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| Home Front: Politix |
| Obama the Incompetent |
| 2010-10-08 |
| Mike Potemra, "The Corner" @ National Review I have been trying of late to come to grips with why I find the ideologist/conspiracist understandings of President Obama unsatisfying: Many thinkers are writing books saying the problem with Obama is he’s anti-colonialist, socialist, or what have you. My concern is not that these analyses are necessarily false ... as that even if some of them happen to be true, they don’t really explain the observed problem of Obama’s presidency, which is, not to put too fine a point on it, that he is a clueless bungler. Look at the utter gormlessness with which he has been able, over the past two years, to alienate virtually all groups of Americans, left, right, and center; to squander the massive good will of the people who elected him. What’s more likely — that he’s a hardened ideological “Manchurian president” deliberately laying the seeds of our future enslavement? or that he’s just a lucky working politician-magician who amazed us with a few magic tricks in 2008 but who long, long ago ran out of new ones? I mean, put yourself in Obama’s place. In 2008, the American people approached this young chap and said, “We find your set speeches very charming, and even though you have next to zero experience with national challenges and have accomplished nothing besides authoring a couple of books talking about what an impressive person you are, it would make us feel ever so good about ourselves if you consented to be President.” What was he supposed to say? What would you have said? “No” ? And so, like the dog who chased the car and has — for once, per impossibile — caught it, he is flummoxed, completely overpowered by the situation in which he finds himself. His policies don’t work, and he has no others.... |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #4 Knave or fool? Yes! Obama is a socialist (or at least socialist-inclined) and he does want to turn this country into some sort of quasi-European social democracy (heavy on the social, light on the democracy). He is also profoundly inexperienced and shockingly unwise in the ways of the world. He's spent his entire life inside a liberal elite bubble. He's never worked in a profit-making enterprise, never had to live day to day around people who don't agree with him 98% or more on the issues, never before been responsible for the success or failure of a project. He's intelligent, but he's so overconfident that he doesn't know what he doesn't know. |
| Posted by: Mike 2010-10-08 20:36 |
| #3 Knave or fool? These are not mutually exclusive. I feel that he is knave through & through but thank the lord that he is also a fool so that we may survive the knavishness. A smart knave would not have brought forth in less than two years an opponent as robust and distributed as the tea party. He would have done the soft sell successfully and co-opted the Rinos to such a degree that the opposition was muted at worst. |
| Posted by: Alan Cramer 2010-10-08 20:32 |
| #2 There has been a "Knave or Fool?" debate ever since the Zero was elected. I have come to the Knave position. He intends to do exactly what he is doing. The fact that his policies leave a trail of destruction in their wakes is a feature, not a bug. I recall how survivors of Stalin's gulags said, "If only Stalin had known." |
| Posted by: SR-71 2010-10-08 13:01 |
| #1 My only comment for the lad. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2010-10-08 08:26 |