Just Words?
When House Speaker John Boehner walked out of the negotiations last week, he said the president had “moved the goalposts,” by insisting on raising taxes more than they had originally agreed. The president denied this–but can anyone doubt that it was Boehner who was telling the truth? It’s not that Boehner—or any politician—is going to win a prize for perfect honesty, but President Obama is at another level of word-to-action disconnection altogether. He seems to feel it completely within his right to say anything—absolutely anything at all—and then go on with his plans with no regard whatsoever for what he said.
During Hillary Clinton’s losing nomination fight against Obama, the Clinton camp famously charged that while Obama’s speeches were impressive, his record was virtually non-existent. “When all is said and done, words aren’t action. They are just words,” the Clintonistas said.
Barack Obama responded with a rousing speech in which he cited some of the great, inspiring phrases of American history: “All men are created equal,” “I have a dream,” and so on. After each phrase he then asked, “Just words?” That speech, plagiarized shamelessly from Masschusetts Governor Deval Patrick, was even more shameless in what it left out: the men who spoke and wrote all those inspiring phrases of the past actually lived out their meanings at the risk of their careers, their honor and sometimes their lives.
Mr. Obama doesn’t seem to care what his words mean, only how they sound, only what they get him. The answer, then, is yes, when this president speaks, it really is just words.
UPDATE: Obama Debt Talk – First Thoughts
“The president, in short, has a problem with his mouth: words keep comin’ out of it that have nothin’ to do with the truth. He doesn’t even speak plainly. In matters that might be controversial or unpopular, he almost never calls anythin’ by its proper name. He talks about “cuttin’ spendin’ in the tax code” when he means raisin’ taxes; about “making investments” when he means more government spendin’.”
This is what Rush has been saying from the very beginning.
With the assistance of the hollow-cheeked make believe media, he knows that his customers, whom he subsidizes lavishly with our money, don’t care and will never remember what he said yesterday. So he is free to say whatever sounds good today, or whatever he thinks his current audience wants to hear, regardless of what he said yesterday or what the last audience wanted to hear.
It really is the most extraordinary thing, and the ease with which he does it is unprecedented. Only hard-core psychopaths can lie so effortlessly. Can anyone doubt that he could easily pass a lie detector test? Of course he could. He has no emotional attachment to facts or the truth whatsoever. It’s the only skill he has acquired in his life. The world’s consumate liar.
While I agree with everything you wrote, I don’t think he’s a really convincing liar or con-man. The fact that we’ve all figured him out a long time ago is proof of that.
When I first heard him 3 1/2 years ago, it took me 5 minutes to know he was a con-artist. If it weren’t for his race and adoring media he’d be splitting rails in Illinois just like his hero.
When the hell did Lenin ever split rails in Illinois?
LOL
There were enough intellectually challenged people out there to elect him. My fear is that they are still intellectually challenged and will be in 2012 as well.
When Mr. Obama speaks, it is almost always a lie. He just cannot help himself. I have known opeople like that through the years.
They will lie even when the truth would serve them better.
Shame on the McCain campaign and our news media for not vetting this guy better in 2008.
I had a friend, whom I abandoned years ago, who was an inveterate liar. He always told me what he thought I wanted to hear, rather than the truth of the situation. Words were just sounds that came out of his mouth. And it wasn’t just me – all his friends, family, work colleagues, were lied to constantly. He’d re-use old lies as if they were new, erroneously thinking that we wouldn’t remember. We used to keep score. A mutual friend kept a journal where he noted down the lies, for our collective amusement. A bit like what the NYT will be like in the future for Obama’s.
Obama says what he thinks people want to hear. And then he does something else. A classic bullsh*t merchant.
I thought Boehner was telling a whopper the other day when he said he trusted Obama. If he had his fingers crossed or whispered under his breath “as far as I can throw him’, would it still be a lie?
boehner did tell a lie, a stupid one at that, and, dumb cluck that he is, thinks it was clever to tell it.
You were right. He was telling a lie, a stupid one at that, and thinks he was smart to say it, yet.
Vague?? Isn’t the President’s name Barack H Vague Obama?
Yeah–for the most part what comes out of Obama’s mouth is nothing but self-serving “Progressive” diarrhea spew. He likes the smell of it. I don’t.
diarhea
What offends me most is the idea that I am expected to like it too.
I’ve said this before and it’s never been more true….that dude is a menace to society.
hello. career politicians know word value. the difficulty has been admitting we elected such an incompetent buffoon. the previous fool set us up to be fooled again. fooled us twice, and that aint nice; this time around, politicians pay the price.
Mr. Klavan, your summary is right on the money.
