I found this pithy and trenchant description of the Obama administration at Ace’s:
All the ethical integrity of the Clinton administration combined with the economic acumen of the Carter administration and rounded off with the domestic policy and war-fighting expertise of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
A veritable trifecta of duncedom.
But I would amend it to say that, in all three respects, the Obama administration is substantially worse than these predecessors.
Obama was always a fluid if vapid speechmaker, although his off-the-cuff statements featured a lot of hemming and hawing. But I’ve noticed something that seems new: hesitancy even when he speaks from a prepared text.
Obama now seems to go off-teleprompter more often—perhaps because he’s been critiqued so much for its use—and when reading from notes on a lectern he stops and starts, as well as using a tennis-match-like repetitive back and forth movement of his head.
What’s more, Obama’s disfluencies have an odd cadence, coming at times that seem unnatural, as though he’s distracted and not even thinking about what he’s saying but rather merely reading it from a text he’s never seen before. Is he nervous? Lying? Nervous about lying? Nervous about being caught in lying? Aware that the gift he’s relied on his entire life is going or perhaps even gone, now that he needs it most?
Whatever the cause, I imagine it must be quite frightening to Obama (rather like losing your turns). He’s accustomed to having the magic touch when he speaks, and now he’s become self-conscious, watching every word. Many have remarked on his changed affect, as well; we hear descriptions such as “passionless” and “not properly engaged.”
Here’s a tape of Obama speaking about the Northwest Airlines bomber (we’re still searching for the proper name for the incident; I prefer the “BVD bomber” myself). I think you’ll be able to see what I’m talking about:
[ADDENDUM: It may be time to revisit this, which I wrote at a moment of low ebb in Obama’s campaign. And then there’s this, which if I’m not mistaken is the first piece I ever wrote about Obama. It was posted in May of 2007, and features the following observation:
]The problem is twofold. The first is that it may indicate not only a certain lack of toughness on Obama’s part, but a willingness to offer up excuses too easily. It’s okay for a Presidential candidate (or President) to be tired, but I’m not so sure he should be so eager to excuse himself on that score. I’ve often thought that, if the campaign is a grueling marathon, it’s probably a (pardon the phrase) cakewalk compared to the actual Presidency.
Just as the Presidency is not for the shy or those tortured by ambivalence, just as it requires a certain amount of narcissism (perhaps more than is healthy in ordinary life), it also requires true grit and enormous””almost superhuman””endurance. And if the President doesn’t feel up to it all the time, he/she is supposed to shut up about it and not let others see.]
[ADDENDUM II: The Anchoress has more to say on the subject, including this:
I suspect that what Obama wanted was to be the King, not the President. The King’s role is largely ceremonial. In time of national tragedy the King goes before the camera and says, “this is very sad.” If he can assign blame on a perceived enemy he does so, and then he steps aside and retires to his amusements while those actually in charge clean up the mess and determine how to prevent future messes. Everyone loves the King, defers to the King, rushes to do for the King, but the King -who tends to get bored and distracted by the dry business of actually governing- is responsible for very little, and most are just as glad of it.
And American Digest has more as well.]
[ADDENDUM III: Michelle Malkin takes note of the tiredness factor.]
I suppose it was inevitable. We’ve become so used to the artificial enhancement of body parts that a normal woman has begun to look abnormal. So, why not improve on things with a completely artificial woman?
Le, who built his first robot when he was four, has dedicated his life to creating the perfect humanoid and his success so far with Aiko has won him worldwide attention.
Aiko, whose name is Japanese for ‘love-child’ has an amazing artificial intelligence and can speak 13,000 different sentences in two languages
‘Aiko can recognise faces and says hello to anyone she has met,’ he said…
Aiko, whose age is ‘in her early 20’s’, is 5ft tall and has a perfect 32, 23, 33 figure.
She has real silicone skin and a real-hair wig made by a Japanese doll company. Her touch sensitive body knows the difference between being stroked gently or tickled.
‘Like a real female she will react to being touched in certain ways,’said Le.
‘If you grab or squeeze too hard she will try to slap you.
