The Obama Watch
The TMI President
Talking too much with nothing to say.
By Daniel J. Flynn – 10.3.14
Immigrants give you the diseases no one else will.
ISIS plays as the JV team the varsity squad would rather keep off the schedule.
Secret Service director Julia Pierson resigns for not keeping the service’s secrets.
The seemingly disparate media obsessions over Ebola, ISIS, and the Secret Service’s previously tight security on news of White House security lapses join to illustrate the folly of the Obama presidency. Merely by declaring this or that so, the president believes his will be done.
Obama judged Ebola traveling to America as “unlikely.” He dismissively said of ISIS that “if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.” He expressed Monday through his spokesman “full confidence” in Julia Pierson.
Just call him a confidence man.
Ebola’s here. ISIS is still there. And the Secret Service director moved Wednesday from Obama’s employ to his unemployment lines.
Perhaps the president can talk her into a job. Remember “Recovery Summer”? The recalcitrant economy, evidently not heeding presidential declarations, grew at a pedestrian 2.5 percent in 2010 after shedding 2.8 percent the previous year. In any job, even creating jobs, the work matters more than the words.
People lose confidence in men who express confidence before the collapse. Hearing a promise and seeing it unfulfilled makes one tune out future promises. The disappointments catalyze further words aimed to alleviate the disappointments that instead create new ones. The more Obama talks, the less America listens. The less America listens, the more he talks. Call him the anti-E.F. Hutton.
The president eagerly informs us that if he owned the Redskins, “I’d think about changing” the name. He gives a shoutout to rapper Young Jeezy after earlier dissing Kanye West. He opines that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in cuffing academic Henry Louis Gates. He shares his March Madness basketball bracket online. He divulges to Ellen DeGeneres, “I watch House of Cards.”
The America that announces haircuts and dog walks on Twitter, conducts a never-ending slideshow on Tumblr, and posts crying confessionals on YouTube elected this oversharing individual. You get the government you deserve. Obama, in his loquacious fault, represents us.
Even the best speakers bore audiences after an hour or so. The president has talked for 2,083 straight days. Fidel Castro and Louis Farrakhan look tight-lipped by comparison. In the president’s defense, even “Hey Jude” loses something after the first 2,083 plays.
“We elected a man as president who had no experience at anything," casino billionaire Steve Wynn told CNBC earlier this week. This isn’t exactly true. As a community organizer, law professor, and candidate for the Congress, Illinois state senate, U.S. Senate, and presidency, Barack Obama delivered speeches, lectures, and interviews. The president relies on what he knows.
Words aren’t actions. Obama’s predecessors, almost to a man, understood this. Theodore Roosevelt, so enamored with talking that he delivered a 90-minute speech with a hot bullet lodged in his thick chest, famously summed up his foreign policy as “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Harry Truman, who embraced the motto “the buck stops here,” surely wouldn’t have blamed his intelligence chief for his misjudgment of an international crisis. “As we express our gratitude,” John Kennedy wrote in a proclamation for a Thanksgiving that he would never see, “we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them.”
The presidents speak. This president’s too busy talking to listen.
Silent Cal, meet Chatty Barry. “I have never been hurt by anything I didn’t say," #30 allegedly held—words for #44 to open his ears and close his mouth to.
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