Sleepwalking Through History
While I was away last week, Jonathan Last’s brilliant essay, “American Narcissus,” appeared at the Weekly Standard. Last assembles an extensive catalog of the two sides of Obama: extreme narcissism — and its flipside, extreme boredom with every aspect of life that doesn’t immediately advance the career of Barack Obama.
Let’s look at a few instances of the latter:
David Remnick delivers a number of insights about Obama in his book The Bridge. For instance, Valerie Jarrett—think of her as the president’s Karen Hughes—tells Remnick that Obama is often bored with the world around him. “I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually,” Jarrett says. “So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that they had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy.” Jarrett concludes, “He’s been bored to death his whole life.”
With one or two possible exceptions, that is. Remnick reports that “Jarrett was quite sure that one of the few things that truly engaged him fully before going to the White House was writing Dreams from My Father.” So the only job Barack Obama ever had that didn’t bore him was writing about Barack Obama. But wait, there’s more.
David Axelrod—he’s Obama’s Karl Rove—told Remnick that “Barack hated being a senator.” Remnick went on:
Washington was a grander stage than Springfield, but the frustrations of being a rookie in a minority party were familiar. Obama could barely conceal his frustration with the torpid pace of the Senate. His aides could sense his frustration and so could his colleagues. “He was so bored being a senator,” one Senate aide said.
Obama’s friend and law firm colleague Judd Miner agreed. “The reality,” Miner told Remnick, “was that during his first two years in the U.S. Senate, I think, he was struggling; it wasn’t nearly as stimulating as he expected.” But even during his long, desolate exile as a senator, Obama was able to find a task that satisfied him. Here’s Remnick again: “The one project that did engage Obama fully was work on The Audacity of Hope. He procrastinated for a long time and then, facing his deadline, wrote nearly a chapter a week.” Your tax dollars at work.
And as we’ve noted earlier around these parts, Obama has expressed frustration with other aspects of life. “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me,” Barack Obama told the AP in the early 1990s, as Joel Kotkin reminds us, in this passage highlighted late last month by Instapundit:
Many of the administration’s most high-profile initiatives have tended to reflect the views of urban interests – roughly 20 percent of the population – rather than suburban ones.
When the president visits suburban backyards, it sometimes seems like a visit from a “president from another planet.” After all, as a young man, Obama told The Associated Press: “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.”
Add that to Obama’s previous utterances regarding other aspects of America that induced in him a sense of ennui as a young man. In 2008, Jim Geraghty spotted this telling passage in a book by David Mendell titled Obama: From Promise to Power:
“[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day,” said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. “The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions… that was scary to him.”
Maybe that explains Obama’s fascination with radical chic figures such as Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers: perhaps only rhetoric that venomous could break through the all-enveloping forcefield of young Obama’s existential ennui.
But most presidents don’t arrive at the White House so bored with the quotidian details of the American people. Reagan lived out the American dream of being a self-made man in first broadcasting, then show business, then the governor of one of the nation’s largest states. Ike brought freedom to western Europe. Teddy Roosevelt was the consummate outdoorsman. As Machiavellian as Richard Nixon could seem, he could at least outwardly sympathize with, rather than be bored by, the Silent Majority. Even men born into wealth and privilege such as JFK and FDR appeared much more connected with the American people than our current president.
And as Last writes, far from bored, America’s founding father was extremely humbled by the tasks he had taken on:
When he accepted command of the Revolutionary forces, George Washington said,
I feel great distress, from a consciousness that my abilities and military experience may not be equal to the extensive and important Trust. … I beg it may be remembered, by every Gentleman in the room, that I, this day, declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the Command I am honored with.
Accepting the presidency, Washington was even more reticent. Being chosen to be president, he said, “could not but overwhelm with despondence one who, inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration, ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.”
