Was It Something I Said? My Two Cents on Plain Talk

Spare Change | February 27, 2009 | David J Aland

[Natty Bumppo@frontier.net]

Everyone has those moments when they wish they hadn’t said something, but that seems to be a theme this week. From arguably racist snarkisms to gross misrepresentations of fact, Obama and his friends and allies are tripping all over their tongues lately.

There are a lot of reasons one may regret ones words, including saying something insensitive, saying something clearly wrong, and simply saying something so badly that it mangles the point. This week, the awards for tongue-gashing go to President Obama, Vice-President Biden, Secretary Clinton, Senator Byrd, the vast majority of the media industry, and many others.

In the Insensitive category:

- Hillary Clinton, for dismissing criticism of her failure to discuss human rights with China because, as she said, you know they won’t listen.

- Chris Matthews, for groaning “Oh God” when Gov. Jindal walked on-camera for the Republican response to the pseudo State of the Union speech Tuesday night.

- Chris Matthews, for saying the Republicans “outsourced” the response – even if he did mean “to a governor”, was that the best choice of word when referring to someone of Indian descent?

- Helen Thomas, for removing all doubt by allegedly making “Slumdog” jokes about Jindal.

In the Wrong category:

- President Obama, for assuring Americans that only “responsible families” will be helped by the mortgage bailout – does the White House really have some way in mind for screening out the opportunists and irresponsible players? Simply saying so doesn’t make it so, even if it’s what people want to hear.

- President Obama, for continuing to tout “tax cuts for 95% of Americans” while putting forward a federal budget plan that quadruples our national debt, and imposes $1.4 trillion in new taxes that will affect everyone, regardless of income bracket.

- Roland Burris, for insisting “I’m not going anywhere,” (both true and false). Hopefully, Dick Durbin told him the truth: he was only needed for the stimulus vote – now he can take his perjuring self back to Illinois.

- Baltimore ACORN leader Louis Beverly, for breaking into someone else’s home in the name of foreclosure protest. Turns out that the foreclosure “victim” was lying about how the big bad bank undid her mortgage, and failed to mention that she had at least two adjustments and two hundred grand in profit on the property she defaulted on twice.

- Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi for declaring that earmarks are dead, and then rolling out a half-trillion spending bill with almost eight billion dollars for almost 9,000 earmarked pet rocks.

In the Mangle-The-Point category:

- President Obama, for spurring a 2% plunge on the Dow the morning after his detail-starved economic pep talk, adding to the 2,000+ points the market has lost since his election and the onset of the doom-and-gloom speeches in place of hope-and-change. (Runner up: Tim Geithner, for pulling the same stunt with his bank bailout press conference.)

- President Obama, for lacing his pseudo state-of-the-union address with so many half-truths and whoppers that the Associated Press published a translation

- Vice President Biden, for assuring the public that he’s on top of the oversight challenge for the stimulus money, but unable to identify his own web site.

- Janet Napolitano, for being outraged that immigration laws are being enforced while she’s in charge of immigration.

- John Holdren, Obama’s choice as Science Advisor to the White House, whose current global warming cheerleading can only be appreciated by comparing it to his prior global cooling pronouncements, his prediction that a billion people would die from ecological collapse, and his famous losing bet on resource scarcity.

We’re in pretty sad shape when our leaders start looking as silly as they accuse the “chatting classes” to be. When Chuck Schumer says Americans don’t care about this stuff, one has to wonder which Americans he means. The sad truth is, most of us are listening, but not many of us like (or even believe) what we hear.

As the new administration members look out onto Lafayette Square today at one of the many “tea parties” springing up to protest the latest expansion of inefficient and insatiable government, they can only ask themselves: “Was it something I said?”

[Jvette]

Sleight of mouth seems to be the order of the times.

[Go Gordon]

What about Obama’s sharp stock market knowledge and knowing when stocks can be a bargain because of the PROFIT and earnings ratio.