Obama talks a pretty good game, but when it comes to actually performing his duties as President of the United States he isn't walking the walk. Seeing that he's sided with Mexican President Calderon against Arizona's immigration law that mirrors the federal immigration law that goes back 70 years doesn't exactly endear him Middle America, either.
The economy was a shambles and what did Obama do? Spent almost a trillion dollars the government didn't have on half-assed 'stimulus' programs that did nothing but stimulate pork-barrel spending on a scale not seen since FDR, but did nothing to create anything but more government jobs. Then, rather than focusing his efforts on actual economic programs that would get government out of the way of economic recovery, he has Congress ramrod through a health care reform package that has had the effect of damaging economic recovery even more than if he did nothing, and in doing so will be spending trillions more the government doesn't have.
If this isn't incompetence, I don't know what is.
Then there's his latest show of incompetence: the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Some have called it Obama's 'Katrina', and they're right. It is just one more example of his many mistakes.
It seems the every day duties and requirements of being President do not interest him. Then again, he's never really needed to actually perform the duties of the various offices he's held, being busy with running for the next higher office and all. But here he is, at the pinnacle of elective office in the United States, and he finds he actually has to work for a change. Somehow I doubt this is what he really signed up for. He's discovered he has to work every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and he's not liking it one bit. He's learned the Utopia he thought he'd be able to create once he got in office is beyond his abilities. The more he tries, the worst his failures become. It doesn't help that he's been leaving much of the decision making in regards to all the 'wonderful' programs and entitlements he believes the taxpayers should be funding in the hands of even less competent advisers and, even worse, Congressional leaders with less economic savvy than the average person on the street. He's living in a dream world.
I don't see how the president's position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president's political judgment and instincts.
There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don't see how you politically survive this.
The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They're in one reality, he's in another.
Never mind that history shows that every attempt to 'create' a utopian society has always ended in disaster, sometimes with far reaching consequences outside the society in question. Sometimes those consequences include the deaths of untold numbers of people wishing nothing more than to be left alone to live their lives. Others have tried internationalism (or at least their version of it) and it, too, ended with the deaths of millions. Such societies always have the tendency to appeal to the lowest common denominator, which has never been a good idea as it usually leads to despotism, corruption, diminution of the value of human life, and in the end, horror for those within the society.
An assessment of President Barack Obama's speech on Saturday to the graduating class at the United States Military Academy leads to one of only two possible conclusions:
Either Obama does not live in the real world, or he wants Americans to believe that they don't live in the real world.
Neither possibility is comforting.
The speech has been described as a repudiation of the doctrine of pre-emptive war to prevent attacks on U.S. soil, and so it is.
But it is so much more.
In what it contains, in what it ignores and in what it willfully misinterprets, it stands as a remarkably clear and forthright statement of the utopian mind.
The question of whether the president actually believes what he said is immaterial. The question that matters is how far this wistfully self-destructive longing for an internationalism that works will be allowed to drive American policy.
Obama has become a walking, talking object lesson, showing everyone, including the Democrats, how to lose public support in a very short period of time, even among your own party members. He's focused on the wrong issues, gone about trying to fix the wrong things at the wrong time using long disproven methods, while ignoring the public will at every turn. He has tried to ignore problems even the usually supportive MSM have been hammering him about.
Again, his performance during the Gulf oil spill has been, shall we say, underwhelming, as has been his responses to a number of other events. As Michelle Malkin puts it, “America has become accustomed to President Obama's crisis face: eyes glazed over.
It seemed to me that he really didn't care all that much because dealing with all these pesky Presidential duties is taking him away from the really important things, as he sees them. I'm not sure what those 'important' things are, but I doubt they really have anything to do with the good of the American people. Rather, could they be things that have to do with the good of Barack Obama? If his known history is any indicator, I'd have to say “Yes”. Then again, isn't that like anyone in over their heads, having reached their highest level of incompetence?
At his first press conference in 308 days, Obama fielded questions about the Gulf oil spill, immigration, the war in Afghanistan and the mounting outrage over Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak's job-trading allegations with a sluggishness bordering on geriatric. His aplomb was a bomb.
The commander-in-chief's mumbling, diffident tone contradicted the "I CARE" message of urgency that drifted across the teleprompter screen and rolled languidly off his tongue.