Jonah Goldberg recently wrote that Obama’s elephantine ego causes him, and his sycophantic advisors, both to inflate the challenges they’ve faced in the Oval Office and the current administration’s place in history:
Rahm Emanuel, as he was fleeing for the healthier and more civic-minded political environment of Chicago’s backrooms, said, “I want to thank you for being the toughest leader any country could ask for in the toughest times any president has ever faced.”Really? The times have been rough, we can all agree, but if memory serves, the Civil War was no cakewalk either. And that Pearl Harbor thing — not to mention 9/11 — might compete with the miserable economy Obama inherited and then ignored as he pursued his own “transformational” vanity projects.
There’s an irony to occupying the Oval Office. When presidents think they’re bigger than the job they hold, they shrink in office. When they think they’re smaller than the honor they’ve been temporarily bestowed, they grow into it. Obama has done nothing but shrink.
Of course, Obama’s liberal worldview and his current fishbowl-like existence in the White House aren’t helping him maintain contact with anything resembling the day-to-day reality you and I inhabit.
As others have written throughout the last decade, many liberals live in a media cocoon; none more so than the nation’s current president. Peggy Noonan proposes one solution to help him escape its confines: inventing “The Special Assistant for Reality:”
What a president should ideally have, and what I think we all agree Mr. Obama badly needs, is an assistant whose sole job it is to explain and interpret the American people to him. Presidents already have special assistants for domestic policy, for congressional relations and national security. Why not a special assistant for reality? Someone to translate the views of the people, and explain how they think. An advocate for the average, a representative for the normal, to the extent America does normal.
If Mr. Obama had a special assistant for reality this week, this is how their dialogue might have gone over the anti-TSA uprising.
President: This thing is all ginned up, isn’t it? Right-wing websites fanned it. Then the mainstream media jumped in to display their phony populist street cred. Right?
Special Assistant for Reality: No, Mr. President, it was more spontaneous. Websites can’t fan fires that aren’t there. This is like the town hall uprisings of summer 2009. In the past month, citizens took videos at airports the same way town hall protesters made videos there, and put them on YouTube. The more pictures of pat-downs people saw, the more they opposed them.
President: What’s the essence of the opposition?
SAR: Sir, Americans don’t like it when strangers touch their private parts. Especially when the strangers are in government uniforms and say they’re here to help.
President: Is it that we didn’t roll it out right? We made a mistake in not telling people in advance we were changing the procedure.
SAR: Um, no, Mr. President. If you’d told them in advance, they would have rebelled sooner.
President: We should have pointed out not everyone goes through the new machines, and only a minority get patted down.
SAR: Mr. President, if you’d told people, “Hello, there’s only 1 chance in 3 you’ll be molested at the airport today” most people wouldn’t think, “Oh good, I like those odds.”
And so on. It’s a cute idea, but who wants to be the man to tell the president’s finely tailored clothes (just ask David Brooks) that they have no emperor inside? Particularly when, as Jonathan Last highlights, quoting a 2008 New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza on Obama’s presidential run, this is going to be the likely response:
Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” After Obama’s first debate with McCain, on September 26th, [campaign political director Patrick] Gaspard sent him an e-mail. “You are more clutch than Michael Jordan,” he wrote. Obama replied, “Just give me the ball.”
Certainly the legacy media that created the president doesn’t have the courage to admit the president’s faults, as Sarah Palin satirically wrote in her terrific Thanksgiving posting:
My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that…
Of course, the paragraph above is based on a series of misstatements and verbal gaffes made by Barack Obama (I didn’t have enough time to do one for Joe Biden). YouTube links are provided just in case you doubt the accuracy of these all too human slips-of-the-tongue. If you can’t remember hearing about them, that’s because for the most part the media didn’t consider them newsworthy. I have no complaint about that. Everybody makes the occasional verbal gaffe – even news anchors.
Perhaps though, there is one clarifying benefit to Obama’s narcissism, as Scott Johnson quipped recently at Power Line:
One of President Obama’s most prominent and least attractive qualities is his vanity. It almost disposes of the speculation that Obama is a Muslim. The man can’t be a Muslim; he worships himself.
