s still cool, although I don’t quite see it. But maybe that’s because I’m not cool.
Here’s a little history I wrote in that previous post:
Coolness as a desirable Presidential characteristic may have begun with Kennedy and TV, but it intermittently went into hiding afterwards, or at least became less important. One of LBJ’s problems was that he was perceived as extremely uncool, but it didn’t stop him from trouncing the admittedly also uncool Goldwater. Nixon was popular and was elected to a second term by a wide margin, his polls only tanking because of Watergate. But he was so extraordinarily uncool he nearly made uncoolness into a style all his own:
“I was just helping a person who was in need”
The quote in the title of this piece is from Bobby Green, one of four black people who were heroes in the LA riots of twenty years ago. But there’s no “just” about it; the acts were rays of hope in an otherwise bleak picture.
I remember these people very, very well. They are the sort of heroes that so often emerge in a crisis. Before the events transpire they usually seem quite ordinary, and yet something inside them makes them act in an extraordinary manner.
One of the things about such people is that they almost never see themselves as anything special. Typical comments are “I was just doing what had to be done;” “It was what anyone would do.” But I don’t think that most people would purposely go to the scene of a vicious attack by a mob and try to rescue the victim, as Titus Murphy and his girlfriend Terri Barnett did, and where they encountered other rescuers Bobby Green and Lei Yuille.
Two men, two women, all black, as was the mob attacking white truck driver Reginald Denny and bashing his head in with a brick in a reaction to the Rodney King verdict. Murphy and Barnett had been watching the scene on TV when Murphy had a reaction typical of those brave souls who wade into danger to rescue others [emphasis mine]:
“When this gentleman was getting beat something was just telling me this isn’t right, this isn’t what it’s all about,” he told Yahoo News 20 years later. “When he got hit in the head with the brick something told me to go down there. I just reacted.”
The details of the rescue are fascinating; I’d not read them before:
Murphy saw that Denny had managed to drag himself back into the cab of the truck, which was moving very slowly. Murphy ran to the passenger side and jumped on the running board; he saw a woman named Lei Yuille comforting Denny inside the cab. Just then, a hulking guy named Bobby Green leaped on the running board of the other side. The two stared at each other through the windows, each fearing the other was a rioter.
“I asked him, ‘Who are you? What are you going to do?'” Murphy says. “He said, ‘What are you going to do?’ I didn’t know he was thinking the same thing I was thinking. I figured I had to take him on, he figured he had to take me on. We were both over 6 feet tall. I told him I was going to drive the truck and he said, ‘I’m a truck driver.’ That was the end of that.”
Green jumped in and drove the massive truck a terrifying three miles to the hospital, with Murphy’s girlfriend Barnett guiding the way by driving in the car in front. Murphy clung to the outside of the truck for the entire journey, feigning to be a rioter by pounding on the outside of the vehicle as if he had taken it for loot.
“There were cars approaching us and swinging bats and sticks and guns and stuff,” he said. “I had to pretend that I was part of the riot so that the people in the cars wouldn’t try to take us on or try to take advantage of the truck again. I started beating on the truck like it was mine. The trick really worked.”
From his position on the running board, Murphy was also able to guide Green, who couldn’t see through the truck’s cracked windows. “Each one of us could not carry on the task without the other,” says Murphy. “Bobby couldn’t drive the truck without me on the outside. Mr. Denny was attended to from the inside [by Yuille], and we couldn’t drive the truck without Terry in the front of us.”
The result was a perfect collaboration. “We all came together as a team,” he says. “It was like it was meant to be.”
Although Denny lived, he is permanently brain-damaged.
As for Murphy, in interviews these days he says there’s only one race—the human race—and that he never though of Denny’s race when he rescued him.
And there there’s Al Sharpton, a guy who’s done plenty to foment and capitalize on a very different feeling. He made the usual calls for calm in the wake of the anniversary and the Trayvon Martin killing.
Penny from the block
I was reading the Wiki entry for Penny Marshall, “Laverne” of the TV show “Laverne and Shirley,” when I came across this astounding tidbit:
In the 1950s, she grew up in an apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx on a block that also spawned Neil Simon, Paddy Chayefsky, Calvin Klein, and Ralph Lauren.
Two famous playwrights, two famous designers? And they’re all Jewish except for Marshall, whom I’d always assumed was Jewish but whom I discovered is in fact Italian.
Then again, if they’re talking about the entire Grand Concourse when they write “the block,” it’s loooong. I had a friend who grew up there, but she’s not famous for anything.
[NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on this song, in case you’re not entirely familiar with the oeuvre of Ms. Lopez.]