Sunday, June 6, 2010

The Thrill Is Gone

Please play this while you read.



Here's Jack Kelly writing about how The Thrill Is Gone. A brief excerpt:

The low point came when Mr. Obama professed not to know whether Elizabeth Birnbaum, the woman he appointed to head the Minerals Management Service, resigned or was fired. No one expects the president to don scuba tanks and plug the hole himself. But he at least ought to know what's going on with his own people.

"He came across as a beleaguered bureaucrat in damage control," wrote Craig Crawford of Congressional Quarterly.

Here's Maureen Dowd, a former worshipper of The Obamessiah:

It’s impossible not to feel sorry for President Obama, pummeled by the cascading disasters, at home and abroad, unleashed by two war-mongering oil men — plus scary escalations by Israel, Iran and North Korea. (Dick Cheney’s dark influence is still belching like the well. BP just brought on a new public relations executive: Anne Womack-Kolton, who served as Cheney’s campaign press secretary in 2004 and worked in W.’s White House and at the Energy Department.)

Well, actually it is possible to avoid feeling sorry for the Messianic muttonhead.  I know a lot of  people who accomplish the feat every waking hour. 
If you like, you can go here for a similar column written by Newsweek's Jonathan Alter.
IMAO, what we're dealing with is the inevitable disappointment in the leadership style of someone who has been given the toughest job in the world, but who has never even had to deal with the heavy burdens of running a Whataburger night shift. 
What kind of competence were they expecting?     
I hope you're enjoying the B.B. King/Eric Clapton jam.  (That's a much younger, less bald Phil Collins on the drums, BTW.)

I found this in the comment field of the New York Post article up at the top:

Bush has been out of office for almost 2 years and you're STILL crying about him.
Did Reagan ever blame Carter for the mess he left?
Did Carter ever blame Ford for Nixon? For ANYTHING?
Did Nixon ever blame Vietnam on Kennedy or Johnson?
Did Kennedy blame Ike or Truman for the Cold War and the Cuban Missle Crisis?
Did Truman blame FDR for WW2?
Did FDR blame Hoover for the Depression?
Or did these men focus on the issues instead of acting like a child and pointing fingers?

Well, they probably did.  But I don't have time to research it. 
It's been a year and a half, and the guy and his minions still can't speak  to the media without saying the phrase "what we inherited".  What they're doing is "more of the same". 

I hope you'll listen to King and Clapton all the way through to the end.  The last minute of that video is like listening to Zeus talk to Thor.  Great stuff. 

2 comments:

Hot Sam said...

I love the burger joint reference, but we knew that when he ran for office. He's the most inexperienced person ever elected president from any objective standpoint. The only real job he ever held for any period of time was as a lecturer, and those are usually people without the skills to get a tenure track job.

I'm sure presidents have blamed predecessors to some degree, but it has generally been tradition not to comment about you predecessor or successor. Obama broke the former, Carter and Clinton broke the latter.

Obama is a master of taking "full responsibility" in one sentence and then spending every other sentence blaming everyone but himself.

TarrantLibertyGuy said...

Zeus talks to Thor. Good one.