In Obama’s speeches, one favorite phrase: ‘Let me be clear’

Obama’s declarations of clarity are far more than a little presidential throat-clearing.

In a presidency in which everything is murkier than Obama could have imagined, the “let me be clear” preface has become a signal that what follows will be anything but.

“Now let me be clear — let me be absolutely clear…”If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, a quarter-million dollars a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.” Since then, several proposals have muddied that assertion, including the Obama-approved tax on costly health insurance plans.

Let me be absolutely clear about what health reform means for you,” he said in July. “. . . It will keep government out of health-care decisions. It will give you the option to keep your insurance if you’re happy with it.” In fact, the government’s role in health care would increase under the legislation, and the changes would, in all likelihood, result in many people ending up with different coverage through reasons not of their own choosing.

Now, let me be absolutely clear:

Proverbs 26:24-26: “A malicious man disguises himself with his lips, but in his heart he harbors deceit. Though his speech is charming, do not believe him, for seven abominations fill his heart. His malice may be concealed by deception, but his wickedness will be exposed in the assembly.”

Forget the Palestinians and the Israelis; the White House is embroiled in the biggest no-win diplomatic war of all.

It’s W trying to deftly navigate the whitewater…

The White House on Thursday quickly took away the possibility of Boise State University’s football team joining the national champions Alabama at an honorary Rose Garden ceremony.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) — a well known opponent of college football’s Bowl Championship Series (BCS) — sent a letter to President Barack Obama requesting that the undefeated Boise State Broncons join the undefeated University of Alabama Crimson Tide at the ceremony.

But a White House spokesman indicated to The Hill that Boise’s presence at the ceremony is unlikely, but did not rule it out completely.

The reason?  Well, kudos to the President:

“The president has previously articulated his displeasure with the BCS system, but he’s focused on more important things right now,” White House spokesman Adam Abrams said in an e-mail.

Of course, this doesn’t mean there’s not some interest in the recreational equivalent of nation-building:

Obama has criticized the BCS and backed a playoff system in past media appearances but today’s indication shows that he is not quite willing to make a large-scale statement on the issue.

On the other hand, it might be a better use of half of the President’s time:

The president is simultaneously trying to shepherd healthcare reform legislation through Congress before his State of the Union address in a few weeks and help coordinate U.S. disaster relief efforts in Haiti after a massive earthquake struck there this week.

But at the end of the day – if someone gets a “stimulus”, everyone wants a “stimulus”:

The anti-BCS political action committee PlayoffPAC criticized the president for missing an opportunity to “make a statement” against the BCS without spending taxpayer dollars.

“No one’s saying this is a top-tier issue on the President’s agenda, but college football’s off-the-field impact on schools isn’t trivial either,” PlayoffPAC official Matt Sanderson said in an e-mail. “He promised a year ago to ‘throw his weight around,’ but now it looks as if he may pass-up a golden opportunity to make a statement without spending one extra taxpayer minute or dollar. An overwhelming majority of college football fans will be disappointed if the President doesn’t make good on his word.”

Let me make this clear:  WE are at war with people who want to kill us.  We are in a recession that looks like it’s going to be a lot more intractable than even the Jeremiahs have been saying.  So what in the flaming fine feathered flying flapping fowl is the Federal government doing wasting any time on this kind of crap?

If one taxpayer dollar is wasted on this utter non-issue, it should be an excuse for taxpayers around the nation to storm capitals with torches and pitchforks and chase people from office with coats of tar and feathers.

That will be a playoff we can use.

…weren’t we told that the November Republican turnaround victory in Virginia and the stunning upset in New Jersey weren’t referenda on Obama’s first year?

If that were true, then wouldn’t this story just, like, totally not exist?

Coming off stinging election losses in Virginia and New Jersey — not to mention Copenhagen, where he failed to win the 2018 Olympics for his hometown of Chicago — President Obama is staying away from what could become another painful loss.

Even though the campaign of Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has been making quiet entreaties, the president has no plans to visit her in the last week of the special election to fill the Senate seat once held by the late Edward M. Kennedy.