And so, let us leave them there, the perfect couple:
[Hat tip: Instapundit.]
…it’s in some big kind of trouble.
Herbert is ordinarily one of the most stalwart supporters of whatever the left might be dishing up at the moment. But his relatively clear-minded and well-reasoned opposition to the Cadillac health insurance tax levied by the Senate bill indicates that he (and others on the left) are not going to roll over easy on this one. Although Herbert doesn’t state it in the column, my guess is that he is angry that there’s no public option, and that the Senate bill is a watered-down pastiche of disparate elements that pleases no one except perhaps the insurance companies. So he’s calling foul.
One of the phenomena I’ve noticed recently is the growing anger on the left towards Obama about a host of things, one of which is that, even with this “historic opportunity” afforded by enormous Democratic majorities, the bills in both House and Senate are not what the left would have them be.
That’s not exactly Obama’s fault, since he’s no longer a member of the legislature. But he’s shown no leadership on this issue, leaving the details to the tender mercies of Congress. The result is a batch of sausage that isn’t particularly tasty to either left or right.
The NY Times readership is really really angry—at Janet Napolitano. Take a look at the comments section for this article; here’s a typical sentiment, one of the more moderate of the bunch:
On Sunday—even as a supporter of President Obama, and I also do not approve of “knee-jerk reactions”—Sec. Napolitano really came off badly. She was answering questions—fair questions—as a POLITICIAN, and not as somebody who is in charge of “Homeland Security”. To claim that the system worked was idiotic. To try to “backtrack” today and say she was misconstrued or taken out of context is heinous, because it is a bald-faced lie. I watched the program “live”, and even as a Democrat I could see her lying, deceiving, attempting to mislead, and passing the buck. She needs to resign, because she has to be a disingenuous person to have done what she did. We need truthful, accountable, and responsible people in charge of such an important program.
That’s the problem when you lie so boldly and people are actually paying attention: you tend to get caught. Many of the comments were even critical of the President himself. But quite a few, like the one above, seemed to assume that Napolitano was acting on her own when she said “the system worked” (many call for her to be fired)—even though Press Secretary Gibbs said essentially the same thing, and all of it was congruent with Obama’s silence and then his minimizing, pallid statement on the subject.
Now that it’s nearly a year into Obama’s presidency, I find myself having a recurrent experience: I’ll go back and read something from the past, but now with the perspective provided by the passage of time I experience an “aha!” moment in which the old text gains deeper meaning because it resonates with events that have occurred in the interim.
In that spirit, I plan to revisit and to expand and comment on a few of my old posts from before the 2008 election. The first is the following, originally appearing on this blog on November 3, 2008:
Many of the revelations about Obama that have come out in the past week have been excerpts from old interviews. I’ve even come across one myself—this piece that appeared in Harper’s two years ago, back when Obama wasn’t yet exercising such tight control of his mouth and his message.
It’s instructive to look at what Obama was saying when his every word wasn’t being scrutinized. Here, for example, is the 2006 Obama on how to be practical and to seem less radical than one actually is:
Since the founding, the American political tradition has been reformist, not revolutionary…What that means is that for a political leader to get things done, he or she ideally should be ahead of the curve, but not too far ahead. I want to push the envelope but make sure I have enough folks with me that I’m not rendered politically impotent.
Sounds as though Obama is saying he is tempering his more extreme agenda because he knows it wouldn’t get him anywhere. Makes a great deal of sense, actually. But he’s not denying that agenda. In fact, he’s biding his time [emphasis mine]:
…Obama said he had no doubt that if the Democrats controlled Congress, it would be possible to move forward on important progressive legislation.
The alternative, until then, is to be opportunistic and look for areas where he can get enough Republican support to actually get a bill passed. That, he said, “means that most of the legislation I’ve proposed [as Senator] will be more modest in its goals than it would be if I were in the majority party.”…
“Karl Rove can afford to win with 51 percent of the vote. They’re not trying to reform health care. They are content with an electorate that is cynical about government. Progressives have a harder job. They need a big enough majority to initiate bold proposals.”