What does it all mean moving forward? Byron York believes that “Obama’s poll numbers point to his defeat in 2012″:”
“He’s got to realize the reason he lost independents,” says Winston of the president. “He thinks it was about communications. It wasn’t. It was about substance and policy.” Whether Obama can gracefully back away from the policies that got him in trouble — federal spending, Obamacare — is simply not clear.
Obama supporters point to the example of Bill Clinton, whose approval dipped to 40 percent after losing Congress in 1994, only to climb to 54 percent before winning easy re-election in 1996. Maybe that will happen again.
But Clinton’s former pollster, Doug Schoen, doesn’t see it that way. Schoen recently did a survey asking voters whether Obama deserves to be re-elected and found that 56 percent believe the president doesn’t deserve another term, while just 38 percent believe he does.
Despite his problems, there are still ways Obama can win. His greatest hope, as always in politics, is that the other side will screw up. Maybe the newly empowered House Republicans will do a terrible job, or the GOP will nominate an awful presidential candidate. But that just underscores a stark reality. At this point, it will be hard for Obama to save himself. He’ll need a lot of help to win a second term in the White House.
But as the Professor advises, Republicans should refrain from cockiness. Particularly since the campaign trail in 2008 was one of the few times in his life Obama didn’t appear to be entirely bored with the reality enveloping him.
Related: “Obama is heavy bored,” Neo-Neocon writes, with a vintage assist from poet John Berryman.
Bored with being a prince, who inherited a “right” to attend Columbia, which was not earned either by grades nor by test scores.
He inherited the “right” to go to Harvard, which was not earned either by grades nor by test scores.
He surrounded himself with traitors to America, spewing venom and overthrow of the system. He enveloped himself and hate and then pretended to be above it, oblivious to it…but he sought out the venom.
He ascended to the crown and surrounded himself with mewling, fawning ring-kissers. Jesters do not amuse him.
This man is not President. He’s bored. He’s the first King of the United States since Garfield Goose.
What better compliment could one receive than to be called by Joe Biden; “the most brilliant man I’ve ever met”. And it takes someone as bright as Joe to be able to make that statement.
But…EVERY man that Joe Biden meets is “the most brilliant man I’ve ever met”.
Jeeze. Damn a fella with faint praise, huh?
“[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day”…
Wonder if Biden ever heard what his “brilliant” president had to say about commuters –considering that Biden travelled from his Senate office in DC to his home in Maryland every day for 36 years on the commuter train. Maybe he still does as vice president. Biden would totally bore Obama except for the thrill of hearing his latest gaffe.
Could Obama be clinically depressed?
There are so many parallels between America now and Germany of the early 1930′s that it is scary to think about. Imagine if you will, what Germany could have become if Hitler had put his charisma to use to build up his country’s economy and worth in the world instead of using it to try to conquer Europe… Now imagine again, a world here and now, where Obama got excited about liberty and building up America’s freedoms and worth in the world instead of constantly tearing it down…
Chris Baker: Dude, you’ve got a lotta imagination—VERY good, . . ; but beyond destroying the nation, I’m just afraid that, the nation will destroy him, even more easily, . . .
This description of Obama has been seen in other “rulers” who were worshipped (Messiah?) by followers and a major part of the Senate and Court/intellectuals .
His predecessor’s behaviours / character far more than merely narcissistic.
Nero did not just fiddle while Rome burned. But made himself, and his favourites, by his decree, actual Gods (Csars?). With very little resistance or opposition to those behaviours / decisions from the Senate of Rome.He even proclaimed his horse a Senator with Senate compliance
In addition of course to other acts based on his sense of self as above mere mortals with natural rights over life and death.
Obama may be bored by the suburbs, but at the same time he wants to live there when the situation calls for it — or at the very least, he wants to live in a gated urban community or a luxury co-op with a doorman and a guard downstairs to handle any problems before they reach his floor.
He doesn’t want the fight that accompanies pushing political ideas, unless there are people on the front lines willing to risk their political capital for him. Obama wants to be there to take the credit – and because the left saw him as their absolute moral authority vessel to absolute political power, they were willing to toil in the salt mines doing the grunt work so Obama could claim to have been part of some initiative, and stand on the front lines taking the bullets from the right, so Barack Obama could vote ‘present’ and not build up a pre-2008 political record that would have foiled any chance for the White house.
