Obama's Fatal Mistake and Achilles Heel 2 of 3

Obama’s Fatal Mistake and Achilles Heel – 2 of 3
In pursuit of the truth – www.cinopsbegone.com – Monday, October 26, 2009

Let’s pick the article by Mark Steyn in Sunday’s Orange County Register, Oct. 25/09 under The Presidency. It’s a classic for this letter and # 3.

Benjamin Disraeli’s most famous advice to aspiring politicians was: “Never complain and never explain.” For the greatest orator of our time, a man who makes Churchill, Lincoln and Agincourt look like first-round rejects on “Orating with the Stars.”

Barack Obama seems to have pretty much given up on the explaining side. He tried it with health care with speech after speech after exclusive interview for months on end, and the more he explained the more unpopular the whole racket got. So he declared that the time for explaining is over, and it’s time to sign on or else.

Meanwhile, to take the other half of the Disraeli equation, Obama and his officials and their beleaguered band of surrogates never stop complaining. If you express concerns about government health care, they complain about all these “racists” and “domestic terrorists” obstructing his agenda.

If you wonder why the president can’t seem to find time in his hectic schedule of international awards acceptance speeches to make a decision about Afghanistan, they complain that it is not his fault he “inherited” all these problems.

And if you wonder why his “green jobs” czar is a communist 9/11 “truther,” and his National Endowment for the Arts guy is leaning on grant recipients to produce Soviet-style propaganda extolling Obama policies, they complain about Fox News.

The most recent whine – the anti-Fox campaign – is, apart from anything else, unbecoming to the office. President Obama is the chief of state of one of the oldest free societies in the world, but his official White House Web site runs teasers such as: “FOR EVEN MORE FOX LIES, CHECK OUT THE LATEST “TRUTH-0-METER.” It gives off the air of somebody only marginally less paranoid than this week’s president-for-life in some basket case banana republic ranting on the palace balcony because his interior security chief isn’t doing a fast-enough job of disappearing his enemies.

George W. Bush: Remember him? Of course, you do. He’s the guy who is to blame for everything, and still will be midway through Obama’s second term. It turns out he’s in exile abroad. Presumably he jumped bail and snuck across the border on the roof of a box car. But, anyway he was giving a speech in Saskatoon. That’s a town in Saskatchewan. And Saskatchewan is a province in Canada apparently…. He was asked about media criticism of him, and he told the … Saskatchewannabees? Whatever. He told them the attacks never bothered him, although his dad used to get upset: “He’d read the editorial pages, he’d watch the nightly news, and I didn’t. I mean, why watch the nightly news when you are the nightly news?”

That attitude, while raising a bunch of other issues, is psychological healthier. If you are going to attack the press, you need a lightness of touch, not a ham-fisted crowbar such as the White House wielded Thursday, attempting to ban Fox from the pool interviews with the “pay czar.”

Another bit of venerable Disraelian insouciance, on the scribblers of Fleet Street: “Today they blacken your character; tomorrow they blacken your boots.” For two years, the U.S. media has been polishing Obama’s boots, mostly with their drool, to a degree unprecedented in American public life. But now it’s time for the handful of holdouts to make with Kiwi – or else. (to be continued)
George H. Kubeck -