Well, guess what? Obama may soon have his wish. If he’s elected President and both houses of Congress go strongly Democratic, he will finally have that “big enough majority”—and then some.
Looking back at this piece now, I wonder once again how it was that people believed this man would function as a moderate or from the middle. Although shortly after the election I expressed that hope, I was very clear towards the end of the 2008 campaign that I thought the vast preponderance of evidence was that Obama was not just a liberal but a true “progressive” and man of the Left, and would advance that agenda as best he could. The fact that progressives are angry at him right now for not succeeding doesn’t contradict the assumption that his goal would be to satisfy their wishes if it were only possible.
The 2006 Harper’s article linked at the beginning of my piece contains a few more tidbits that I didn’t highlight or quote then, but which have taken on added significance now. You can’t say Obama didn’t warn us, at least in the beginning—although he and the MSM set up smokescreens later, so that only those who had been paying very close attention knew what we were getting into.
Here, for example, is another passage from that Harper’s piece:
[Obama] managed to win a tremendous majority in his home state of Illinois despite rhetoric, and a legislative record, that marked him as a true progressive. During his first year in the state senate””1997””he helped lead a laudable if quixotic crusade that would have amended the state constitution to define health care as a basic right and would have required the Illinois General Assembly to ensure that all the state’s citizens could get health insurance within five years.
Please let that sink in: one of Obama’s initial acts on being elected to his very first public office was an attempt to codify health care as a basic and guaranteed right in the state of Illinois. This was back in 1997, which indicates how long-held his dream has been, and why he has pushed for so-called health care reform now despite the fact that the financial crisis makes this one of the worst times possible for such legislation. Combine this 1997 attempt of his with the sentiments expressed in the other quotes from Obama highlighted here, and it becomes clear that he understood long before becoming president that he would need to move quickly on his long-held agenda if he ever found himself in a situation in which Democrats held a huge majority in Congress, no matter what the economic situation and no matter what the public sentiment about the legislation.
Is it any wonder we are in the position we are in now? Is it any sort of puzzlement any more why the Democrats are “committing suicide” with this unpopular bill? Is there any doubt that Obama, Reid, and Pelosi et. al. are following a plan to get the camel’s nose in the door with this particularly weak and chaotic legislation while they can, and then push for greater and greater “reform” over time, “fixing it later?”
Obama laid it all out three years ago, and appears to have had the same ideas as far back as 1997 and even earlier. Back then, though, hardly anyone was paying attention.
[NOTE: A few more highlights from that 2006 Harper’s article:
—“In 2001, reacting to a surge in home foreclosures in Chicago, [Obama] helped push for a measure that cracked down on predatory lenders that peddled high-interest, high-fee mortgages to lower-end homebuyers.”
—“Throughout his campaign for the U.S. Senate, Obama called for social justice…” (see this)
—“Yet it is also startling to see how quickly Obama’s senatorship has been woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts official Washington. He quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on.”]
Iran is in turmoil, with major demonstrations against the government and a major and violent crackdown on demonstrators by the government, and President Obama is silent once again.
Boy, when that man takes a vacation, it’s really a vacation.
“Ah, but it’s the holidays,” you might say. Except for the fact that there was no Christmas worship, and no presents exchanged. A vacation from Christmas, as well? Pretty soon people will be saying he’s not a Christian.
I happen to love these two works of music by Czech composer Leos Janácek, from his piano cycle of thirteen pre-WWI pieces called “On an Overgrown Path.”
I love that evocative title. They fit the somber mood of the present day, and are extraordinarily beautiful besides, especially the second one. Enjoy.
[NOTE: You may recognize the cycle as having been featured in the film “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” based on the novel by one of my favorite authors, Milan Kundera, another Czech. But that’s not where I first encountered it. It was the accompaniment to a beautful ballet by Jiri Kylian choreographed in the early 80s.
What’s more, I tried long ago to learn these two pieces on the piano, in the manner of my Chopin jaunt. But alas, I was roundly defeated; they are fiendishly difficult.]
I haven’t read this book, but it sounds as though it could be apropos: Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys.