I keep thinking of him looking directly into the camera, on national television and saying, ” 80% of the american people agree that we need a balanced approach to cutting the deficit.” What is notable about it isnt so much that he didnt blink or flinch, but that he knew when he said it that we all knew it wasnt true. He lies to our face, knowing we know he is lying. I suppose he realizes that he has been caught lying so many times that he has no credibility left, so why bother. What we think or want means nothing to him.
This is brilliantly done. The proper citations are there and, if they aren’t, it wouldn’t be difficult to find examples of the kinds of things you are saying. I agree with every premise and every conclusion in this article: Mr. Obama (because he fails to deserve the title of ‘Mr. President’) has shown time and time again that he is all talk. It’s one thing to be all talk and no action, but I think it may be even worse to be all talk and opposite action.
What I mean is this: there are individuals who say one thing and do nothing about it (all talk). There are some who say nothing and do all sorts of things (all action). But it is almost unfathomable and corrupt to be someone who says one thing and then does the opposite (Obama). That makes him a) a hypocrite, b) a deception artist, and worst of all c) a douche
Good piece Andrew, your central premise is right on the money. I do, however, have a question regarding a phrase I’ve heard often lately.
Over the next year and a half, he heaped more debt on the public than every president from George Washington to Ronald Reagan combined.
In terms of raw numbers this looks true, but what happens when we account for the drastic debasement of the currency in the last 100 years? Isn’t today’s dollar worth less then a dime in US currency circa 1900? Has anybody worked out this comparison using actual real world values existing at the time debts were incurred?
When a president who has accomplished nothing (positive) tells members of congress to eat their peas and do their homework, you know he is going over the edge. Remember, narcissists become angry and confused when you fail to acknowledge how intelligent they think they are. Think a 16 year old spoiled brat who is finally being told NO, you can’t have the car keys.
The people who support Obama don’t even believe him anymore. As long as he’ll keep giving out OPM and taxing someone else why should they care ?
Free condoms – Cash for Clunkers – Bailing out GMC/Chrysler – GE subsidies and tax credits – Free Health Care.
Old Jugg Head neeeds to be challenged at every turn because he does not do well when he’s challenged on any level. I loved it when he couldn’t get Boehner on the phone. Our President is a petulent egomaniac
I really believe that when Obama entered the race for President, he didn’t give himself much of a chance – after all he was what, a 47yo Senator from Illinois . . . he (and Rezko, Ayers, Wright, Jarrett, et al) figured that if he didn’t make it the first time, he was still young enough to try again in 4 years. But then, something strange happened! His campaign came together, his supporters intimidated enough people at the Democratic Nat’l Convention to beat Hillary for the nomination, the Republicans fumbled their own nomination and lo and behold, he won the Presidency. He quickly found himself in over his head, but try as he might, he just couldn’t move America as far to the left as he had hoped. So, now he has to lie his way through everything (just words, as Klavan points out), and the liberal media dutifully doesn’t call him on it. But then, in 2010, America spoke again, throwing Democrats out of office in record numbers all across our fruited plain. Did Washington get the message? Of course not! They’re still spending like teenagers with new credit cards! (The drunken sailor metaphor would be an insult to drunken sailors – at least drunken sailors spend their own money.) America will speak again in Nov 2012 – and I’m thinking the voters will send an unmistakable message . . . . again.
Fooling some of the people all of the time. He is continually shoring up the morale of his base of fools.
The Senators better start watching their six. Repubs might get blamed more, because of the Media, but Congress in general will get the blame. The turnout in ’12 will be huge and in favor of the Republicans. Democratic Senators better make a deal and force Obama to accept it. It will be hard enough for them without this. Obama will be the death of their careers.
Meanwhile, back in America, people better start making plans to hit the streets and campaign to get some of these folks out.
“All propaganda must be popular and it’s intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower it’s purely intellectual level will have to be…The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points, and must harp on these slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.
“The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude, that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling.”
Just words from Mein Kampf.
Hitler was right.
It’s time now, then, to get it through our own thick skulls, once and for all, that the lowest intellectual level and most limited intelligence of all on average among the overwhelming majority of the voting public, right down to its very last members, may be found in the students, teachers, and administrators of our country’s highest educational institutions: its colleges, universities, and post-graduate schools, who almost unanimously support Barack Obama.
It is worth noting that in Hitler’s day, higher educational institutions, students, teachers, and administrators in Germany were among the very first to capitulate to his thoughts and designs.