“It’s not on our schedule to go to next week,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said matter-of-factly.

Huh.

Damn tea partiers.

Some folks  never get the word:

A musical about Barack Obama’s “Yes we can” election campaign premieres in Germany this weekend, including love songs by the president to his wife Michelle and duets with Hillary Clinton.

This doesn’t entirely not make sense; “The world” was perhaps Obama’s biggest constituency.

The venue for the premiere seems appropriate since the optimism of Obamania remains largely intact in Germany, about a year after Obama, an accomplished public speaker, became America’s first black president. One campaign highlight was a July 2008 speech to some 200,000 people in the heart of Berlin about the world, the U.S. and its place in it.

To be fair, “Peanut Farmer From Plains” just closed last year in Munich, after a 32 year run.

…that this loathsome incident…

A doll found hanging off a Main Street building in Plains is causing controversy.

Controversial enough to get the United States Secret Service involved.

Witnesses say it was an image of President Barack Obama with a rope around his neck, and the display was found hanging in one of the city’s most recognizable sites dedicated to former President Jimmy Carter.

…will:

a) be blamed on the “climate of hate” that all conservative opposition to Obama is being speciously linked to, and

b) eventually be found to be a hoax by a lefty trying to discredit conservatives.

I said 75% safe.  Not a lock, just fairly confident. 

We’ve been down this road a few times.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen Obama actually deified.

No, I mean actually deified, this time in the left-leaning Danish site Politiken.dk:

He is provocative in insisting on an outstretched hand, where others only see animosity.

His tangible results in the short time that he has been active – are few and far between. His greatest results have been created with words and speeches – words that remain in the consciousness of their audience and have long-term effects.

He comes from humble beginnings and defends the weak and vulnerable, because he can identify himself with their conditions.

And no we are not thinking of Jesus Christ, whose birthday has just been celebrated – – but rather the President of the United States Barack Hussein Obama.

I had to double check to see if the angry Moslems had killed noodle-, brained lefty commentator in Denmark after the “Mohammed Cartoons” controversy, and they’d hired Grace Kelly as a ringer:

For some time now, comparisons between the two have been a tool of cynical opinion that quickly became fatigued of the rapture that Obama instilled prior to and after the presidential election last year.

From the start, Obama’s critics have claimed that his supporters have idolised him as a saviour, thus attempting to dismantle the concrete hope that Obama has represented for most Americans.

Actually, my Danish friend, it’s the lefties and their bobbleheaded deification that created the cynical opinion; it’s Obama’s incompetence that have dismantled the “concrete hope”.

The idea was naturally that the comparison between Jesus and Obama – which is something that the critics developed themselves – would be comical, blasphemous, or both.

If such a comparison were to be made, it would, of course, inevitably be to Obama’s advantage.

That’s right.  Obama’s better than Christ.

Read the whole thing. 

I’m tempted not to go riot in the streets and demand the author’s death.

Our old friend Susan Lenfestey’s holiday cheer has apparently been harshed by President Obama’s first year in office…

…oh, who are we kidding?  Susan Lenfestey has never met a mellow she couldn’t harsh.

Still, even by her dysthemic standards, this blog post was a doozy:

Maya Angelou’s poem, Still I Rise, has been going through my head lately. Some verses:

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Catch that?  If Susan Lenfestey’s special little world, Barack Obama – a child of the middle class, who’s benefited not only from the best (or at least highest-rated) education American money can buy but from the American people’s open-mindedness, is no different than a Jim Crow-era sojourner who had to deal with real, genuine, constant oppression!

I’d say “every single one of us who disagrees with the President must be no better in their eyes than some Grand Kleagle”, but I guess we’ve already established that).

Feel like that’s what our president is dealing with, and still, he rises.

Well, no.  He doesn’t.

Below is a reject from the Star Tribune on Obama’s Afghan speech. Yeah, it’s a tad dated, and we’re on to Copenhagen, but Barb is sick of holding up her end of the line without me, so I thought maybe something’s better than nothing. Or maybe not. Sorry for the absence, I lost my mind.

