Posted on 10/26/2014 9:36:55 AM PDT by massmike
The president is upset. Very upset. Frustrated and angry. Seething about the government’s handling of Ebola, said the front-page headline in The New York Times last Saturday.
There’s only one problem with this pose, so obligingly transcribed for him by the Times. It’s his government. He’s president. Has been for six years. Yet Barack Obama reflexively insists on playing the shocked outsider when something goes wrong within his own administration.
Obama represents not just the party of government but a grandiose conception of government as the prime mover of social and economic life. The very theme of his presidency is that government can and should be trusted to do great things. And therefore society should be prepared to hand over large chunks of its operations — from health care (one-sixth of the economy) to carbon regulation down to free contraception — to the central administrative state.
But this presupposes a Leviathan not just benign but competent. When it then turns out that vast, faceless bureaucracies tend to be incapable, inadequate, hopelessly inefficient and often corrupt, Obama resorts to expressions of angry surprise.
He’s not simply protecting his own political fortunes. He’s trying to protect faith in the entitlement state by portraying its repeated failures as shocking anomalies. Unfortunately, the pretense has the opposite effect. It produces not reassurance but anxiety. Obama’s determined detachment conveys the feeling that nobody’s home. No one is leading. Not even from behind.
With events in the saddle and a sense of disorder growing — the summer border crisis, Ferguson, the rise of the Islamic State, Ebola — the nation expects from the White House not miracles but competence. At a minimum, mere presence. An observer presidency with its bewildered-bystander pose only adds to the unease.
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonherald.com ...
Very incisive.
How the “King of the Jungle” can be a cowardly lion at the same time, I have no idea!
Krauthammer figured out the Limbaugh Theorem about six years after Rush.
I sometimes wonder, what would the liberals have said, if Bush repeatedly said he learned of problems in his own administration, by saying he was watching the news or reading the paper and learned of things that way???
Yet, the liberals and the media apparently think Obama has a good excuse for not knowing what is happening in his administration.
The Obama administration is very frustrated with the idiocy of the obama administration.
Krauthammer doesn’t get it. Obama doesn’t really care what people think about him, mainly because he isn’t up for election, but also because he knows its just a game of ass-kissing and mutual political favors anyway. Obama appearing to be lazy, e.g. golfing partying etc, is a distraction, while thousands behind the scenes work tirelessly 24/7 to undermine the pillars of society from every angle.
Like the chewbacca defense, everybody’s too busy looking at the silly monkey.
…while probably thinking Rush is an unsophisticated rube.
I wonder if obama will be given the kind of money the clintons have gotten with their speeches as obama is not liked in the democrat hierarchy as obama has not helped anyone but himself when push comes to shove he shoves everyone under the bus. He may end up building houses with Carter and blaming Carter when the houses rot.
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