Obama's presidency began ominously. Hanson chronicled its beginning: "Obama went on an apology tour abroad. He inflated the accomplishments of the Islamic world, magnified his own country's sins, and once again blamed Bush for America's global unpopularity." And gave the Queen of England an iPod. It often seemed that Barack Obama blamed Bush for everything Obama perceived as a problem/roadblock in his presidency. He offered finger-pointing rather than workable solutions.

Meanwhile, Obama declared himself Auto Emperor, pushing Chrysler and GM into bizarrely-structured bankruptcies and firing the CEO of General Motors. This set in motion an inevitable chain of events which will result in default on taxpayer loans. The Congressional Oversight Panel has reported that the likelihood of repayment is doubtful. "Treasury put $81 billion into the two firms, and, unless the global car industry takes a miraculous turn for the better and sustains record sales for years, recouping that sum is virtually impossible." That figure doesn't include the various loans to GMAC.

Robert Farago of TTAC has written that "we're looking at an non-recoupable federal "investment" in the failed automakers that totals more than $100 billion." Of course, in ObamaWorld, this was this was never about the future viability of GM or Chrysler. It was about union jobs and UAW pension and retiree medical obligations - i.e. bankrolling/safeguarding The Union Vote. And screw everyone else.

Then there was energy policy. Candidate Obama swore to explore all options - offshore drilling, nuclear, wind, solar - an encompassing political suitcase of clichéd energy 'solutions'. What is now being delivered by President Obama is not what was promised.

Victor D. Hanson has pointed out that, under the Obama Administration's current policies, there "would be no new offshore drilling after all, no promise to use clean coal, and little if anything planned about nuclear power. Instead, Americans got one Van Jones, some sort of environmental "czar", who had a long history of ritually trashing the American economy, American agriculture, and American coal producers - while derogating George W. Bush as a "crack-head" oilman as addicted to petroleum as an addict is to cocaine. (Presumably Mr. Jones does not fly to his many conferences on carbon-spewing jets and is not picked up by gasoline-burning taxis.)" Or limos.

That would be now ex-czar Van Jones, exposed as a radical crackpot, truther loon, Commie sympathizer and racist.

Speaking of race, Hanson wrote, "Candidate Obama also assured skeptical voters that he would show us how to transcend race. He was no Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, who used skin color and white guilt for careerist purposes. The Reverend Wright, "typical white person", Michelle Obama's "downright mean country," and the Pennsylvania "clingers" remark were mere aberrations of the exhausting campaign, hyped by the shameless right wing.

But soon the people got the attorney general of the United States calling them racial cowards and dismissing voter-intimidation suits against club-wielding Black Panthers who had swarmed voting booths."

Then there's the health care mess. "President Obama somehow demanded that a 1,000-page blueprint of a proposed government takeover of the nation's health care be voted on before August recess - as if even one more month of treating patients the way we have for the last 100 years simply would be too much."

Hanson's exceptional essay strikes a nerve; it is an erudite litany of promises broken, hopes unfulfilled and 'change' most people never expected.

In a similar vein, the Wall Street Journal has opined: "Mr. Obama is falling in the polls because last year he didn't tell the American people that the "change" they were asked to believe in included trillions of dollars in new spending, deferring to the most liberal Members of Congress, a government takeover of health care and appointees with the views of Van Jones."

Victor Davis Hanson concludes, "Once upon a time the people deluded themselves into thinking a suave extremist was to be their nuts-and-bolts centrist. Now they don't know whether to be mad at him or themselves - or both." (posted 9/10/09, permalink)

Here's a hint. Stay in the House. Kick back, take some deep hits on the clue bong, and chill out, dude. You're supposed to be cool, right? Right. So, hey, like be cool okay? ...

Practice doing nothing, zero, zip, niente, nada. For about two weeks. Stay at home and spend some quality time with your family that doesn't involve taking the wife out for dinner at a cost of around $10 million in air and limo charges after we warm up Air Force One and put the country's biggest SUV on the road.

Yup, do nothing except, well, get up in the morning and, like millions of others who still have a job, go to the job. Go to the office. Sit in the big papa bear chair behind the new sign that reads "The Buck Would Stop Here If We Had A Buck!" Close the mouth, open the mind, fo-cus and get some work done."

He continues, asking that Barry O. take a holiday - not a Bank Holiday but, rather, a Blather Holiday: "Enough with the endless billion/trillion bills and the fat fear mongering. Enough with the angry school marm lecturing. Enough with the big daddy warnings of stiffer punishment to come if we don't shape up like right now.

Face it, man, every time you talk about saving and creating jobs thousands of people get ejected out of their jobs with a JATO assist from whatever policy you seem to be whipping out at the moment. Every time you speak of the future it gets grimmer.

Lately it seems that all you have to do is glance away from the teleprompter and hesitate and, boom!, there goes another 100 point drop in the Dow. And then, when you find the next sentence and say it, whap! there's goes another 100 points. I'm not sure if the Dow can sink beneath absolute zero, but I'm not curious to find out. Maybe that sort of "experimentation" seems far out and groovy to you, but I'm not into smoking PCP myself so just put "the idea of the day" down and step away from the policy."

My question is: who's making all these gaffes? Is it Obama, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs or Gibbs' cousin, who has a certain reputation as the master of inappropriate responses?

There is a definite family resemblance between the two men on the right. (posted 2/23/09, permalink)

In the oft-funny book, 'Class' (subtitled 'A painfully accurate guide through the American status system'), Paul Fussell has a chapter about words as class indicators. He notes that middle class people love "bogus airline words" like 'beverage', 'flotation device', 'motion discomfort' and 'non-dairy creamer'. "Smoking is not permitted while making use of the lavatory facilities" is, he says, the complicated, less-classy way of saying "Don't smoke in the toilet."

The more syllables, the more lame and class-dropping a word or phrase is: prison becomes correctional facility, tip becomes gratuity, rich becomes affluent, end becomes terminate, death becomes fatality, atom bomb becomes nuclear device, etc.

And Transition Team (4 syllables) becomes Office of the President-Elect (9 syllables). (posted 11/10/08, permalink)