Posted on 08/19/2010 12:27:32 AM PDT by American Dream 246
There comes a moment in a failing presidency where the incumbent, through some single gesture, action, or statement, crosses a certain line from beyond which there is no return. Through his own will and behavior he so underlines his failings, so frames his negative image, that no further action can ever erase it. Fate, accident, and circumstance have nothing to do with it. It is the president himself who puts the period at the end of his own sentence.
Such moments are obvious in retrospect, though not always at the time. With Richard Nixon, it was the "eighteen-minute gap." An oval office tape recording turned over to Judge John Sirica, who was overseeing the investigation of the Watergate incident, turned out to have a lengthy period of silence smack dab in the middle of a conversation between Nixon and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman. The White House claimed that Rose Mary Woods, the president's secretary, had inadvertently hit the wrong button for those eighteen minutes. This might well have been true, but in light of Nixon's long reputation as Tricky Dick, it sounded like the cock-and-bull story to end them all. Nixon had been holding his own in the Watergate battle up to that point. The voting public viewed the uproar with bemusement rather than indignation. But the tape gap finished him. In less than a year, he was forced into resignation.
For Jimmy Carter, it was the "malaise speech" of July 15, 1979, in which he attempted to shuffle the blame for his tepid performance as president from his own administration onto the shoulders of the American people. Carter claimed that a national "crisis of confidence" (he never actually used the word "malaise") made it impossible for him to adequately grapple with the country's problems. It was America's fault, not Jimmy Carter's. The public reaction was open disgust and the abject collapse of any support for the Carter presidency.
With Obama, we have an abundance of riches: the multiple vacations, the legal harassment of the state of Arizona on behalf of illegals, the clownish response to the Gulf oil blowout. But when historians come to select the moment when Obama went over the edge of the world, I think they'll find the great Iftar mosque speech of August 13, 2010 hard to beat.
During a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan the president found it appropriate to come out in favor of religious freedom. Not in support of Christians being attacked by janjaweed gunmen, or Bahais tormented by Iranian mullahs, or Jews being stalked by assassins, or even American citizens being told that they cannot pray in public, but in favor of a shadowy foreign foundation with suspicious financing and disturbing Jihadi connections that wishes to build some kind of victory monument congruent to the site of the 9/11 massacre.
These doomsday statements work by putting previous suspicions and surmises about the president -- always negative -- into sharp relief, acting as verification and confirmation. Nixon had suffered a reputation as a conniver since his knock-down, drag-out 1950 battle against Helen Gahagan Douglas (it was Douglas who coined the "Tricky Dick" nickname). The tape gap fit so perfectly into that narrative as to crowd out everything else. Carter's inept performance as president was rendered even harder to bear by his continual sanctimony and moral preening. The malaise speech merely added the patina of a whiner.
With Obama, suspicions have involved his status as an American. The foreign parentage, the registration in an Indonesian school noting him as a Muslim, the uproar over the birth certificate, aroused misgivings that, despite media scorn heaped upon those noting them, he has never quite been able to put to rest. As of last weekend, his opportunities to do so are ended. Impressions trump arguments, and for most of the country, Obama will, from here on in, be a strange and untrustworthy figure -- a man who does not understand what Ground Zero means to America, who utilizes American law and custom to support foreign interests, who speaks to strangers more clearly than to his own.
Nothing either Nixon or Carter did enabled them to recover from their faux pas. Even as the tape gap story broke, Nixon was supervising a massive airlift of supplies and ammunition to Israel, which was involved in life-or-death struggle against massive Arab attack in the Yom Kippur War. It gained him nothing, scarcely earning a mention amid all the public speculation about Watergate. Less than three months after the Carter speech, Iranian "students" (actually professional revolutionaries under the control of the Ayatollah Khomeini) sacked the American embassy in Tehran, taking nearly a hundred American hostages. I can attest that I was not alone in thinking, "Great -- and we've got Mr. Malaise is charge." The year-and a-half-long hostage crisis, climaxed by the disastrous Eagle Claw rescue mission, hastened the collapse of the worst presidency of the later 20th century.
The past two years are the best Obama will ever see. The real crises of his presidency are still to come, and are easily visible as they move toward us -- Iran, terrorism, the economy, the collapse of the national health care system hastened by his own policies. He will meet them under a cloud of his own making, attempting to overcome them as a president who takes endless vacations, who will not defend his country's borders, who sat out the Gulf oil crisis, who overlooks the sacrifices of his own countrymen in favor of dubious foreign figures.
Some lines of Shakespeare occurred to me while Obama was dawdling over a response to the oil blowout. They can also serve to cover the entire morass:
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads us to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
The tide has gone out for Barack Obama. It is all epilogue from here on in.
Pray for America.
Good night. *for real*
Actually, it wasn’t Jimmah’s “Malaise Speech” that doomed him, but his wimpy response to the Muslim radicals during the Iran Hostage crisis. The Iranian mullahs were terrified at what an aroused America could do to their nation if the radicals kept poking the US in the eye....until they saw Jimmah acting like a prissy little pansy. It’s no coincidence that the hostages were released 30 minutes after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.
BO’s/BS’s point of no return happened decades ago while surrounded by Communist family and friends.
Sorry, this needs a soundtrack:
kansas Point of know return
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60A1yKc2hi4
He is a laughing stock. Even Iran has made an exception that telling jokes is legal as long as they are about Obama
Dukaka in the tank.
Kerry reporting for doody.
Dean scream.
Unfortunately for us O’s many many missteps have been excused by the msm.
0b0wMa0, missing 48 years.
Excellent point, worth repeating.
I thought Obama’s downfall was his inauguration. What he was and stood for was well know before then to those with their eyes open.
Obama didn't just "spit it the eye of America;" he pulled down his pants in front of the entire country and world, squatted on the hallowed 9/11/01 Ground Zero site and took a huge PUBLIC DUMP UPON GROUND ZERO AND UPON ALL OF AMERICA! After he was done, he got up, pulled up his pants, smiled, his narcissistic smile at the camera and said: "This is where I stand regarding America, Islam and Ground Zero."
With this ONE statement, this ONE act, Obama has committed the unpardonable sin: He has chosen to side with ISLAM and the ENEMIES OF AMERICA who want to destroy America and turn it into an Islamic State! It will NOT be forgiven or forgotten and it is indelibly etched in the collective memory and history of Americans and America. No matter what Obama says or what he does from here on out he CANNOT UNDO WHAT HE HAS SAID AND DONE. As a result he will forever be rememberd by his new and appropriate moniker:
IMAM Obama! P-ss be upon him
Imam obama.
He earned that name.
Sadly, true.
Great ending, JR. Let's hope the rip currents don't take us under along with him.
That’s even more embarrassing in retrospect. If that’s possible.
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