…is a confession of impotence:
If you listened closely, the speech seemed like a confession that the president knows he can’t do much. The deep problems afflicting America — social and economic breakdown in inner cities and rural areas; rising economic insecurity; widening gulfs between ideologies, regions, and socioeconomic classes — are simply far beyond the president’s reach.
They’re particularly beyond this president’s reach, given the economic insanity of his fundamental ideology.
And then, there’s the completely unjustified arrogance and contempt for us and our intelligence:
Obama’s speech was a dreadful, cliché-ridden piece of writing. Here’s our favorite bit: “Rather than reduce our deficits with a scalpel–by cutting programs we don’t need, fixing ones we do, and making government more efficient–this same group has insisted on leaving in place a meat cleaver called the sequester that has cost jobs, harmed growth, hurt our military, and gutted investments in American education and scientific and medical research that we need to make this country a magnet for good jobs.”
Because as Ben Franklin sagely observed, you can’t make a magnet with cloven meat.
But wait. It’s worse than that. He’s criticizing “this same group” for leaving in place a meat cleaver. What happens when you leave a cleaver in place? Nothing!
“With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball,” the president harrumphed. There’s an image for you. Where exactly is the ball relative to the parade route?
Also, which scandals exactly are “phony”? The biggest scandal is the one that raises serious questions about the legitimacy of Obama’s re-election. Here is what President Asterisk himself had to say on the subject way back on May 13: “If you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and non-partisan way, then that is outrageous, it is contrary to our traditions. And people have to be held accountable, and it’s got to be fixed. . . . I’ve got no patience with it. I will not tolerate it.”
We’re sure his outrage over the phony scandal was genuine.
Yes. As genuine as most things he says. Though, as noted, he is occasionally honest:
On the other hand, Obama’s certitude about his own superiority, his utter contempt for his political adversaries, even for those whose priorities differ from his–now that’s genuine. It is the central feature of his political character, and the proximate cause of–pardon the cliché–Washington’s current “dysfunction.”
Indeed.
Did I turn on the Evening News late last afternoon and actually hear the President of the United States and Leader of the Free World, the most powerful and influential man on the planet, the man standing at the Bully Pulpit, actually, whining?
Did anyone here ever hear his putatively powerless presidential predecessor, none other than George W Bush engage in a rant against the persons, parties, and powers preventing his policies? I am told that Mr. Obama is indeed above average, perhaps well above average in administrative competency in relation to Mr. Bush and other presidents. Jim, oh, Jim, did Mr. Bush ever engage in this amount of finger pointing and blame mongering?
There were a lot of people in the Right Blogosphere, maybe even here on Rand’s fine site, who were wishing that Mr. Bush “call out is opponents”, but did Mr. Bush ever demean his high office by actually taking the advice of the partisans in his corner?
Oh, and the president proudly pontificated how this recovery has added twice as many jobs as “the last recovery”, I guess that would be the anemic monetary bubble-driven jobless recovery under George W Bush. If I remember my calculus and limits and convergence theorems correctly, two times a small, infinitesimal number is still a small, infinitesimal number.
GW was/is a class act to the core. I sure do miss him.
Funny how people always like big spending politicians. Perhaps you would have preferred another two wars. Like in Iran and North Korea. Since, you know, that pesky Korean war never really ended either. Only a cease fire was signed. By his logic you wouldn’t even need to ask the Congress to approve a declaration of war. Just invade North Korea and be done with it.
You prefer Libya, almost North Korea, and preparing for Syria, with back to back coup d’état’s in Egypt, while staying in Iraq for nearly 4 more years and still in Afghanistan, or do you not like Obama as well?
By his logic you wouldn’t even need to ask the Congress to approve a declaration of war.
You mean like was done in Libya? Or do you mean drone strikes in Yemen? Oh wait, I forgot, the invasion of Pakistan to kill Bin Laden?
So, got a soft spot in your heart for Kim Jong Un, too, eh? Lovely.
Not really. I was against the war in Libya and was against the aerial bombing campaign in Serbia as well. To me the invasion of Iraq was a pointless waste of time and unjustified.
As for Afghanistan I think the war was justified and was in favor of it but now that Bin Laden is dead there is no justification to spend more manpower and resources there anymore.
The sending of special troops to Pakistan in order to kill Bin Laden was dirty but that is the kind of dirty that nation states sometimes need to do. Given the ties of the Pakistan intelligence service with the Taliban it would have been nearly impossible to do it in full cooperation with the local authorities so it is not like there were viable alternatives.
As for North Korea it is basically impossible to conduct a proper military compaign without the tacit approval of China and Russia. The dirty way to do it would be to create a casus belli and convince South Korea to invade North Korea without the direct involvement of US troops which could stay behind in South Korea to guard the rear so to speak. Another way would be to sponsor a coup of some sort. Colored revolutions wouldn’t work in a hermetic dictatorship like that.
The cheapest way of course would be to proceed with sanctions. North Korea has no chance in a conventional war and the instant they use a nuke they will get obliterated. The main concern is further proliferation especially to non-state agents.
