The Whiniest President Ever

Image via Wikipedia "President Obama gives off a sense of world-weariness and exhaustion with America’s leadership — and has earned a Nobel Peace Prize as a result. He reflects the deep vein of declinism running through the country’s elite, the same class of people who pronounced the presidency uninhabitable just as Ronald Reagan arrived to prove them wrong.

Today, as in the late 1970s, the job isn’t too big, nor is the country too powerful: The man is too small."

As has been posted numerous times on this site, as elsewhere, the comparisons to the feebly inept Jimmy Carter presidency are too glaring to ignore. The only question remaining becomes: Who shall step forward as our new Reagan, and restore our nation from the devastation of his predecessor, as did his namesake?...T

It was fashionable at the end of the 1970s, after a dreary parade of presidential failures punctuated by Jimmy Carter, to say the presidency had grown too unwieldy. The historian Barbara Tuchman spoke for all the academic and journalistic believers in the theory of the impossible presidency when she mused, “Maybe some form of plural executive is needed, such as they have in Switzerland.”

Ah, yes, the wonders of the plural executive. Why didn’t that occur to James Madison?

Pres. Barack Obama has belatedly joined the ranks of presidential fatalists. The job isn’t too complex necessarily; it’s too damn influential. According to the New York Times, Obama has been telling aides that it’d be easier to be president of China. No one hangs on Hu Jintao’s every word, or expects global leadership from a grasping, one-party state that has never been a beacon to the world.

In the history of presidential lamentations, this has to rank among the most pathetic. It brings to mind the affecting scene from The King’s Speech when Colin Firth, playing the stammering monarch-to-be, breaks down and weeps at the prospect of the crown being thrust upon him: “I’m not a king.” Except Barack Obama campaigned for two years straight to be president of the United States — and doesn’t stutter.

The proximate cause of Obama’s angst is the crisis in Libya. Obama announced that Moammar Qaddafi must go, and proceeded to do nothing that might give his words any bite. The administration is still agonizing over the no-fly zone, even as Qaddafi routs the rebels. The no-fly zone isn’t a panacea — realistically, it’d only be a way station to more robust military action. Perhaps the administration wants to rule it out. Fine. But decide already. If Obama wasn’t going to aid the rebels in any way — not even recognize their provisional government, not even arm them — he should have modulated his words accordingly.

Obama lacks executive flair. Talk to New Jersey governor Chris Christie and he will tell you at length how much he loves making decisions. It’s hard to imagine a Chris Christie enjoying life as a legislator. Obama came to the presidency after a political career spent marinating in senates, first in Illinois, then in Washington.

Osama bin Laden famously talked of the weak horse and the strong horse. Obama is the show horse. As a U.S. senator, he distinguished himself more by saying things than by passing legislation. In the White House, he has replicated his role as the non-legislating legislator on a grand scale. His successes have been as the leader of the Democrats in Congress, although even here, the word “leader” applies only loosely. He set the broad goals and gave the speeches; otherwise, he let Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid run riot.

The stakes of Obama’s self-imposed passivity aren’t as dire as those of Pres. James Buchanan, who pleaded powerlessness as the country fell apart around him on the cusp of the Civil War. William Seward commented acerbically: “[He] shows conclusively that it is the duty of the president to execute the laws — unless somebody opposes him; and that no state has a right to go out of the Union — unless it wants to.” Nor has President Obama reached the depths of a Jimmy Carter, who literally disappeared in the run-up to his infamous 1979 “malaise” speech.

At the dawn of America’s global power, a bumptious Theodore Roosevelt raced to make America’s influence felt around the world — and earned a Nobel Peace Prize as a result. President Obama gives off a sense of world-weariness and exhaustion with America’s leadership — and has earned a Nobel Peace Prize as a result. He reflects the deep vein of declinism running through the country’s elite, the same class of people who pronounced the presidency uninhabitable just as Ronald Reagan arrived to prove them wrong.

Today, as in the late 1970s, the job isn’t too big, nor is the country too powerful: The man is too small.
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The Obama Spell Is Broken

So rewarding, just as it is so frustrating for all of us who saw this coming long down the pike. A progressive is a progressive is a progressive. They always want a collectivist society, as they always have. Jimmy Carter, at the height of progressivism in America was found out, and discredited. Bill Clinton ran as a conservative, lied, was discovered, and discredited.

The populace has a disturbingly short memory, it seems, after the successive disasters of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ and Jimmy Carter.

Perhaps this time the lesson will sink in: There are only marginal differences between progressivism, socialism, fascism, Nazism, and communism. These differences mainly depend on the history of the respected peoples subjected to them.