It wasn’t always so, academia is an occupied territory, occupied by a single ideology since the late 60′s. They cooked up the postmodern Marxist strategies we deal with now on a daily basis. These strategies are not part of our intellectual heritage, they are an aberration. This is what happens when Marxists abandon reason in order to win, you get radical egalitarians that vote themselves money from your pocket and when you ask them to explain themselves they claim to be smart enough to know that nothing is true and nothing is false. Theirs is a world of competing narratives with the strongest ‘will to power’ driving their narrative to victory, and if it isn’t true “It should be”. It is a con. We are now beginning to understand this collectively. When you hear Obama say, “Who do you believe, me…or your lying eyes?”, we will begin the end game. Fasten your seatbelt, and move your dining tray to the forward, upright position.
I knew that Obama was a pathological liar by the middle of the second speech of his that I ever heard. I turned off that speech, and I have ever heard him speak again.
I honestly do not understand why anybody would completely waste their time listening to any of his speeches, or why anybody gives any weight or meaning what-so-ever to any commitments or comments he makes. Nothing he says means anything. His statements are more like sound effects than actual words.
As was said above, Obama will look directly into your eyes and emphatically tell you something that he is already aware that you know to be absolutely false. He will confidently state that all dogs and cats can can fly like superman. He will tell you that your own name is Mortimer (as if you do not even know what your own name is).
It is embarrassing to witness, and it is very bizarre and pathetic.
This man has told so many lies he does not know the truth, and is probably close to the point where it begins to really affect his mind. This is the story of the despot. They eventually implode when their lies fail. Mr. Obama seems close to that point.
Strikes me as odd that noone has linked his “community organizer” days coupled with his lawyering work for ACORN with the fact that he got what he wanted out of Citibank.
How did that wind up for Citibank …. and the nation?
He feels the need to speak again tonight and his despairing, desperate media minions will give him prime time. He’s marginalized, but here’s a prediction: the press will say now that the GOP has the trillions in cuts that it wants, then as soon as the bill is signed will run story after story on how the trillions over a decade really only equal one dollar and what saps the GOP are and how the prez has triumphed yet again over their cupidity!
Sounds like we need “Talking Crap 3: Total Crap.”
Could it be his Muslim upbringing showing through? They are taught that it is okay to lie and deceive the infidel in order to advance Islam. Maybe he believes we are all infidels and his is the true way to salvation through Islam. All he has to do is screw up enough to bring us down and Islam can step in and form their perfect Caliphate in our nation.
I’m going to the gymn.
I can’t sit through the double-talk. I can’t listen to a millionaire who has never done a day’s work talk down to me and tell me how greedy I am. I can’t hear him pout and preach while proposing the policies that will only make our economy worse and our debt larger. I would smah something.
Hopefull the scales are falling off the eyes of at least the Independents.
Isn’t it racist to spew such ideas?
“The President doesn’t seem to care what his words mean, only how they sound, only what they get him.”
In other words Barry’s a Boomer.
Some things I learned while working retail:
1) You can fool all of the people some of the time, and that’s usually enough.
2) You can fool some of the people all of the time, and they are your best repeat customers.
Lastly, when The One talks about this debt thing I keep thinking of the Princess Bride. “You keep saying that word. I don’t thing’ it means what you thing’ it means.”
I truly get physically ill when I watch this man before the camera. How many hours, as a young man, do you think he practiced in front of a mirror, waving, gesturing and pointing.It’s one of the most amazing performances I’ve seen in my long life.I once worked with a man that could have been his twin. Physically the same, very articulate and absolutely no substance whatsoever. Upon meeting strangers, this man was extremely impressive and worked his way up the corporate ladder until finally, people realized he had absolutely no talent or expertise in anything. Total failure. 2012 can’t come too soon.
You’re so right about his practicing in front of a mirror. I read that when he was a child in Indonesia he would pretend he was the prime minister of Indonesia and would stand up and give speeches with hand gestures.
We are dealing with a mentally ill person, I kid you not. The only question I have is what motivates the people around him who must know that something is amiss yet have hitched their ride to him. I guess a quest for power.
What’s truly sad is that I have a fraternal twin brother with a degree in psychology and a master’s degree in social welfare who’s the polar opposite of me. He’s the consumate liberal who supports Obama and also thinks he’s fair and balanced and refuses to open his eyes as to what Obama stands for. My brother thinks he’s open minded but never listens to talk radio or watches anything but the MSM and CNN. I force myself to watch CNN and MSNBC to insure that I’m receiving all sides of an issue. You would think that since my brother is in the mental health field, he’d recognize the traits that Obama exhibits and could make a fair appraisal of his personality. He seems to be blinded by this imposter and derides anyone that has a difference of opinion. If this is an example of the way a highly educated man thinks, what must the uneducated man think. Sad.
