Well, this certainly inspires confidennce:
2009 is the anti-2008 for Team Obama. Whereas, last year, the Obama campaign was able to demonstrate its supreme competence at running a campaign, raising money, and using technology to further Barack Obama’s political goals and personal ambitions, once Team Obama moved into the White House, it seemed that its hold on managerial competence disappeared. Thus, we have a Treasury Secretary whose tax delinquencies were not discovered by the Obama vetting system, and who is Home Alone at the Treasury Department because the White House can’t get its nominees confirmed quickly enough to provide the Treasury Secretary the personnel support he needs to deal with the greatest economic crisis since the recession of the early 1980s. The White House’s initial choice for HHS Secretary, Tom Daschle, was himself eliminated because of tax delinquencies. Because of the multiple problems with nominees running into tax problems, the responsibility for vetting over tax issues became concentrated in the White House Counsel’s Office . . . only to discover that White House Counsel Greg Craig has his own tax problems. Two Commerce Secretaries have been forced to withdraw their nominations. Only now is the Senate turning its attention to confirming the nomination of Ron Kirk as U.S. Trade Representative. And in the latest personnel snafu, the selection of Charles Freeman as the Chairman of the National Intelligence Counsel has been withdrawn.
Well, as that astute Chicago politician, Jesse Jackson, said, “Barack ain’t ever run anything but his mouth.”
[Update a few minutes later]
“No one wants to be Obama’s Brownie.”
It’s not surprise that he can’t get good help. I sure wouldn’t want to be part of the team that will be blamed for the disaster that is inevitable from these policies.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s another explanation, from the same comments section (read the post, too) — ethics bends:
He’s a Chicago machine politician, used to associating with the likes of Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers, and nobody complaining about it. And he got catapulted into the highest office of the land in an unnaturally short time, with a media so in the tank that he wasn’t vetted himself.
Give the guy a break, he’s suffering from the “ethics bends”, all that corruption is coming out in great painful bubbles, instead of gradually seeping out over the course of a long political career.
Seriously, had he reached the White House after a normal political trajectory, as the capstone of a long, long career, he’d have had time to adjust himself to the differing expectations at the federal level, and to shed a lot of baggage. He must be very disoriented right now.
It’s not just a lack of experience. It’s an overabundance of bad experience.
It also means that it may be very tough to find a good NASA administrator (not that it’s ever easy).
[Update a few minutes later]
A crisis of competence. Well, some of us aren’t surprised.
[Update a couple minutes later, from comments at the link.]
His statement about “profit-to-earnings ratios” comes from that same well of ignorance.
Actually, it was even worse than that. The moron said “profits AND earnings ratio”. Not only didn’t the idiot know what a P/E ratio is, he doesn’t know how to translate mathematical operations to English. I’m betting that the idiot messiah was pretty darned awful at mathematical word problems. Frankly, I’d be surprised if the fool understood any math beyond some basic arithmetic.
I’d be willing to bet that’s right. Actually, with all the trillions being tossed around, I wonder even about the basic arithmetic. Of course, it’s hard to know, because he refuses to release his transcripts. There’s certainly no available evidence that he understands anything about business, or math.
But he wants us to take stock advice from him. Because he talks pretty.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Even ObamaweekNewsweek’s Howard Fineman is taking a break from his usual Obama tongue bath, except this part is nuts:
The center usually is the safest, most productive place in politics, but perhaps not now, not in a once-in-a-century economic crisis.
Swimming in the middle, he’s denounced as a socialist by conservatives, criticized as a polite accommodationist by government-is-the-answer liberals, and increasingly, dismissed as being in over his head by technocrats.
“Swimming in the middle”? “Swimming in the freakin’ middle?!“
Only on planet Leftist.
[Update a few minutes later]
And why does Fineman feel a need to declare that The One isn’t a socialist? Methinks the sycophant doth protest too much.
This is another example of Jeff Goldstein’s point: To the Left, it’s the words/labels that matter, not the objective actions. So it doesn’t matter if Bush had a modest, sustainable family ranch – he’s a Republican, and therefore drinks the blood of baby seals. Likewise it doesn’t matter what laws Barack signs; he says he’s “swimming in the middle” and therefore he is.
This is why we have to insist that words and labels are hard-linked to measurable, objective actions and real-world consequences. It’s the only way to control a conversation and have effective communication.
Apparently the NASA administrator is also banned from reentering the aerospace industry for life. I really don’t know, but that’s what I read on NASA space flight forums and those guys tend to know their stuff.
If true, that must makes the NASA administrator position particularly unattractive this time around. Deal with Ares one way or another, which in itself is likely to brand you as a total failure no matter what choice you make, associate yourself with an administration which is experiencing some serious problems and has shown more than the usual apathy in most of what NASA does, and as payment you get to leave the aerospace industry permanently.
I just posted over there, but P/E is PRICE to Earnings. It’s a ratio of stock price to the earnings-per-share.
Actually, Rand, the evil sleight of newspeak here — and how appropriate that Newsweek should be one of the principle purveyors of Orwell’s newspeak — is the compound sentence you quote that subtly maligns the technocrats.
Notice the juxataposition: Unreasonable Accusation A, Partisan Criticism B, and Could Maybe Be True Statement C. By putting them together like that, relying on the fact that people typically mentally assign truth values to complete sentences, he manages to suggest that the technocrat criticism of Obama — that’s he over his head — is just as partisan and unimportant as the debate about whether or not he’s a socialist.
This is Orwellian language manipulation at its finest. Jim claimed in a recent post that war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and the Steelers will win the Super Bowl. People generally feel compelled to assign a truth value to the whole sentence, and having ticked off the obviously false first three clauses, are inclined to mark the entire sentence mentally as false, thus allowing the false clauses to pollute the truth value of the final clause. Sort of a language “guilt by association” trick.
That’s the real purpose of Fineman’s article — to suggest in a sneaky non-direct way that the criticism of “technocrats” — which is to say, if you put it less pejoratively, “people who know what their doing, non-politicians” — is either (1) partisan hackery in disguise, or (2) not really important, just some dry academic discussion about labeling. Socialist, technocrat, right, left, competent, stupid — they’re all just labels, man. Not stuff to bother your pretty little head about. These are not the droids you’re looking for.