President Obama's halo has well and truly fallen off.
He has demonstrated lately what many of us have been saying since even before his canonization: that inside the Holy Father, a petty, radical misfit is struggling to get out. And finally has.
Having promised us that prosperity was just around the corner, for one low, low price of $787 billion, he finds himself as top dog in an economically blasted country with a thousand points of blight. The United States has not responded to his behavioral therapy: there has been a stimulus but no response.
He has sought to rescue us from the ravages inflicted on our health by private doctors and insurance companies. If only our doctors and insurance were ruled by a government bureaucracy, and health care for the many were rationed to allegedly benefit the few, we'd all be sound as a dollar. Wait, bad choice of words. Sound as a politician's promise. Uh, no …
But we cannot wait, Obama says. We cannot stop to examine the 1,018 pages of the healthcare reform bill, which it is safe to say he has not read in its entirety — briefings from staff members don't count, and it's unlikely any single staff member has read it all. However, it seems that Jeff Dircksen of Government Bytes has:
… A couple of things stand out. First, the legislation empowers a very busy bureaucracy. The term "Secretary" — as in the Secretaries of Health & Human Services, Labor, Defense, and Veterans Affairs — appears 1,124 times in the bill. The Secretaries -- along with Commissioners (199 references), Committees (76 references), and Boards (17 references) are busy conducting studies, developing methodologies, and receiving recommendations among other things — some of the other things [include] requiring, limiting, penalizing, regulating, taxing, and enforcing their way to affordable health care for all.Despite Obama's foot-stamping impatience, and his order that Congress will pass the thing before the August recess, it's not going to happen by his deadline. Maybe never. Too many people are questioning whether our undoubtedly imperfect healthcare system is actually that bad. Too many people are doubting that the answer is to have a national infirmary run by a dozen layers of managers and string savers.
It's even whispered in some quarters that those wonderful-in-theory systems in Canada and the U.K. aren't quite so wonderful when the rose-colored glasses slip off. Not when you're a file number with an illness that severely downgrades your quality of life or even chances of survival and you wait months till the functionaries in some monstrous cubicle farm decide you can have your operation. Canada and the U.K. have abolished capital punishment, except for patients in their national health services.
And not least, Obama acting stupidly in re Gatesgate. I suspect a few minds were opened like clamshells as a U.S. president delivered a judgment on an incident that was none of his business, and demonstrated that he is spring-loaded to perceive bias everywhere. As he told the NAACP, "The pain of discrimination is still felt in America. By African American women paid less for doing the same work as colleagues of a different color and a different gender. By Latinos made to feel unwelcome in their own country. By Muslim Americans viewed with suspicion simply because they kneel down to pray to their God. By our gay brothers and sisters, still taunted, still attacked, still denied their rights."
Well, guess what. Ordinary, un-hyphenated, un-identity-obsessed Americans are getting a little tired of being taunted and attacked at home by their own president, when he's not traveling the world apologizing for our sick, discrimination-riddled souls.
Can tin haloes be recycled?
9 comments:
Nice to get a relief from the unending right-wing hysteria here. "A thousand points of blight" is a nice phrase. Did you come up with that yourself?
After Obama was elected, I predicted his presidency wouldn't be as bad as right-wingers were expecting because the Great Recession, and the generally moderate nature of the incoming Congressional Democrats, would prevent Obama from getting his agenda passed. Some of the predictions in that article are looking a bit dubious now, but that one is holding up.
Not sure I'm tracking you, Ian. What unending right-wing hysteria? At Reflecting Light?
Yes, I have to take credit or blame for "a thousand points of blight."
No, you're not hysterical, but Vdare is. I haven't read Lawrence Auster in months, a great improvement in my life, but I assume that he's still hysterical, too.
Great thread. Agreed on "a thousand points of blight." I'm also loving Barack speaking on an issue he feels he's expert on: police racism. hahaha
I'm loving Skip Gates talking about he's "ready to move on now" and how he wants us all to learn from this and have less racial profiling. The asshole is scared that the police audio tapes of the incident are going to be released and he's going to be seen for what he is - a race hysteric and hustler who lost control and wayyyyy overplayed his hand. If such tapes got played in public and people heard for themselves how he abused the policeman, his reputation - such as it is - would be seriously damaged. Who could take a "leading scholar on racial profiling" seriously in the future once it was shown that he falsely claimed to be a victim of racial profiling?
I would like to have seen his face when he found out that the cop he was accusing of racism was the one hand-picked by the black police chief to teach the police academy class on how not to racial profile. What a nightmare....no wonder he stopped talking about filing a lawsuit. The witnesses, together with the testimony of the other cops, including a black cop, together with the audio tapes, together with Crowley's good reputation - he would be annihilated in court and he knows it. He just wants this whole thing to go away now.
I'm just sorry the white cop is apparently going to play along with the charade and "have a beer" with Obama and Gates at the White House, thus letting them paper over the incident. I'd like to think I'd tell them I'd consider drinking with them when I got a public apology and acknowledgement that there was no police misbehavior involved.
I hate to say it but I think the cop will eventually bow down. Next thing he'll be on CNN/MSNBC/CBS/ABC/NBC as an "expert" which will lend credence to "racial profiling" with never a moment of truth being spoken in regards to the outrageously high crime rate for blacks.
Truly White Liberals are on a murder/suicide mission. And our "restraining order" is a worthless piece of paper.
No, you're not hysterical, but Vdare is. I haven't read Lawrence Auster in months, a great improvement in my life, but I assume that he's still hysterical, too.
Go back to la-la land, Ian.
I'd love to see the two Darwinists, Jobling and Kevin MacDonald, together in the same room hashing some things out. It would be fun to watch.
"La-la land"? Please explain! I said that Obama wasn't as radical as people imagined, and that, if he did try to push an aggressively liberal agenda, he would be blocked by Congress. Now, I'll admit I was wrong in my predictions about his Supreme Court appointments--Sotomayor is a very bad pick, and she won't be filibustered. To my credit though, the Republicans did give Sotomayor a very hard time and used her to discredit Obama so that everything will become more difficult to him.
I take it as confirmation of my predictions that so far the policy initiatives that are dearest to Obama and other liberals, cap and trade and health care reform, look likely to both go down in flames. We've hardly heard a word breathed about amnesty too. As a happy surprise, the Obama administration is also taking steps to enforce immigration law.
Time will tell. But compare my predictions to those of Pat Buchanan and tell me who's gotten more right.
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