Richard you wrote “How many hours, as a young man, do you think he practiced in front of a mirror, waving, gesturing and pointing” what you forgot to add is “Just like Hitler did”.
Obama should stop channeling Reagan in his speeches (I gag when he starts quoting)and should start channeling his senator self instead.
Couldn’t have said it any better myself Andrew. In fact, I’m surprised you didn’t link to your own video concerning this topic!
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=80
Enjoy everyone!
The problem is his base believes every word he says! If you listen to the radio sometime and hear them it’s depressing. The black unemployment is way up, even the hispanics are having a hard time. But they love, love, love him! Heaven help our country if he gets in a 2nd time!
As a teen-ager and young man, I wrongly placed my confidence in an older family friend. When this man wanted some thing of another’s, he would first try simple persuasion—words. If that failed, then he would attempt to swindle the other person by any means necessary. If that failed, he simply resorted to theft. This man left wreckage in many people’s lives, including my own. He simply didn’t care about anything other than what he wanted.
And yet, if you met him on a casual basis, his words would soothe. He was almost always polite. After Sunday church services, he was always eager to tell the minister how inspiring the sermon was. If given a traffic ticket by a police officer, he would thank the officer for doing his duty. In simple daily commerce he was affable. Many people were taken in by him and his demeanor. In truth, he was very much like the character on the 1950s TV show, Leave it to Beaver—-Eddy Haskell, except that his duplicity was not immediately evident to most people.
America’s problem is that we have handed over our credit cards and the keys to the car to Eddy Haskell. The antidote prior to the 2012 elections is for men such as Speaker Boehner and other conservative members of Congress to not negotiate with Haskell—er—Obama. Instead, they should, as they are doing, go about their business of formulating and passing responsible legislation, and let the chips fall where they may.
For us as citizens, whenever, Obama uses his presidential bully pulpit and his teleprompter to charm and deceive us, we need only turn the television volume off, and imagine him saying, “My! Mrs. Cleaver. You look particularly charming, today.”
And, of course, we must vote a Republican presidential ticket in November, 2012.
I could only stomach about 90 seconds of his speech tonight – by which point he had uttered at least 2 lies: one, “the money was spent on trillions of dollars in new tax cuts” and two, that “it required us to spend even more — on tax cuts for middle-class families”.
Ahem, excuse me, Mr. President, but tax cuts are not spending. These two statements (in less than two minutes no less!) perfectly illustrate his core belief: that all money & property belong to government and anything it lets people keep is a tax cut, and if the amount it lets people keep is somehow increased, then it’s ‘spending’. Perhaps the President should be made aware that government earns nothing, creates nothing and has nothing except what it takes from the earners & producers.
Once again, thanks to all those suburban soccer moms suffering from white guilt and deranged sexual fantasy for putting this narcissistic clown in the office of POTUS. Thanks as well to the old guard RINOs for nominating a deluded old man as hopey-change’s opponent.
To Obama and his Leftist ilk, words are confetti. Colored scraps of crepe thrown about to mesmerize the masses. Words have whatever meaning one wishes to ascribe to them. From these confetti are formed ideas. Ideas that shift and swerve and break apart and reform like clouds of tropical fish. The MSM reports on Obama’s word arrangements as though they have actual structure and logic to them, when in fact they have nothing of the sort. I have never seen anything like this in an American president — or in an American “free” press. It scares the crap out of me. This man, whom nobody seems to know much about, is either a seething anti-American ideologue or an over-indulged boy king with no clue as to the import of his decrees. At the end of the day, I think that the only thing that matters to Obama is having one hell of a good time cashing in on the trappings of his office. So who’s up for a beer summit and a round of horse? I don’t think he gives a damn about his presidential legacy. Barry Obama lives only for today. He is the hungry ego bee who must be constantly fed. He could not care less about the future of the American people.
“This man, whom nobody seems to know much about, is either a seething anti-American ideologue or an over-indulged boy king with no clue as to the import of his decrees.”
Actually, he’s probably both. He comes from an academic/politicized subculture (leftist academia) in which being the first inevitably leads to being treated as the second.
As for his cluelessness, in his restricted circles, how something “feels” is more important than the actual results. If it fails, the the reflex response is to blame the “reactionary power structure”- even when they’re the ones running the power structure.
One of the disconnects in progressive mentality is that if the “reactionaries” they blame for all their failures are so all-powerful, the progressives would all have been liquidated long ago, or at least sent to a gulag.