“To me the invasion of Iraq was a pointless waste of time and unjustified.”
Well, that’s just stupid, because there is no plausible scenario by which Saddam, unfettered any longer by the sanctions, would not have rearmed and threatened vital Western interests all over again. The choice was not whether we would go to war with him or not, but whether it would be on his terms, or ours.
Personally, I am appalled by those leading cushy lives in the West who haven’t a care for those oppressed by mad dictators in this world. I find this stance utterly lacking in compassion, morality, or long term strategic consideration.
Once you start invading countries because you do not like their leaders you start a dangerous precedent. I would also argue that more Iraqis died in the war and in the current terrorist acts than would have died otherwise had Saddam remained in power. The sanctions worked and his military was depleted.
The fact is a lot of borders in the Middle East and Africa were artificially designed splitting ethnic groups along the way. It is hardly unexpected that there would be conflicts.
“Once you start invading countries because you do not like their leaders you start a dangerous precedent.”
Flaccid nonsense. Saddam was a very bad dude, and I for one shed no tears for his demise.
“I would also argue that more Iraqis died in the war and in the current terrorist acts than would have died otherwise had Saddam remained in power. “
Then, you know nothing of life under Saddam, and should read up on the travils of the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds in particular.
Moreover, you cannot even get in the same league without accepting some of the more outrageous estimates for how many Iraqis died during the actual fighting. And, if you accept those, you have also to accept the estimates from the same organizations which claimed that the sanctions themselves were responsible for over a million untimely deaths, and then the bottom drops out of your entire argument and rationale for inaction.
“The sanctions worked and his military was depleted.”
Farcical, wishful thinking. Key word “was”. The sanctions were over. They were about to be voted down in the UN, and Iraqi trade was burgeoning as fewer and fewer entities paid any heed to them anyway.
The president is a total lame duck. No one takes his speeches seriously, especially when he makes them then moves on to something else.
As for the scandals, there are multiple things that raise concerns, yet the president and AG aren’t pushing for an independent investigation. Why not, if they have clean hands?
He is already counting his last days remaining…
To me, Obama has always been like the typical liberal college kid who can drone on for hours about all the things they could easily fix (by applying the usual liberal, college-age, socialist fixes that have failed every time they’ve been tried), yet whose actual core competency is playing hacky sack and day dreaming about ruling the world.
When he first ran for President someone observed that Obama would be a masterful motivational speaker for church youth groups and high schools, perhaps one of the best, but that there was little sign of any other abilities.
Truly, he could convince people to try and build a pyramid with his ringing words and mellifluous baritone. Unfortunately, five years into the project, the construction site is still a pile of disorganized stone blocks and the laborers are idly perched on top of them, listening to yet another speech about how his ingenious plans to build the world’s tallest pyramid (from the top down) are being vexed by Apophis, Heket, greedy Jewish construction supervisors, a disloyal priesthood, the depleted stone reserves in easily accessible rock quarries, and climate change that’s upsetting Nile floods despite his entreaties to Hapi (god of the Nile) to forgive the Egyptian companies and farm interests for abusing the river How he’s going to refocus on the task at hand and by overcoming all the obstacles and by bringing us together, this time he’s going to make some progress.
Everyone sits and listens to the droning speech, unmoved, having concluded that the Pharaoh, though convinced he is a living god, is just too dumb to stack blocks. They return to their lunches and await the day when they can toss the pharaoh’s useless body down a tunnel in the Valley of the Kings, bury the entrance with sand and gravel, and write him out of history.
Wow.
You a raciss.
_
When he was running for President the first time and asked about his experience, the response was “Successfully ran a Primary.”
It just goes to show how many people will mindlessly follow a completely empty suit.
“The deep problems afflicting America — social and economic breakdown in inner cities and rural areas; rising economic insecurity; widening gulfs between ideologies, regions, and socioeconomic classes — are simply far beyond the president’s reach.”
.
.
Seriously?
Not only are they NOT beyond his reach, his campus liberal, hand-wringing idiot, socialist ‘reach’. His over ‘reach’, is WHY we are still in this economic mess! He’s reached into every pocket, every job, every car, every school, every church, every possible area of public or private life we have, and he’s stirred things up SO much that we may never get back some of our Rights or Freedoms. I get that GWB opened us up to stuff like the Patriot Act ‘for our own good’.
But Mr. Obumble has screwed with the economy and it’s tie in to taxes and healthcare to a point that EVEN the Chinese Communists are alternately laughing at, and crying over, our dear leaders total lack of understanding of HOW money works.
It’s too bad that HIS mother wasn’t as big a proponent for abortion as her son is!
I remember the last time the media were pushing the meme that the country had simply become too complex for any one man to fix it. I’ll give you a hint: bell bottoms were in and the Bee Gees were hot.
Under Obamacare the Bee Gee’s would still be singing!
