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Friday, July 9, 2010

Could We Have Done Any Worse Than We Did?

For some reason the words in the title to this post came to me in reading Charles Krauthammer's column, The selective modesty of Barack Obama.
Obama is not the first president with a large streak of narcissism. But the others had equally expansive feelings about their country. Obama's modesty about America would be more understandable if he treated himself with the same reserve. What is odd is to have a president so convinced of his own magnificence -- yet not of his own country's.
I seem to have heard something similar before.  If only I could remember where:
Barack Obama also is the deep thinker who ponders great things. And the thing that Barack Obama seems to ponder most is his own greatness. He doesn't write biographies, he writes only autobiographies. He gives speeches which he declares to be historic. He recognizes his place in history long before he has created history. This nation is but a stage upon which Barack Obama creates his life story, and it's all about him.
The answer to the question is:  No.

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13 comments:

  1. It's the "Nobel Prize for Future Accomplishments" thing. It'll turn your head every time.

    Blame it on the Swedes.

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  2. It truly is unbelievable -- both the ego of this guy and your precsience. More unbelievable is the lengths to which the most of the media will go to either cover for him, or worse -- actually support this guy's words and actions.

    I read your blog most every day and I don't think I have missed a post. Your win-loss record is in the stratosphere. That's why I'm a loyal follower. [Well, that... plus you're cute. ;-)]

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  3. Obama is God. To think otherwise is racist.

    I am impressed that you can think so clearly having graduated from Harvard. Most of the Harvard grads down here are tokens.

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  4. From what I understand- he is the first president to plaster the halls of the white house with mainly pictures of himself or his campaign.

    Creepsville.

    I'm a glass half full sort of guy. Reagan didn't create Reagan Democrats, Jimmy Carter did. I believe our country, our constitution is so strong that it can withstand a nation wrecker at the helm for a term, especially as the checks and balances kick back in in 2012.

    Who would have guessed that the father of the resurgence of conservatism would have been the biggest socialist of our nation's history?

    If you could re-write history, what should conservatives have done differently? Was the feel-good bamboozle inevitable because small government and personal responsibility seems too hard until you get a horrific taste of liberal/big government failure?

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  5. given my years in the Infantry and Cavalry, i have to respectfully disagree with your conclusion:

    yes, we could have done worse. maybe not from the choices we were given, but there are, hard to believe, worse people out there..... the NBP head, for instance.

    don't get me wrong: Ear Leader needs to go, and it will take years to unscrew all the deliberate damage he has done, but until he tries a coup or something, there's a long way to the hard bottom. as dirtbags go, he's a rank amateur, just as he is one as Presentdent, or as he was as Senatenothere.

    IMHO, of course.

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  6. You've gotten to the primary reason I kept telling people not to vote for Obama. I said that running for ever higher office, voting present, publishing books about himself, in short the focus of his entire life was on self aggrandizement. I said a man like that has neither the experience or the interest to be a good president.

    This is one of those times when I would rather have been wrong.

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  7. If ONLY there had been a better choice for president! If ONLY there had been someone with tons of experience, who had done tons of networking, who was dedicated to this country, who had a list of accomplishments as long as your arm, who ...

    Oh yeah. Right. There were. TWO OF THEM.

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  8. That was a wonderful article when I read it two years ago, and it clearly stands the test of time.

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  9. @Andy: Our country's Constitution is only as strong as those willing to defend it.

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  10. Professor - I wish I had had your faith in McCain but as the campaign progressed, he grew irritable and at times, over extended and irrational. I quite honestly worried about him. I don't have anything against Sarah Palin. I do have against John McCain for throwing her to the wolves. She didn't step in front of him. He pushed her out front. He viewed her as a guy views putting pin stripes down the side of a new car - it adds appeal. You could tell his staff were not helping her.

    All of that is over now. But honestly, I have not seen one man, woman or whatever on either side who would get my vote today. For whatever reason, we are just not producing the kinds of leadership we need either in Washington or on the fields of conflict in the Middle East.

