Posted on 11/01/2013 7:24:03 AM PDT by Kaslin
Often in error but never in doubt, Barack Obama could walk into the Rose Garden and step on a half-dozen rakes like Foghorn Leghorn in an old Looney Tunes cartoon, and the official line would be, "He meant to do that."
And the amazing thing is that so many people believe it. "Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He's smart, deft, elegant and subtle," proclaimed then-New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in 2009. It's an image of the president that his biggest fans, in and out of the press, have been terribly reluctant to relinquish -- because it confirms the faith they invested in him. Nobody every likes to admit they were suckered.
But the fiction of Obama as a man three steps ahead has taken a terrible beating if you have eyes to see it. The budget cuts under the so-called sequester are the law of the land because Obama thought he was outthinking his opponents when he gave budget-cutters budget cuts. Now he's stuck railing against his own idea. His allegedly revolutionary decision to turn his presidential campaign into a personal political organization independent from the Democratic Party has turned out to be the most expensive way ever to generate smarmy and ineffectual e-mail spam. And, if you want to believe that Obama's goal in Syria all along was to elevate Vladimir Putin and alienate all of our Middle East allies, including Saudi Arabia and Israel, to make Bashar al-Assad our strategic partner while he finds more politically correct ways to slaughter his own people, well, that's nice.
Or consider Obama's only clear-cut political victory since his re-election. Republican demands were a bit of a moving target, but basically the GOP wanted either an all-out repeal of Obamacare or, as a fallback, a one-year delay of the individual mandate. By the end, they would have taken even less.
But Obama wouldn't consider it. Instead, he played hardball with everything from national park closures to, temporarily at least, denying death benefits to military families. As the debt ceiling loomed, the GOP relented. Conventional wisdom says Obama won, and I basically agree with the conventional wisdom.
Or at least I did. There's something those of us scoring that bout didn't know: The president desperately, urgently and indisputably needed to delay the rollout of Obamacare.
This is not a matter open to fair-minded dispute, never mind partisan disagreement. Even the president and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius agree that the rollout of Obamacare has been a "debacle" (Sebelius' word). Revelations in the press and in congressional hearings show that the administration was warned prior to both the shutdown and the Obamacare debut that Healthcare.gov was as ready to go live as a kid's make-believe refrigerator-box submarine was ready to explore the ocean depths.
If Obama were a chess master -- or even a fairly adept checkers novice -- he would have known that when you're not ready to do something incredibly important, it's best to buy time. He could have traded a delay (Three months? Six months?) for some major budget concessions, maybe even lifting the sequester. Perhaps his base wouldn't have liked it, but he could have easily spun the compromise as a necessity given how irrational and "extreme" the GOP was being.
Publicly he'd say he was paying a ransom to "kidnappers" and "hostage takers." He'd denounce Republicans for delaying precious insurance coverage for sick kids and frail oldsters just to score partisan and ideological points.
But privately, ah privately, the master strategist would be stroking his proverbial white cat -- or, in reality, his hypoallergenic black dog -- while breathing a sigh of relief that he bought himself some time to fix his woefully mangled healthcare reform.
Obviously he wouldn't want to delay Obamacare. But that decision was out of his hands due to his administration's incompetence. The only choice before him was whether he would get the blame for the delay or if the Republicans would.
Why Obama didn't do this and why it didn't occur to him are good questions. Hubris obviously played a role, as it does in nearly everything this White House does. But the best answer is he didn't know how terrible things were over at HHS. In other words, the chess master didn't even know what pieces he had on the board, which is usually not something we associate with chess masters. It's something we associate with people who don't even know how to play the game
Did I get up under your skin pointing out the obvious truth to you?
Here let me further illustrate for you.
Are you still free?
No. You’re not.
Did you lose your freedom to a person who “can’t figure out why he always loses at tic-tac-toe”?
Yes, you did.
Are you smart enough to realize that you have lost your freedom to this man?
Apparently not.