This absence of smart-ass riposte is brought to you by the kinder, gentler Mitch.  Or at least the Mitch that’ll let the occasional hanging curve-ball by out of pity.

I”m not sure what’s got me more jazzed; that Obamacare is such a shambles, even the far left is bailing on the President…:

In a stunning reversal of fortune for President Barack Obama top progressives are attacking the health-reform plan moving through the Senate as “hollow,” “unsupportable” and a sellout to corporate interests.

Republicans, after plotting for months to sink the signature legislation of Obama’s first year, suddenly think that Democrats might wind up doing it for them.

Most dangerously for White House chances of assembling 60 Senate votes, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean launched a third day of attacks on the emerging bill, arguing in a Washington Post op-ed that it meets none of his benchmarks for “real reform.”

“[A]s it stands, this bill would do more harm than good to the future of America,” Dean wrote, then took to the airwaves to amplify his case.

…or that Fast Eddie Schultz, a man who actually is as stupid and hateful as the left alleges conservative talk radio to be (see Berg’s Seventh Law), is now considered a “top progressive”:

Ed Schultz, an influential liberal radio host [he’s “influence” a few million listeners to switch back to Limbaugh – Ed.], declared on his “Ed Show” on MSNBC: “The base is restless. They are wandering in the wilderness, Mr. President. … They want to know, where are you? … Right now, Mr. President, your base thinks you’re nothing but a sellout — a corporate sellout, out that. … The only people who like this current bill right now, Mr. President, is the insurance industry — they get a bunch of new customers.”

Don’t you love it when the left takes a break from demanding that conservative leaders run to the center, to demand that liberal leaders move to the left?

Desperation, thy name is Obama. Earlier this week the President pleaded if we don’t pass health care reform now, no President will ever try it again.

Today, with virtually every federal agency in financial disarray or on a trajectory of financial collapse, the President implies this time it will be different.

President Obama told ABC News’ Charles Gibson in an interview that if Congress does not pass health care legislation that will bring down costs, the federal government “will go bankrupt.”

Mr. President, sir, we have no doubt that you will see to that whether we reform health care or not. The truth of the matter is, the federal government, by any measure applied to any non-public entity is insolvent already.

When private entities reach the end of the fiscal road, they don’t have the benefit of raising debt ceilings and taxes. They die a quick death – that is unless the government decides a bail-out is in order – then they die a slow, painful death. Either way, the competition eats their lunch and steals their talent. Of course, the federal government has no competition, no one to keep it accountable (any more).

As for a bankrupt federal government, the tipping point was probably reached some time ago. We will never pay off our national debt and inevitably it’s weight will come crashing down on our economy making 2009 look like the good ol’ days for millions of Americans.

Indeed, Mr. President, I have to agree with you. The federal government will go bankrupt if we don’t pass health care reform legislation.

But if we do, it will come a lot faster.

…to indulge in schadenfreud is not a good one.  I resist it the best I can.

Of course, some times it’s  harder than others:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 24% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -18.

But polls change – which is why they keep taking ’em.

Is Barack Obama from another planet?

Mystery as spiral blue light display hovers above Norway (while Obama was in Norway?)

The mystery began when a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain in the north of the country. It stopped mid-air, then began to move in circles. Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky.

The light bears some resemblence to Obama’s logo!

Are his people trying to beam him back home?

Is there a way we could assist them?

Extraterrestrial citizenship would certainly play into the Birthers argument.

Bad wins.

50% of voters now say they prefer having [BHO] as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they’d rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that’s somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country’s difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited.

I’m not a huge Bush fan being a far-right fiscal conservative so count me out, but Change is coming. Soon.

Neither have I.

…and I’m married to one, and blog with one.

I’m feeling the love from Norwegians here at home but as my Lefse-loving colleague posted mere minutes ago, Obama is not feeling the love from Norwegians abroad.

Norwegians are incensed over what they view as his shabby response to the prize by cutting short his visit.