The fact that it was the people they admire so much (Communists, “revolutionary socialists”, etc.) who were the prime proponents of these methods of dealing with their enemies in the last century is another of those disconnects with logic typical of their thought processes.
This is why you cannot have a reasoned debate with a progressive. His mind simply doesn’t work like yours. Anymore than a Babylonian priest/astrologer would accept our modern knowledge of how the Solar System works.
To such an astrologer/priest, those “planets” were gods, using their movements against the fixed stars to communicate their orders to mortals. With him, the priest, interpreting the gods’ commands- which incidentally made him very powerful in the purely temporal sense. Were you to explain to him that he was wrong, you’d not only be a heretic in his eyes- you’d be threatening his position of power.
You’d be lucky not to be stoned to death.
Progressives operate on exactly the same principle. To them, their delusions are more real than reality is. And if you dare to disagree- they have ways of teaching you your place.
clear ether
eon
The president, in short, has a problem with his mouth: words keep coming out of it that have nothing to do with the truth.
Doesn’t this remind one of Pinocchio?
Obama knows that, for many decades, most Americans have not paid attention to the devilry Congress has been engaged in on both sides of the aisle. (What do we expect from a bunch of lawyers but that they legislate against the People, but I digress). The media has trained us to listen to selective reportage of politicians’ words without investigative journalism delving into the actual performance that follows these words.
America is now watching. Investigative reporting is going on with the explosion of talk radio and especially websites like this one. We know he is lying because the new media is juxtaposing Obama’s words with his actions. How inconvenient for him.
I’ve always thought that Obama was one of those people who really do happen to think that the act of speaking about doing something is equivalent to actually doing it in reality. It seems to be a type of magical thinking that spoken words can become reified. At times this conflation between spoken thoughts and equivalent actions seems almost a pathological mental disorder. What is even more baffling is that it seems to work with many of his strongest supporters. It doesn’t seem to matter to them that his promises are unfulfilled or worse that he actually did the opposite of what he said he would do. The fact that he made the promise with heartfelt sincerity is enough for them. If one were to ask one of Obama’s black supporters why they still back him so strongly even though they have suffered more than any other group because of his ineptness, they probably could not give you a single specific reason, other than to say that Obama speaks for them and has their best interests at heart. They haven’t yet realized or do not seem to care that everything Obama says has an expiration date beyond which it can no longer be believed. It might be years, or months, or only a few days, depending on his needs of the moment.
Wrote this about a guy like that named Victius back in my day, in ancient Rome:
In te, si in quemquam, dici pote, putide Victi,
id quod verbosis dicitur et fatuis.
You’re it if anybody when they say putrid, Victius,
always full of shit and running off at the mouth.
The condition is known as logorrhea.
Has Obama actually ever made a great speech?
I’m just saying, Mr. Klavan, but a lot of us already realized this in 2008! The thing that is scariest the most is that Barack got into office by appealling to the less sceptical dumbest aspect of a Voter’s awareness. Some even said he uses conversational hypnosis in his speeches. I read the essay, and I too believe that still. Anyway, the scariest thing is that those people who voted for Barack are still out there, and he is still using the same bull crap system – talking up a big game without any real substance. I also rule out that this is not just an anomaly among such voters from the way they attack with equal dumbness conservative figures like Sarah Palin. It IS the actual Logic they employ.
Who knows. Maybe, Napoleon Dynamite had a significant affect on the culture right under our noses: just tell them that all their hopes and dreams will come true if they vote for you.
if little barry the DICKtater wannabe’s purple lips are moving, he’s lying ! nothing new there ! he thinks in his deranged mind that when he speaks, he has the power to perform the “jedi mind trick” or the “vulcan mind meld” and everyone listening will hear it as the truth. little barry is the ultimate sociopathological liar !
Just heard an interesting discussion about Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Googled it and clicked on the Wikipedia site and guess who’s name popped up in the article? Noam Chomsky. Theory developed in the 70′s and used by hypnotherapists and also popular within the management training, life coaching and “self-help” programs. Might explain Obama’s use of “words” and why he’s such a powerful speaker to the masses. Very interesting reading.
Opinions on Obama Supporters and Atheists
. . . That vicious, bigoted rant speaks for itself but I’ll add a few more: No, Mr. Silverman, that cross is no Christian icon in the context of the WTC memorial, the 3,000 innocents were not killed in God’s name but in Allah’s name, and the only ridiculous feature of your lawsuit is that you missed the entire point of the memorial and that cross–to remember, to mourn, and to resolve that what happened on September 11th, 2011 will never happen again.
Silverman’s American Atheists and Obamians have a great deal in common: ignorance, stupidity, and self-debasement.
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5106)