And before you ask me if I am smart enough to realize that I lost my freedom to the same man, the answer is yes, I am. I am also smart enough to see that he was and is smart enough to take it, which apparently no one else in this thread is.
You can hurl all the insults at him you want, and at me too for that matter, and doing so will not change the fact that you and I are now his subjects, because his strategy was far smarter, better planned and executed than ours.
Especially considering that we didn’t have one and still don’t have one.
You’re getting agita over things you can do nothing about. You need to lighten up and enjoy yourself. It’s time to acknowledge that America is in decline under Ubama and the rats and there’s no going back.
The former “America” is now nothing more than a land mass populated by moochers, cretins, ingrates, and parasites who have absolutely no respect for the military and who vote for big government to confiscate money from their neighbors so that it may be “redistributed” to them in exchange for their votes. It is not an America worth defending anymore. That America no longer exists.
The Democrats have won.
Good men will hunker down, stay under the radar, protect their families, and hide and protect whatever they can from the government and its enabling parasitic hordes. Good men will rise above the disgrace that surrounds them and live their lives productively for the benefit of their families and their children. Good men will continue to love and laugh and have some fun, but they will never give up. They will continue the fight, if only to deny the scumbag Democrats the ability to fully revel in their destruction of a once-proud nation.
FRegards,
LH
I’m not really agitated.
What I am is kind of befuddled as to why people are calling the man who was smart enough and crafty enough to take their freedom from them stupid.
If Obama is stupid, what does that make them?
If people continue to misunderestimate their enemy, then they are going to continue to lose to that enemy, and we have oh so much more for him to take from us, and he is coming to take it without a doubt, every last bit of it.
And once he leaves them with nothing but the dirt he left them sitting in, I wonder if they are still going to make stupid jokes about him.
You are right though. There is likely no solution to this. The only possible viable, civil solution is what mark Levin has suggested.
Outside of that...best left unsaid.
Not only is Obama a chess master,
He is the Devil.
The Devil.
The enemy is not crafty or superior to us in any way. He's simply holding the reins to a vast amount of power, and he's just heartless enough, and evil enough to wield it against us without remorse.
Collectively, we are far stronger than he and all of his minions combined. He knows that, and fears that we will unleash that power before he can disable us in some way.
That's the true state of things. It's up to us all to recognize the fundamental dynamics at work here, and steel ourselves for the historic events that could play out in this country over the next three years.
“The enemy is not crafty or superior to us in any way. He’s simply holding the reins to a vast amount of power”
Yes, he is, and you proved my point in your second sentence.
He has limitless resources. You don’t. I don’t.
Problem. Huge.
He is using those resources and wielding that power extremely effectively considering his purpose is to destroy.
No one is opposing him, no one thus can oppose him.
Yes, something bad is coming in the next three years, maybe even sooner, and it is a very good idea to steel ourselves, because this man would kill us all to erect his utopian hell, and he would not care at all.
I imagine he would say “It’s the right thing ta do”.
Until the collective actually collects itself, organizes and acts, there is no collective.
He has no effective opposition whatsoever.
I’m sorry for you, Chris. I truly am. Only you know what’s right for you to do.
Best of luck.
Luckily none of his voters can play chess either.
I can’t believe the policy decisions made in this country. Nearly all are very poor chess moves. Shoes being checked for years at security after the shoe bomber. Privates scanned from the underwear bomber.
Any entity or country good at chess could finish us off.
No need to feel sorry for me, we are in the exact same boat.
Only difference between us is I know who put me in this boat and why, and I’m not going to make jokes about his stupidity, because he isn’t stupid.
What I am going to do is come up with a plan to resist and fight a worthy opponent, because that is what he is.
People saying Obama is stupid and can’t figure out why he always loses at tic tac toe are fools being foolish fooling themselves. Nothing more.
Such people will forever be under his thumb, because they cannot even recognize who they are up against.
Great point. I think it is having that effect on the Dems and they are used to action.* They may well lead the way to repeal.
*republicans don’t think of action when they don’t want something. First, they perform handwringing. Then they work on mastering some gymnastic bending routines. Then of course on the agenda come cowering, “reaching across the aisle,” drawing back stumps, and finally, sometimes, they consider action.