And what do you get when you cross Obama’s contempt for the law, high speed rail, an ignorance of history, and a white Hispanic? You get 80 dead. Casey Jones lived this time, after taking a 50 mph turn at 120. Physics is a bitch.
So what a railroad accident that happens once a decade. Do you have any idea how many people die in the roads every day? Rail is still a lot safer than driving a car. The safety levels of rail are close to those of air travel.
Actually, since the 1980’s we’ve got US railroad accidents down from almost 10,000 a year to about 2,000, with only 271 fatalities in 2012 (down from a peak of 801 in 1989).
But that’s only counting collisions with cars. If you add in pedestrians you get another 434 deaths.
But that’s not including suicides by train If you add those in you get another 300 to 600 deaths.
But that’s not including railroad-related work fatalities. Add those in and you get another 120 deaths per year.
And occasionally you get some passenger deaths, but not often, as they account for only about 4% of all railroad fatalities.
So you’re looking at about 1,200 deaths per year for a mode of transportation that’s only used by about 1 to 2% of the population.
Thank goodness everybody doesn’t use trains or the deaths would be running anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 a year, and of course a huge chunk of the workforce would be employed by railroads to move people from nowhere near where they wanted to leave from to nowhere near where they wanted to go.
So what a railroad accident that happens once a decade.
What are you talking about?
Derailments, I found 3 Amtrak derailments since April and quit looking. Passenger train fatalities, such as the head on collision in DC in June 2009 or just passenger injuries such as the two commuter trains that collided in Bridgeport in May of this year? Perhaps you meant only high speed rail accidents with fatalities like the Maglev train collision in 2006 in Germany or the Wenzchou train collision in 2011?
That’s not to say passenger train service is extremely dangerous, but an accident once a decade is absurd even as hyperbole.
Perhaps you meant only high speed rail accidents with fatalities like the Maglev train collision in 2006 in Germany or the Wenzchou train collision in 2011?
Frankly I have given up trying to figure out Godzilla’s comments. I am guessing he grew up in a Communist country and English is not his first language.
With that sort of severity only once a decade in Spain. But I guess you are too US centric to care. Here have fun comparing the fatalities of cars vs heavy rail:
https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_02_04.html
If you compare them using deaths by passenger miles traveled, or using deaths by number of trips the result is always the same. Railroads are a lot safer than cars.
Remember this accident?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23222048
It wouldn’t have taken a lot for there to have been a lot more fatalities either. Yet air travel is still a lot safer than traveling by car. Just because the vehicles carry more people when an accident happens more people die. But the frequency of accidents is a lot lower. But I guess you are too dumb to figure that out by yourself.
I guess you are too US centric to care.
Germany? China? Are these in the US?
Or were you referring to George, who was discussing the potential of high-speed rail accidents in the US, when you suggested railroad accidents only occur once a decade?
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics categories Godzilla linked show that about 2.3% of transportation fatalities involve railroads, while they only transport about 1% of the population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanair_Flight_5022
Airplane accident in Spain back in 2008. 154 dead. Will you start wining about how airplanes aren’t safe either?
s/wining/whining/
I just wonder if behind it all was a government bureaucrat insisting that the train had to make better time.
No. The cause was a government bureaucrat deciding to cut costs by making the high speed train enter the city using a low speed track in order to save money and another bureaucrat deciding not to upgrade their automatic train control system in low speed lines to enforce speed limits much like the high speed system which already does this.
Either way, as usual, it was government corruption at work.
It’s the usual bait-and-switch. The government says it can solve all your problems if you just give it more money and power. And, initially, they make good. But, then other political priorities push that particular concern to the bottom of the pile, and the service deteriorates, but you’re stuck with it because there’s no other game left in town.
BTW – not sure it was the track that failed. If that were the case, I would have expected the heavier engine to have broken it and flown off first. As you can see in the videos, it is the lighter cars after which leave first, dragging the engine behind.
The problem was the driver entered a curve where you could only travel at 90 km/h without derailing at 190 km/h or something like that. The low speed trains for which that line segment was designed for seldom travel at more than 80 km/h so there was little chance of that happening back then.
Once they started running the high-speed trains over that line the possibility of an accident happening increased a lot. It is the drivers fault for speeding. But in the high-speed segments they have automatic speed control systems to prevent speeding and that segment did not have the automatic speed control system. If it had the system this would have never happened.
“widening gulfs between ideologies, regions, and socioeconomic classes — are simply far beyond the president’s reach.”
Who do they think is widening those gulfs?
As Robert Heinlein would say, it’s called bad luck.
I can’t comment on Obama’s speeches any more; all that comes out now is vile cursing.
Oh, I wouldn’t characterize the President as engaged in mild cursing — simply soft whining (ba doom, boom!)
PM,
I think Casey meant when Obumble was speaking, he, CASEY, has vile cursing emissions from his, Casey’s, pie hole! I totally got it, I’m a sufferer of CPMMSVCS [Current POTUS makes mm spit vile curses syndrome], and the ONLY cure is Mr. Obumble leaving 1600 Penn. Ave!