Okay, so you’re nonplussed. Let’s apply a modicum of analysis to the situation.

You gave the Peace Prize to a President via a nomination and selection process that began in late 2008 and was closed to candidate submissions in February 2009. The President at that time hadn’t even exhausted a roll of toilet paper in the Presidential Potty. At least that would have been an accomplishment.

As it were, at that point in time, and arguably at the current one as well, the President had not advanced the cause of peace, or frankly any cause for which he campaigned so vigorously.

Even the President himself said he didn’t deserve it. In this case I don’t think he was employing his signature brand of transparently false humility. I think he really meant it.

It would appear the Nobel committee has so depreciated the value of their vaunted prize that even the winners think it a joke.

The White House has canceled many of the events peace prize laureates traditionally submit to, including a dinner with the Norwegian Nobel committee, a press conference, a television interview, appearances at a children’s event promoting peace and a music concert, as well as a visit to an exhibition in his honour at the Nobel peace centre.

You might have considered the consequences of awarding your “prize” to an opportunistic fraud like Al Gore and America’s (heretofore) worst President, Jimmy Carter. Word has it  Kanye West is on the short list for 2010.

The visit will test Obama’s rhetorical skills as he seeks to reconcile acceptance of the Nobel peace prize with sending an extra 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan.

Of course, because troops have never brought peace to anyone anywhere, right? God only knows what form of “peace” Norway would have today without the Russian troop invasion of 1944, liberating Norway from the (then fleeing) Germans. Maybe Hitler would still be hiding out at the foot of the Galdhøpiggen.

White House officials said that Obama, who was planning to work on the final draft of his speech on his flight from Washington to Oslo, would directly address the issue of the irony of being awarded the peace prize while escalating the war.

Just his speed as he just finished one featuring the irony of spending our way out of the federal deficit. Wait’ll he tries to plug his teleprompter’s 120 volt American plug into those goofy European outlets.

Choke.

The Norsks will have the last laugh then.

Remember when Obama was going to make the rest of the world love and respect us?

Either does the rest of the world.  Obama, who saw fit to give King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia a full-tongue butt-smooch and bruised his forehead scraping before Emperor Akihito, blew off King Harald of Norway – a nation that’s always been a friend of the US, is the anscestral home of millions of Americans (myself included) and has walked the same rhetorical tightrope the President himself is attempting; giving the Nobel Peace Prize to the President, while contributing troops to the war effort in Afghanistan since the very beginning.

Norwegians are incensed over what they view as his shabby response to the prize by cutting short his visit.

The White House has cancelled many of the events peace prize laureates traditionally submit to, including a dinner with the Norwegian Nobel committee, a press conference, a television interview, appearances at a children’s event promoting peace and a music concert, as well as a visit to an exhibition in his honour at the Nobel peace centre.

He has also turned down a lunch invitation from the King of Norway.

Bad move, Mr. President:

According to a poll published by the daily tabloid VG, 44% of Norwegians believe it was rude of Obama to cancel his scheduled lunch with King Harald, with only 34% saying they believe it was acceptable.

“Of all the things he is cancelling, I think the worst is cancelling the lunch with the king,” said Siv Jensen, the leader of the largest party in opposition, the populist Progress party. “This is a central part of our government system. He should respect the monarchy,” she told VG.

It’s going to be an interesting trip:

The visit will test Obama’s rhetorical skills as he seeks to reconcile acceptance of the Nobel peace prize with sending an extra 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan.

White House officials said that Obama, who was planning to work on the final draft of his speech on his flight from Washington to Oslo, would directly address the issue of the irony of being awarded the peace prize while escalating the war.

The Nobel peace committee has been criticised for awarding Obama the prize before he has any major accomplishments in international relations.

I think it’s gonna go a little something like…

“Dear…um…Nobel Committee.  I…um…am not George Dubbya Bush!”

Obama’s approval ratings are the lowest of any president at this point in their first term, since they started keeping records:

President Obama’s job approval rating has fallen to 47 percent in the latest Gallup poll, the lowest ever recorded for any president at this point in his term.

Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and even Richard Nixon all had higher approval ratings 10-and-a-half months into their presidencies. Obama’s immediate predecessor, President George W. Bush, had an approval rating of 86 percent, or 39 points higher than Obama at this stage. Bush’s support came shortly after he launched the war in Afghanistan in response to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

It’s best not to get too excited; Ronald Reagan’s numbers were only two points better at this point in 1982, and Bill Clinton was only five points better – and we know how both of those turned out. 

Yes, we do.  Reagan had a solid plan for solidifying our tanking economy and fixing the foreign-policy nightmare of the seventies.  And Clinton was well on the road to getting chastened for his overreach on healthcare, after which he triangulated so far to the right that he actually ran a more fiscally-responsible adminsitration (with the aid of GOP majorities in both houses) than his successor.

Obama?  So far, we haven’t gotten to that point yet:

President Barack Obama outlined new multibillion-dollar stimulus and jobs proposals Tuesday, saying the nation must continue to “spend our way out of this recession” until more Americans are back at work.Without giving a price tag, Obama proposed a package of new spending for highway, bridge and other infrastructure projects, deeper tax breaks for small businesses and tax incentives to encourage people to make their homes more energy efficient.

Great news if you’re a highway worker!  Or a window installer!  Not so much elsewhere, of course.

I’ll await details on how Obama next plans to spend his way out of deficit.

 This just in from an alternate universe in which Barack Obama was President of the United States on June 6, 1944; this is his proclamation announcing the invasion continued surveillance and aggressive patrolling actions in Normandy.

Soldiers, Sailors and Airpeople of the Allied Relief Force!

You are about to embark upon the Great Shout-Out At Hitler, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world – even those very, very many parts of the world whom we have aggrieved in the past –  are upon you. The hopes and prayers of security-loving people everywhere march, walk, and roll in their wheelchairs alongside you.
In company with our brave Allies and brothers-and-sisters-in-arms on
other Fronts, you will bring about the prevention of the German human-caused-disaster machine from conquering any more territory until further communityorganization can take full effect, as well as, the bringing to justice in a court of law of the Nazi tyrants, who were the responsibility of the previous administration anyway, over the oppressed and, it needs to be said, at times oppressive peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a world with adequate social spending.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your opponents are is well trained,
well equipped and man-made-disaster hardened. He will fight savagely.
They are, indeed, haters.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great setbacks in negotiations to preclude further man-made disasters. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity  to wage war on the ground, while erroneous collateral damage is being paid for out of an international trust fund. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in money and political will, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained lawyers and organizers, as well as all of you alternate-resolution specialists. The tide has turned! The free men and women of the world are marching together to send a message to Mister Hitler; stop advancing!

I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in dealing with this epic man-made disaster. We will accept nothing less than sending a very serious message!

Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Me upon this great
and noble undertaking.

                          SIGNED: Barack H. Obama
                          President
                          United Communities of America

Chris Matthews:

West Point is “the enemy camp?

Wow.  Paranoid much, Mr. Tingly?

After promising the most open, accessible Administration ever, Obama is strictly cutting his media face time:

The president, whose job-approval ratings have been on a steady slide, hasn’t held a formal news conference in 19 weeks, since July 22. That one ended badly, when Mr. Obama waded into a racial controversy by saying a white police officer “acted stupidly” when he arrested a black Harvard professor.

“It can’t be a total coincidence that the last time he faced the press corps, we ended with beers in the Rose Garden with Henry Louis Gates and James Crowley, when the focus was supposed to be health care,” said Julie Mason, a White House reporter for the Washington Examiner who also covered the Bush administration for the Houston Chronicle.

“It does seem like they are responding to the overexposure argument and trying to exert more control over his appearances,” she said.

I could see that backfiring; there is nobody in the world more petulant than a reporter who has, and then is denied, access to something.