Let us hope and pray that the Americans people's proud traditions of liberty and rule of law once again prevail, and this dark stench of tyranny is banished from our shores once and for all time...T

The curtain has come down on what can best be described as a brief un-American moment in our history. That moment began in the fall of 2008, with the great financial panic, and gave rise to the Barack Obama phenomenon.

The nation's faith in institutions and time-honored ways had cracked. In a little-known senator from Illinois millions of Americans came to see a savior who would deliver the nation out of its troubles. Gone was the empiricism in political life that had marked the American temper in politics. A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies.

There is nothing surprising about where Mr. Obama finds himself today. He had been made by charisma, and political magic, and has been felled by it. If his rise had been spectacular, so, too, has been his fall. The speed with which some of his devotees have turned on him—and their unwillingness to own up to what their infatuation had wrought—is nothing short of astounding. But this is the bargain Mr. Obama had made with political fortune.

He was a blank slate, and devotees projected onto him what they wanted or wished. In the manner of political redeemers who have marked—and wrecked—the politics of the Arab world and Latin America, Mr. Obama left the crowd to its most precious and volatile asset—its imagination. There was no internal coherence to the coalition that swept him to power. There was cultural "cool" and racial absolution for the white professional classes who were the first to embrace him. There was understandable racial pride on the part of the African-American community that came around to his banners after it ditched the Clinton dynasty.

The white working class had been slow to be convinced. The technocracy and elitism of Mr. Obama's campaign—indeed of his whole persona—troubled that big constituency, much more, I believe, than did his race and name. The promise of economic help, of an interventionist state that would salvage ailing industries and provide a safety net for the working poor, reconciled these voters to a candidate they viewed with a healthy measure of suspicion. He had been caught denigrating them as people "clinging to their guns and religion," but they had forgiven him.

Mr. Obama himself authored the tale of his own political crisis. He had won an election, but he took it as a plebiscite granting him a writ to remake the basic political compact of this republic.

Mr. Obama's self-regard, and his reading of his mandate, overwhelmed all restraint. The age-old American balance between a relatively small government and a larger role for the agencies of civil society was suddenly turned on its head. Speed was of the essence to the Obama team and its allies, the powerful barons in Congress. Better ram down sweeping social programs—a big liberal agenda before the people stirred to life again.

Progressives pressed for a draconian attack on the workings of our health care, and on the broader balance between the state and the marketplace. The economic stimulus, ObamaCare, the large deficits, the bailout package for the automobile industry—these, and so much more, were nothing short of a fundamental assault on the givens of the American social compact.

And then there was the hubris of the man at the helm: He was everywhere, and pronounced on matters large and small. This was political death by the teleprompter.

Americans don't deify their leaders or hang on their utterances, but Mr. Obama succumbed to what the devotees said of him: He was the Awaited One. A measure of reticence could have served him. But the flight had been heady, and in the manner of Icarus, Mr. Obama flew too close to the sun.

We have had stylish presidents, none more so than JFK. But Kennedy was an ironist and never fell for his own mystique. Mr. Obama's self-regard comes without irony—he himself now owns up to the "remoteness and detachment" of his governing style. We don't have in this republic the technocratic model of the European states, where a bureaucratic elite disposes of public policy with scant regard for the popular will. Mr. Obama was smitten with his own specialness.

In this extraordinary tale of hubris undone, the Europeans—more even than the people in Islamic lands—can be assigned no small share of blame. They overdid the enthusiasm for the star who had risen in America.

It was the way in Paris and Berlin (not to forget Oslo of course) of rebuking all that played out in America since 9/11—the vigilance, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the sense that America's interests and ways were threatened by a vengeful Islamism. But while the Europeans and Muslim crowds hailed him, they damned his country all the same. For his part, Mr. Obama played along, and in Ankara, Cairo, Paris and Berlin he offered penance aplenty for American ways.

But no sooner had the country recovered its poise, it drew a line for Mr. Obama. The "bluest" of states, Massachusetts, sent to Washington a senator who had behind him three decades of service in the National Guard, who proclaimed his pride in his "army values" and was unapologetic in his assertion that it was more urgent to hunt down terrorists than to provide for their legal defense.

Then the close call on Christmas Day at the hands of the Nigerian jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab demonstrated that the terrorist threat had not receded. The president did his best to recover: We are at war, he suddenly proclaimed. Nor were we in need of penance abroad. Rumors of our decline had been exaggerated. The generosity of the American response to Haiti, when compared to what India and China had provided, was a stark reminder that this remains an exceptional nation that needs no apologies in distant lands.


A historical hallmark of "isms" and charismatic movements is to dig deeper when they falter—to insist that the "thing" itself, whether it be Peronism, or socialism, etc., had not been tried but that the leader had been undone by forces that hemmed him in.