That’s where it’s going to be interesting to see how Obama handles the next two years. His political cowardliness at getting out in front of anything controversial means he’s frightened of triangulating to the middle and losing much of his syncopatic base on the left that does the most to stroke his ego, while at the same time that ego really won’t have an easy time accepting rejection by the rest of the public in 2012. My guess is the response will be fake triangulation for as long as possible, and then if there’s no choice, throwing the left under the bus sometime in 2012 and agreeing to some deals with the Republicans in hopes to winning the swing voters back that November.
I don’t see how the President’s character will let turn to the center.
He never had the conservatives. He’s lost the independents. He only keeps the left by being true to progressive nostrums.
Sure, by going to the center he may regain the independents. But they won’t worship him like the left historically has and he will lose the left. His choice is LBJ or Adlai Stevenson. I believe his pride will only let him choose to be Adlai. Better to be worshipped by a few that not worhipped by anyone.
Vanity, vanity all is vanity
Obama is the most contrived ‘leader’ in US history. He is front and center always, just ask the dozen or so teleprompters that coddle him and his insecurity. Bored eh? Can you blame this chap, he does eff all in his first two weeks of office and toothless fairies in Oslo award him a Nobel. A narcissist cannot help but make themselves the navel of the universe, but it’s useful idiots and pseudo intellectuals who continually feed Obama’s narcissism and maintain his delusions of grandeur. They’re as much to blame for his massive ego as Obama.
Know Obama will come and go, but the pot smoking gaea faithful and godless progressives will find some other charismatic figure (with nil life-experience) to pin their hopes on; and Soros if he’s still breathing will happily fund their destructive, malevolent fantasies.
I’m betting Soros’ money will be on Hillary. She is a true Alinskyite..where as obama is wishywashy and the public has turned on him..unless they’re on welfare. michelle is more “presidential’ than he is.
He will go down as “the first black president”..and the last . A sorry heritage to pass down.
BUT!!! folklore among the welfare/affirmative action/gimme somethin free so I can sit on my ass class will turn him into “a god that walked among mortals”.
He has excelled as “nothing “…okay wrong, he has made America weak and almost ruined out economy.
Electing Obama was the ultimate in “affirmative action”
Anne: And withal, to then be hailed as our modern “Black Jesus”, a “Messiah”.
But the telling thing standing against and yet to be dealt with is—even as we are now possessed of a high court lacking even one mother—there are a sufficient number of American citizens to have brought this present shame into sad reality—ay?
you think he actually thinks about that. you think he actually thinks about governance ?
not a chance …he couldn’t care less.
I’ll bet he thinks about his golf score more often than he thinks of governance… then it’s ‘what time does our flight leave?’ and ‘where do we go today? Give me a speech.’ governance? that’s left to leaders and we all know he’s hapless and hollow as a leader – school-crossing guards show more leadership – but, boy, he does like living in the White House so he can be called the leader of the FEE-world.
ince Obama first announced his candidacy for President, I compared him to Adlai Stevenson. Not LBJ, certainly not FDR. Adlai Stevenson: An intellectual with an intellectual’s disdain for the allegedly unintellectual American people he’s ostensibly trying to lead.
In 1990, David Gerrold wrote an “alternate history” sci-fi story, “The Impeachment of President Stevenson,” about what a flop the Stevenson Administration would have been, if Stevenson had become President in 1952.
Today, that story is no longer science fiction. Adlai Stevenson became President in 2009.
Cognitive psychologists have recently discovered that boredom is an overt sign of lack of knowledge. A few cognitive psychologists have investigated the causes of boredom in adolescents and have discovered that the less a person knows about a topic, the more it bores the person. The person is bored because he does not have the skills or knowledge to engage with the topic.