    We need to stop focusing on what Barack Obama has done and begin to fashion our campaign to get rid of him. Our energies belong there. We are still up against a formidable machine with all the hooks into the social networks one could want. And what have we got? A splintered Republican party. No formidable machine to run winning campaigns like Organizing for America and the confidence of the people that ours is the right way.

    I'm mad because there is a lot of talk and no appreciable action to actually DO SOMETHING. I want to be wrong about this. Help me here.

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  11. "He doesn't write biographies, he writes only autobiographies. He gives speeches which he declares to be historic. He recognizes his place in history long before he has created history. This nation is but a stage upon which Barack Obama creates his life story, and it's all about him."

    Maybe he really wanted to be the star of one of those Dos Equis commercials... "The Most Interesting Man In The World", and all that...

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  12. Moogie P, you cannot blame the "future" prize for Obama on the Swedes. There is a separate committee that awards the "Peace Prize," and it is (dare I say it) an all Norwegian Committee. And it is an almost exclusively political committee, one formative condition of which (as established by Alfred Nobel) was that it be composed of five people elected by the Norwegian Parliament.

    Judgments made by the Peace Prize Committee are obviously not limited to work that has in any way withstood the test of time, as, for the most part, are the Nobel Prize awards in the various substantive areas, especially in the sciences.

    For example, the Nobel Prize in Phisiology or Medicine given to Crick, Watson and Wilkins in 1962 was given for discoveries regarding the molecular structure of nucleic acids, that was based on pioneering work first published in 1953. Many such prizes are awarded after much longer periods of time.

    The history of the Peace Prize is unfortunately spotted with a few very odd judgments as a result -- e.g., Yasser Arafat ('94) -- and a number of awards over the course of the century were obviously based on wishful thinking. There were also a significant number of years in which no prize was awarded -- during both World Wars.

    Further, details of why they do what they do, or why they ultimately select a certain Laureate, are by statute a matter of secrecy for half a century -- and then only by permission!

    From the statutes of the Nobel Foundation:
    Proposals received for the award of a prize, and investigations and opinions concerning the award of a prize, may not be divulged. A prize-awarding body may, however, after due consideration in each individual case, permit access to material which formed the basis for the evaluation and decision concerning a prize, for purposes of research in intellectual history. Such permission may not, however, be granted until at least 50 years have elapsed after the date on which the decision in question was made.


    It will, therefore, be a long time before any of us may come to know any of the details of why they really made such a strange selection in 2009 for the Peace Prize. But the "bio" they posted on their website for Barack Obama reads like a press release from his campaign.

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  13. SAMHENRY, I certainly understand and agree with your frustration. But I do disagree with your statement that, "We need to stop focusing on what Barack Obama has done . . . ."

    If not us, then who?

    I think the overriding media problem today is that they simply refuse to focus on many of the things he has done -- at least on those things that they know would cause an uproar and even outrage in the electorate if they were widely reported.

    As only the latest of several such examples, how long would this guy last politically if the public in general knew that he had appointed a man to run NASA -- Charles Bolden -- who has publicly said that the most important single element of his mission as the NASA Administrator is to help raise Muslim self-esteem!

    That's right! Charles Bolden, the Obama head of NASA, said in a recent interview with Al Jazeera, that the "foremost" task the President specifically gave him when he appointed him, was "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering."

    Well, as the Church Lady used to say, "Isn't that special!

    But the mainstream media simply refuse to report it because they know that that story alone would severely politically undercut Obama. So, they haven't reported it. Mum's the word . . . Scott at Powerline gave us the rundown back on the 8th of July.

    Which leaves it to us!

    That particular YouTube video should not have only 55,070 views. If any of the major networks had done a story on Bolden's idiotic comments, however, it would. That video should have 5 or 10 or 20 million views. And that can only happen if we keep e-mailing the link, and embedding it, and otherwise putting it out there until it finally goes viral. That is how we can get rid of Obama -- just keep telling the truth about him!

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