It is true to this history that countless voices on the left now want Obama to be Obama. The economic stimulus, the true believers say, had not gone astray, it only needed to be larger; the popular revolt against ObamaCare would subside if and when a new system was put in place.

There had been that magical moment—the campaign of 2008—and the true believers want to return to it. But reality is merciless. The spell is broken.

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The Guy From Boston on Global Warming

The Guy From Boston on Global Warming - Watch more Funny Videos

Global Warming, bwah, who cares if it's true: "You never want to let a good crisis go to waste" - Rahm Emmanuel. No sacrifice is too great to deter us from the goal of progressive fascism! Heil Osama!...T

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Paul Harvey, Good Night

God bless Paul Harvey! He was the one who paved the way for all that followed on radio - the 1st influence in my life to speak loudly to me reinforcing what I always thought since the age of 5, namely that "these guys sound like idiots" when watching or reading the main stream press. Good night and God bless you Paul!...T

I don't know about the rest of the nation, but here in Central time we could get Paul Harvey's News and Comment in the morning and again at noon, most likely on some crackly AM country music station. If I were out of town or on the road, I would surf the AM dial hoping to find a hint of that unmistakable voice: The Voice. Like a true news junkie, I needed my Paul Harvey fix.

Paul Harvey, born Paul Harvey Aurandt in Tulsa on Sept. 4, 1918, had a voice like a cannon at Gettysburg, like Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill or General Anthony Clement McAuliffe answering the German surrender ultimatum with the expletive "Nuts!" His distinctive baritone was soothing and comforting, the optimistic, can-do voice of Middle America, the voice of hope decades before Barack Obama knew the meaning of the word.

Listening to Paul Harvey, who died Saturday at age 90, was like eavesdropping on radio in its golden age, which wasn't just radio's golden age, of course, but America's. Like many of his listeners, Paul Harvey did it all: wrote his own copy, read his own commercials, even invented his own vocabulary (Reaganomics, skyjacker, guesstimate, to name a few of his neologisms). When it came to selecting news copy Paul Harvey applied what he called his "Aunt Betty" test. Aunt Betty was an old fashioned Missouri housewife (his sister-in-law, actually), and no story too complicated or dull for Aunt Betty made it onto the newscast.

A Paul Harvey newscast was in startling contrast to the network or public radio news. From the opening salvo of "Hello Americans! Paul Harvey…Stand by for News!" -- the absence of any theme music or bells and whistles let you know you were in for 15 minutes of honest, man-to-man talk. Paul Harvey gave it to you straight, but without the doom and gloom that hung over other conventional newscasts. In the midst of recession, national tragedy, or malaise, Paul Harvey showed you the silver lining amid the dark clouds and raised America's collective spirit -- not like a preacher (though he was descended from five generations of Baptist preachers), but as America's most trusted news source.

What a contrast to the negative nabobs of negativism further down the dial. If you had to pin down Paul Harvey, he probably leaned more to the right of center than to the left, but only because he believed in core conservative values like self-reliance, religious faith, the free market, and the industry and ingenuity of the American people. But while Paul Harvey loved to preface stories with "There is good news today…" Paul Harvey News and Comment was not a vacuous "Good News" newscast. There was a fine line between locating the good in the news and being willfully naïve. With an audience of 22 million dedicated listeners, Paul Harvey was anything but naïve.

IN THE TWENTY or so years I listened to Paul Harvey I do not ever recall hearing him say a negative word about any celebrity or government official -- which was one reason you came away from a Paul Harvey broadcast feeling better about yourself and your country. And perhaps a hankering to run out and buy a new vacuum cleaner. Certainly being one of the most trusted and respected journalists of your day helps when you are trying to peddle your sponsors' wares.

As popular as his newscasts were, equally beloved was a segment called "The Rest of the Story." I remember crawling in from college football practice at 5:30 p.m. -- this was the early 1980s -- and collapsing on a locker room bench while over the loudspeaker came The Voice halfway through his evening broadcast, which wasn't news at all, but a feature story where some famous person's identity was revealed in a surprise, twist ending. It might be the story how one man single-handedly brought Philadelphia back from the dead following the Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 (George Washington), or the misanthrope who wished to drown the human race (Mark Twain).

Talk about a surreal scene: fifty exhausted college football players from all across the country lying all over a locker room floor in silence waiting for Paul Harvey to reveal the identity of today's subject. "And now you know…the rest of the story…Paul Harvey…Good Day!" Only then would we hit the showers.

His few Eastern establishment critics -- and I do mean few -- would probably have called Paul Harvey a second-rate newsman, an anti-intellectual populist, and a snakeskin salesman who peddled not only vacuum cleaners, but false hope and optimism while ignoring the real challenges America faced. But it doesn't matter what they say, because they only talk to themselves.

The Voice spoke to all of us.

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