Posted on 06/18/2010 12:01:06 PM PDT by Zakeet
I believe it was Jean Giraudoux who first said, "Only the mediocre are always at their best."
Barack Obama was supposed to be the best, the very best, and yet he is always, reliably, consistently mediocre. His speech on oil was no better or worse than his speech on race. Yet the Obammyboppers who once squealed with delight are weary of last year's boy band. At the end of the big Oval Office address, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews and the rest of the MSNBC gang jeered the president. For a bewildered Obama, it must have felt like his Ceausescu balcony moment. Had they caught up with him in the White House parking lot, they'd have put him up against the wall and clubbed him to a pulp with Matthews' no-longer-tingling leg.
So what? He always "disappoints." What would have been startling would have been if he hadn't "disappointed." His eve-of-election rally for Martha Coakley "disappointed" the Massachusetts electorate so much they gave Ted Kennedy's seat to a Republican. His speech for Chicago's Olympic bid "disappointed" the Oslo committee so much they gave the games to Pyongyang, or Ouagadougou, or any city offering to build a stadium with electrical outlets incompatible with Obama's prompter. Be honest, guys, his inaugural address "disappointed," too, didn't it? Oh, in those days you still did your best to make the case for it. "He carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate," wrote Stanley Fish in The New York Times. "There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as 'the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating ... the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.'"
(Excerpt) Read more at ocregister.com ...
Agree-they are angry that he’s too conservative. That means no help to the conservative cause from their discontent.
I agree. I'm in Pennsylvania, and people here are very upset about it. My hair stylist is collecting clippings and shipping them off to make absorbent booms, and people are talking about the horrible impact, contaminated seafood, dead birds and overall mess. It's just one more thing that has reasonable people mad at government in general and him in particular. BP isn't getting off easy either.
What a gift of insight!
No one involved should get off easy. Yet I fear too much anger is directed at BP and ignores the very heavy role the government has played (or failed to play, perhaps). It’s not just that they’ve dragged their feet, but that they are implicit in the requirement for having to drill that deep to begin with.
I agree.
Styen BUMP!! He is a priceless treasure.
Some liberal disappointment was due to the increasing body of evidence relating to the President's incompetence. This was among only the relative sane liberals, however.
Among the insane wing of the Democrat party -- about half of them, it would appear -- the source of their disappointment was as you say.
Their Messiah failed to a.) seize BP and b.) shut down the rest of the oil industry (he only snuffed the deepwater offshore business). You can read their comments on some blogs and articles. They wanted the supply of petroleum to dry up -- so we would be forced "to go green and save the planet."
I suppose they all already have their bicycles, their wood stoves and eat cold tofu.
There is a strain of insanity abroad in the country...
It's affirmative action on steroids.
I was wondering how many of the people who read that will recognize it.
An intelligent and accurate assessment. May I repeat it?
1. For whatever reason that the rig blew, BP correctly owns the ultimate responsibility.
2. For whatever reason, the federal government abjectly failed to respond to its sole responsibility, by law, for mitigation.
3. Further, the Obama administration and the Democrat Congress are solely to blame for BP having to drill in those difficult circumstances.
At bottom, that's the only way blame can be assigned.
Steyn's musical tastes are surprisingly broad for a one-time entertainment critic.
Frank Rich, for example, would no have idea what the provenance of the lyric was.
Anyone who says he is disappointed in Obama is only showing how dumb he is to have believed him in the first place.
Reminds me of the tale of the “trailer” for Glenn Beck’s book, with the lines (from memory) “when the dog returns to his vomit, and the sow returns to her mire, and the burnt fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the fire”, everyone over at Huffpo went on about “What kind of mindless blather is this?”, not realizing that it was written by an author with a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Who happens to be one of my most favorite authors ever. My children...and my grandchildren...have been raised on Rudyard Kipling.
I wouldn't expect a liberal to familiar with the genre.
He was awarded a Nobel prize when it meant something...
I would say he is qualified to be called The Perpetrator Of The Greatest Long Con in US American History, perhaps the world. So, I think you could call him the greatest con man ever.
If we just brush our teeth for at least two minutes, and drink plenty of water, maybe even stock up on duct tape and plastic sheeting, and I’m SURE everything will be ok.
Do they not understand that if they do that, everything in this country is simply going to STOP? Obviously they don’t remember the gas lines, the inflation. But they are going to be in the hurt locker too.
Rudyard Kipling, railing against PC progressivism a hundred years ago.
Ha! Are you a bumper sticker graphic artist?? Is that your work? Milli Vannilli -—Go for it!
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