President Obama is vacationing in Hawaii, and hasn’t yet deigned to address the nation on the subject of the Flight 253 terrorist. Instead, he has left that task in the very unsteady hands of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who has reassured no one by saying that “the system worked.”
What’s going on here? Speculation ranges from the idea that Obama’s handlers are nixing a statement from him in order to protect Obama from any faux pas, ad-lib or otherwise; to Marc Ambinder’s risible notion that Obama’s silence is strategic, and will deny the terrorists the attention they’re hoping for. Richard Fernandez takes care of Ambinder thusly:
[Ambinder’s words] come ready formed from that Washington cauldron of action, the cocktail party. In that setting the wounds are inflicted by different weapons: the disparaging glance, cutting word, calculated snub and the limpness of the handshake. These strike the telling blows…Through this prism the world looks a different place. Al-Qaeda must be crushed that the President has decided to stay in Hawaii rather than react to their nearly successful attempt to bring an airplane with nearly 300 people down on Detroit. The Islamists must be mortified that he does not even deign to notice them. They must feel downcast; oppressed by the certainty that they are so yesterday. In that universe Obama could not have smitten them more cruelly than if he had told them “don’t call me, I’ll call you”.
Ridiculous, as Fernandez goes on to say.
But what does it mean when Napolitano says “the system worked” when it most definitely did not, and when Obama cannot interrupt his golf game to make his own statement? Look at it from their point of view. The contempt in which they hold the American people assumes that the public cannot figure out on its own that this was a serious attack in which the system most definitely failed. They believe that if Napolitano tells us all is well, then we are reassured and will believe it to be true, despite the evidence before our lying eyes. Since the administration can’t figure out a way (yet) to say that they “inherited” this particular attack from President Bush, and since no one was killed, they believe the best approach is to minimize it.
After all, this was just an “attempt.” In law (and always remember that Barack Obama is a lawyer, as was Bill Clinton before him, as is Napolitano), the word “attempt” means that the criminal act did not succeed in its intended result. It doesn’t mean it was not potentially very lethal indeed.
For example, if a terrorist obtained a suitcase nuclear device designed to kill many thousands, and for some minor reason it fizzled (much like the Flight 253 bomb) when set off and therefore failed to kill anyone—legally, that chain of events becomes a mere “attempt,” subject to far smaller penalties than if a single person were murdered, even though the perpetrator did everything in his power to kill enormous numbers of people and was protected only by his own incompetence.
Obama has been strongly pushing the pre-9/11, criminal law approach to terrorism, and that’s the way the civilian criminal law would treat any such act. So, to our president, this really is a minor incident hardly worthy of notice. Move along please; nothing much to see.
A great many Americans view this quite differently. They would like to see some serious attention paid, and they’re getting the distinct impression that this administration will not be doing so at any point soon.
Wake-up call ignored.
A few observations on the case of Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian Muslim who tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines jetliner on Christmas day, but ended up following in Richard Reid’s footsteps (pun intended):
(1) It seems to fit a recent pattern, that of a single terrorist agent with backstage helpers, and an attack that—if unsuccessful—is thwarted less by the skill of opponents than by bad luck and/or incompetence on the part of the perpetrator.
(2) It shows how difficult it is to activate the proper channels to compel authorities to take proper defensive action and bar the passenger from traveling, even when multiple and glaring red flags are present.
(3) It shows once again that Islamicist terrorists often come from the ranks of the prosperous rather than the poor.
(4) It follows a well-known trend, that of Islamicist terrorists tending to have had training as engineers or to be in the field of medicine.
(5) It features the MSM disclosure that the bomber’s father tipped the US off about his son’s dangerousness. Unless this information was furnished to the media by the father himself, it seems to me unconscionable that the informant’s identity was revealed. This not only endangers the father, but will most likely have a chilling effect on any such future warnings.
(6) We will all pay with increased annoying and inconvenient prohibitions and rules for flight behavior that will in all likelihood do absolutely nothing to prevent future attacks.
Please take a look at my new article at Pajamas Media, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Social Justice.” The subject is health care reform, but the real subject is the threat to liberty represented by the left’s agenda and philosophy.