“Liberalism:  Where everything that isn’t mandatory is banned”
   — Unknown

One of liberalism’s most noxious traits is its tendency – indeed, its almost inevitable need – to support and enforce “liberal” (big and small “L”) policies with authoritarian means. 

This tendency is expressed through means both moderately civil and benign (the European mania for larding every step of the production and distribution process with Value Added Taxes, or VATs, which make enterpreneurship so very horribly difficult and so terribly inpinge the profit motive where they’re applied) to big and ugly (Nancy Pelosi’s plan to build concentration camps for people who don’t buy healthcare, Obama’s fistful of czars and his executive pay boards and the enforcement arm behind the “Stimulus”).

There is history for this, of course; it was during America’s most unfettteredly-“liberal” era, from the thirties through the early seventies, that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, and the CIA, carried out abuses against American civilians that would have made Bush-era liberals lose bladder control, if their masters told them to think about it they thought about it all that hard.  Under Roosevelt, Truman, the relatively liberal Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnsion, domestic surveillance was common; the FBI and CIA kept dossiers on American citizens. 

“War on communism?”  Sure. 

But even after the so-called “McCarthy” era – and remember, while the left to this day jumps up and down and invokes “Joe McCarthy” with the same thoughtful consideration of monkeys flinging poo (as if a Senator from Wisconsin controlled all the levers of the federal government), there was plenty of bipartisan, transpartisan and non-partisan support for the so-called “witchhunts” in the post-New-Deal executive branches of the day.

And after the “Red Scare?”  When Jimmy Carter’s version of “hope and change” was stymied by the “lynch and terrorize” counterpolicy of Ayatollah Khomeini, he not only launched a rescue mission that’d make Jack Bauer blanche at the unreality of it all; he also founded the “Joint Special Operations Command” (JSOC), the organization that controls the Army’s “Delta” and the Navy’s SEAL “DevGru”, which reports directly to the Secretary of Defense and the President as opposed to the regular military command, which undertakes all the serious “black bag” dirty work with only the highest level of oversight.  The left and media, naturally, only paid attention to it during the Bush Administration – and seems not to have any actual evidence of actual abuses during that time – but it was a creature of the Carter years.

And it should go without saying that after eight years of lefty whinging about nonexistent or overblown excesses in the Bush administration, it’s the Obama Administration and its allies that are actually seriously discussing censoring  and gutting freedom of speech.  Because Hope and Change must be unanimous!

At any rate, the main point is this:  behind the “carrot” of hopey-changey big-L Liberalism – the programs, the entitlements, the goodies under the government tree every morning – there is a big, ugly, authoritarian stick.  They go together like horse and carriage.

So after putting up with eight years of lefty whinging about the Bush Administration’s alleged, largely nonexistent abuses of the Constitution, and a year of watching the Obama administration undergird its “hope and change” with enemies lists, with official paranoia aimed at American citizens, I’ll make this prediction: 

If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is sprung from his public show trial by fair means (unlikely) or foul (also unlikely, but then so is every jailbreak that has ever happened), it’ll be the Obama Administration that authorizes covert hit teams to prowl the globe killing people beyond the pale of any law, oversight or accountability.

On whether he finds it offensive that a terrorist is afforded all the legal rights of an American citizen…

Obama: I don’t think it will be offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.

The Government has a good case! He will be convicted and executed.

Fer sher.

Trust me.

OJ Simpson was not available for comment.

As Allahpundit notes, the Administration is using “Kiddie Human Shields” in its latest PR project – a propaganda video contest.

Which is bad enough.  But here’s the part that caught me.

Doesn’t the beginning look like the beginning of a WPA or NRO newsreel from the thirties?

and…in a surprisingly early concession…

“You know, if – if I feel like I’ve made the very best decisions for the American people and three years from now I look at it and, you know, my poll numbers are in the tank and because we’ve gone through these wrenching changes, you know, politically, I’m in a tough spot, I’ll – I’ll feel all right about myself,” Obama told CNN’s Ed Henry during an interview in China.

You may not run for a second term?

[insert dramatic orchestral exclamation here]

…because a resounding Jimmuh-like expulsion from office might leave your self esteem a wee bit bruised you mean?

