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Posted on 10/27/2011 9:27:33 PM PDT by neverdem
Obama's Target List
While calling for civility, Obama demonizes everyone in sight.
What with exhaustion, overexposure, and the temptation to comment on just about anything in the news, presidential candidates and presidents alike naturally often slip up. Given their hectic speaking schedules, they frequently mispronounce words (“nucular,” “corpse-man”), engage in the trivial (inflating tires and tuning up cars in lieu of drilling for more oil), and simply get things wrong (57 states). “Bushism” was coined about 2001 to refer to all the various ways that George W. Bush mangled the English language. There are, of course, just as many “Obamaisms,” though they are rarely commensurately lampooned by the media.
FDR unfairly and often demonized his political opponents. Truman could be coarsely blunt; Nixon far more so and in paranoid fashion. Jimmy Carter’s beatific façade seemed to hide all sorts of inner mean streaks. But what seems somewhat different from past presidential sermons, malapropisms, and flat-out wrong statements is the tendency of Barack Obama to lecture, talk down to, caricature, or even insult various people and groups — even as no other president in recent memory has reminded the nation so often of the need for civility, unity, and tolerance.
After only one year plus of campaigning and three years of governance, there is already a sizable corpus of Obama’s targets. The common theme is less ideology, politics, race, class, or gender than a sense that many groups and people simply don’t measure up to Obama’s high standards. Some are deemed lazy, stupid, greedy, fearful, or clinging; others are too affluent, of questionable ethics, and ill-informed and ill-intentioned — and thus are culpable for our current problems.
Where did the president pick up this habit of hypercriticism and easy caricature? Who knows? Michelle Obama showed similar tendencies during the campaign, when she labeled the U.S. a country that is “just downright mean,” until recently not worthy of pride, and variously talked about unnamed persons who perennially “raise the bar” on those struggling to get ahead.
Yet lecturing, demonizing, and caricaturing are not just symptoms of narcissism or being socially dense, but are also a revelation that Obama feels that he can say almost anything he wants, with the expectation — always borne out in the past — of few consequences. Still, his handlers worry about this habit, which explains both the serial use of teleprompted scripts even for the briefest of commentary and the almost lightning response from the White House, either that the latest target had it coming, or that the president’s critics themselves were suspect in noticing such insults, or that the remarks were meant only in jest. Note as well that while almost everyone else is culpable, the president himself rarely is — at least not as much as ATM machines, George W. Bush, tsunamis, the European Union, the nine-month-old Republican-controlled House, the Arab Spring, and skyrocketing oil prices. Others err; but the president has made all “the right choices.”
Here is a tiny sampling of those who have been on the receiving end of the president’s disdain:
African Americans: “Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’.”
Americans: Are “not a model for the world” and have a “tragic history.” Also, “we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared,” and, more recently, we have gotten “a little soft” and lost our “competitive edge.”
Bankers: “Fat cats”
Border enforcement: Its overzealous adherents want “alligators and moats” on the border and would arrest children on their way to get ice cream.
The Cambridge, Mass., police: “Acted stupidly” and, like law-enforcement officers in general, racially profile
Corporate-jet owners: “Are you willing to compromise your kids’ safety so some corporate-jet owner can get a tax break?”
Democratic base: Must “shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up . . . if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.”
Doctors: Needlessly chop off the limbs of diabetics and take out tonsils to increase their own profits
Donald Trump: A “carnival barker”
Grandmother: “Typical white person”
Las Vegas: Where you are likely to “blow a bunch of cash when you’re trying to save for college”
Millionaires: They don’t pay their “fair share” and are synonymous with those who have 1,000 times more.
Nancy Reagan: Don’t “get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any séances.”
Rural Pennsylvanians: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment.”
Sarah Palin: “You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.”
Special Olympics: Comparable to the president’s dismal bowling scores
Super Bowl: Where you go “on the taxpayer’s dime”
Supreme Court: Would “open the floodgates for special interests”
Supreme Court Justice Thomas: “I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don’t think that he, I don’t think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation.”
Tea Party: “The teabag, anti-government people”
The target list grows weekly. By the end of 2012, those on it may outnumber those not.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of the just-released The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.
I look forward to him saying “Michelle and I are very happy back in Chicago now”””
My money is betting that he ‘declines to run because of his health’ & he & Moochelle self-exile themselves in Brazil, where the size of his campaign war chest will spend quite nicely.
It may be a matter of semantics. The “media” don’t consider most of the places you mentioned to be part of the “media.” So, I get your point but the mainstream beat on Bush like a rented mule but give Obama a free pass on that and his refusal to release his academic records and other papers from his stints in elected office.
LOL!
It makes sense that he would dig at her, if I'm right that she's going to bolt the traces and mount an insurrectionary candidacy next year. She has the look of a candidate, and her energy level is up. She sure smells like a candidate to me.
IIRC, the State Dept. runs military export sales and it's implicated with an operation that ran through Columbus, New Mexico to the Zetas that included explosive ordnance, night vision devices, etc.! She, like Holder for Fast and Furious, Castaway, etc., may well be impeached like the bent one!
That would be sweet -- the first husband/wife impeachment duo in U.S. history, and for gross violations of the law.
I think Holder would be good to impeach because, even tho' he's only the AG, everyone knows he's Obozo's man, and it would force the Democratic incumbent senators all to stand up and drink the party-line Kool-Aid in an election year, and bloc-vote to acquit an obviously guilty-as-hell Leftist AG. We could wind up with 80% of the Senate after the elections, if GOP candidates could tie Holder around their Dim opponents' necks.
I’d like it to be Uganda.........
“They” aren’t the mainstream....”They” are the LEFT stream...
I wrote a little over an hour ago:
Grassley has said that the investigation will probably go into 2012. Issa has subpoenaed Holder. If Holder doesn't resign, he'll probably be impeached, IMHO.on this thread, "Holder’s days as attorney general may be numbered as resignation calls double overnight".Except those in safe seats, up to 16 rats in the Senate looking to keep their seats in November 2012 will have to explain a vote not removing Holder from office.
Akaka, Bingaman, Conrad, Kohl, Lieberman and Webb are retiring. All of those 16 voted for Obamacare.
Even Sanders, the Vermont self avowed socialist, could be in trouble. This was obviously a plot against the 2nd Amendment. Vermont has never restricted concealed carry. It was always permit free.
In Hawaii, former GOP governor Linda Lingle said she wants to replace Akaka. In NJ, Menendez must have soiled his pants when Christie won. Schumer's recent boast that the rats will keep the Senate is very suspect.
If we don't get the magic 60 next year, rats have about 2 dozen more seats to defend in the Senate in 2014!
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