Your intelligent description of the planned chaos is brighter than Obama and, now obviously, his handlers (I believe this rollout was not planned to be such a fail - they FUBARed).
And the American people, and I include the powerful low info voters, are PI$$ED OFF about this. Reading twitter sometimes gives me faith back in the “Let’s Roll” attitude that is still alive in America, even buried under a lot of bull droppings these days. It’s still there. We can get this country back. Remember, soviet style communism didn’t even work in Russia. And as warm as we frogs are in our slowly boiling pot, we ain’t dead yet.
Obama was lucky. Circumstances were on his side. The media was on his side.
And -- you may have to give him at least this -- he did have the sense not to get in the way when things were all going his way.
None of that implies any positive ability to get stuff done, though.
And the irony is that the detachment or disengagement that made for his early successes also made for his downfall.
Hopefully you are correct.
People need to realize and understand that he and this government, including the GOP, took our freedom.
We are no longer free. In fact, we have been made into slaves of this government, right now, that is what we are.
And not only have we been made into slaves, if this chaos is allowed to continue, people are going to die as a result of having their health care interfered with, blocked, screwed up, whatever.
This is for real.
And it is time to roll.
We see him as dangerous, not stupid. But I think some Obama low info voters are starting to see him as incompetent, and using vocabulary with stupid denotations.
Obama himself is not brilliant and neither are his handlers. They are crafty, to be sure. But there is no populace on earth more gullible than our American one. We are known the world over for earnestness, in both good and bad ways. Look at how they got into the White House:
White Americans, and plenty of other Americans of various stripes, feel horrible about the history of slavery. Everyone has been ready for a leader of (slave-descended) African ancestry. That really is, in America, proof of how far we have come. And truthfully, a black person who looked or talked like Chris Brown, in the 1970s, wouldn’t really stand a chance of being elected. But when the radical left got an eyeful of this young, tall, fairly bright, mocha skinned guy spouting their own loser philosophy, with a desperate, desperate need for public adoration, they knew this was a way to usurp the public’s desire to assuage our wrong of slavery. And they were correct.
They used our goodness against us.
I’m with you. It will take a Levin plan and a lot of disillusioned democrats, but we can do this.
There are highly educated, low info dems who have been so used to spooning liberal pablum into their mouths that will awaken to find out they were wrong, everything they were taught was wrong, and it was simple (yet deviously clever) mocking that kept them on the path. Simple self hating Jews like Jon Stewart played the part of the electric cow fence.
They should start becoming disillusioned about now, and it will hurt. There were a lot of suicides when the wall came down in Germany (I lived in Germanic Europe at the time). The brother of a friend of mine said he felt his whole life had been a total lie.
Not only did they use our goodness against us, they used our goodness to makes us into slaves.
These people are pure and absolute Evil.
However, in my case, they are going to have to go all the way to make me do anything at all, and I mean all the way.
It’s isn’t going to be nice and clean like they want, they are going to have to get their hands dirty.
I’m never going to give them my freedom.
I understand how your brother felt, Yaelle.
For sometime now I have seen my country as constructed completely of lies.
Whatever bricks of truth used to exist in America’s foundation have been replaced by bricks of lies.
I have often thought we need to change our motto to “America, in lies we trust”.
I definitely feel something big is coming, have felt this way for some time now.
Yes. It wasn’t my brother, though. I’m American.
Chris, you are wrong. The real America is the Constitution and the lives we lost to get and stay free. This bag of goods we are sold by our recent governments is the tyranny that good men by ignorance have allowed to flourish.
Banish ignorance and we will get busy removing the tyranny. We can do it.
Yes. It wasn’t my brother, though. I’m American.
Chris, you are wrong. The real America is the Constitution and the lives we lost to get and stay free. This bag of goods we are sold by our recent governments is the tyranny that good men by ignorance have allowed to flourish.
Banish ignorance and we will get busy removing the tyranny. We can do it.
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