It’s all about you, isn’t it, Sir?

Instead of apologizing for it’s past.

The Chinese, though members of a famously old civilization, seem to possess some of the vigor that once defined the U.S. The Chinese are now an astonishingly optimistic people. Eighty-six percent of Chinese believe their country is headed in the right direction, compared with 37 percent of Americans.

Take a bow, indeed Mr. President.

Last week, in my post “Our McClellan” – in which I compared Obama’s dithering in Afghanistan to that of George P. McClellan,  some of the feedback said “look, the President is thinking things over and not being rash, unlike the previous resident”.

That might be true – although Obama doesn’t have the eighteen months Bush had to spend on his deliberations before invading Iraq – but only if he comes out of it with the right decision, as opposed to more concerned inaction.

But when even the LAtimes gets it, you know the Administration is in trouble:

Obama was right to insist on a full review of whether U.S. interests are better served by expanding the American military footprint in Afghanistan or shrinking it.

But now, two months into his second “comprehensive policy review,” after eight Cabinet-level meetings and several slipped target dates, the president still hasn’t made up his mind.

At some point, “deliberation”, especially in the face of an ugly-and-deteriorating situation like Afghanistan, becomes “paralysis”.

In George W. Bush, we had a president who shot first and asked questions later. In Barack Obama, we have a president who asks the right questions but hesitates to pull the trigger.

And there the LATimes is conjecturing based on facts not in evidence.  We have no idea what questions he’s asking.  But we have no idea if he’s “hesitating to pull the trigger”, or if he can’t figure out how to get the pointy things into the gun.

Is he even qualified to make the decision?  Does he have beginner’s flop-sweats?

Three weeks ago, former Vice President Dick Cheney accused Obama of “dithering.” At the time, the charge sounded premature and partisan — but now some of Obama’s own supporters have begun to wonder whether Cheney was right.

Heh.

Last week, the president’s indecision became even more apparent after White House aides let it be known that he was asking the military for more “exit strategies” — what one official called “off-ramps” — in case things go badly.

Read one way, it sounds like he’s more interested in covering his butt than anything.

And that all of us who said he wasn’t ready for prime time were right.

SCENE:  One day in 2010.  President Obama speaking to a crowd at the Ground Zero memorial at Hiroshima:

(OBAMA steps to the podium)

OBAMA: Uh, welcome, ladies and gentleman.  Before I get started, I’d like to give a quick shout-out to my good friend and world-wide hero Al Gore for the efforts he’s making to, uh, save the world.  He’s sparing no effort to convince people, including some of the efforts that, uh, your people, uh, Emperor Akihito, perfected during your father’s time. (Akihito shifts nervously on his feet).  I think the world owes him more than just the Nobel Peace Prize.  I’d suggest perhaps they make him pope.  (Robert Gibbs starts clapping; stops after a few awkward seconds).  He’s also reaching across the aisle to call, uh, Sarah Palin “gung ho“. Anyway. Just a big shout out. 

Crowd claps nervously.

OBAMA: OK.  Now, Hiroshima.  I’d like to start by thanking my lord and liege, Emperor Akihito, for inviting me here. 

OBAMA turns, bows deeply.  Stays bowed long enough to tie shoes with tongue.

AKIHITO Nods.

OBAMA (remains bowed)

AKIHITO. (clears throat)

OBAMA (remains bowed)

AKIHITO: Er, mister president?  Carry on.

OBAMA: Thank you, sir.  At any rate, I’d like to express my offical sorrow and apology for the mistakes on the part of my predecessors that led to the inhuman attack on this city, and for the deaths of all the women and chidren who were  for the deaths of all the women and chidren who werefor the deaths of all the women and chidren who werefor the deaths of all the women and chidren who werefor the deaths of all the women and chidren who werefor the deaths of all the women and chidren who were…

TECHNICIAN: (kicks teleprompter)

OBAMA: …hope and change. Thank you.

(Japanese string band plays “Hail To The Chief”)