An example of how boredom arises can be seen with the topic of music. If you know nothing about classical music, how it is structured, the roles of the many instruments in the orchestra, etc., then if you are exposed to a symphony, you do not know how to listen to it. For the person who lacks knowledge, the symphony is just a lot of sound that doesn’t make much sense. Similarly, a person who knows nothing about art is likely to find the paintings of Rembrandt boring because the person does not know what to look for or look at. You have to know the “rules” of the genre (music, painting, etc.) in order to understand the genre, and if you don’t know the rules, then the objects you are listening to or looking at are just boring and uninteresting.
Obama is bored because he cannot hear or see the complexity of the entities (the Senate, foreign relations, the economy) in front of him.
Wonderful post, Gloria. I hadn’t heard that before, but it makes a lot of sense.
To push it forward in the case of Obama, it isn’t likely he has had a real debate in his life (presidential show trials are simply an exchange of talking points). The man was force fed his ideology before adolesence. That mind is closed to all input. You can see it in his response to everything. He barely acknowledges and never articulates an opposing opinion. The approach isn’t to discuss, the approach is to overwhelm.
He doesn’t even have curiosity, no matter any in-depth knowlege of any topic. So how can he not be bored?
I would venture that intellectual “laziness” has more to do with it.
his homosexual dalliances and cocaine use might have something to do with it.
Interesting how commentators avoid ONE possible, probable ? base for his “extreme narcissism” (what exactly is that?) Comments on his “psychology” seem to be most popular. Provenance and past social history a no-no.
You seem to be one of few who even mentions his cocaine use. And what about other drugs. Sure sure these drugs of the bien-pensant and “elite” are safe, guru Timothy Leary, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University et al assured. Long lists of fashionable drugs among the privileged, best and brightest. Not like tobacco, the drug of the “commoners”. Its dangerous smoke carbons / tars, which must be outlawed. AND alcohol. Law of unintended consequences?
Obama and his supporters have bragged he was radical who experimented? with various mind-altering chemicals. Wouldn’t of course have any long-term effects on brain metabolism.
Because many other radicals, writing the script for the crown princes who were to inherit the power and glory of the world, accepted the propaganda that it’s good for you, frees the mind and spirit. NO long-term, unknown effects, of course. WHAT do longitudinal studies report of this?
BUT as so many now in pivotal position in the civic institutions were also fairly consistent and cheerful drug users, it’s only reasonable to suppose that such drug use would not be of concern. It !”hasn’t affected them”, has it.
In pharmceuticals, as in politicals, there are “trade secrets”.
Beware playing with brain physiology as child’s play. And when these two “disciplines” drugs and politics, march together…
Boredom is also a sign of depression as well as learned helplessness.
But, the title of the article is “sleepwalking…” In my time when you reached the “age” you were invited to a draft physical to determine your fitness to serve in the military. The unsuspecting responded to one of the first questions – “have you ever sleepwalked?” Bada-boom, those who raised their hands were ushered out of the line-up and we never saw them again. Then, the leader told us sleepwalking was an auto disqualification to serve in the military (how the hell did John Kerry, an acknowledged sleepwalker, ever get past this unless he lied?).
So, if we stay with the sleepwalking theme, Obama is certainly disqualified from service to his country. Can we please assure the next generations we don’t want sleepwalkers serving in the White House.
Not a new take on the human nature, simpletons feigning boredom or disdain when facing a situation beyond their grasp – and this is my explanation for Obama’s attitudes vis-a-vis so many things –
Now the clasical music analogy: I buy it, Gloria, as a classical music type – unfortunately, I have to add here the fact that nowdays we have social categories which simply cannot transcend the initial difficulties of listening to classical music, even after being “exposed” to one of its friendly and exciting introduction to it, i.e. Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide To -”
It looks like we have a very serious problem here – the ancient Greeks believed that Orpheus tamed beasts with his harmonies – yet the experiences of some acquintances of mine who teached for a while in LAUSD strongly suggest that mister Orpheus’ harmonies would be deadly ineffectual in this Los Angeles wilderness -
Cognitive psychologists have recently discovered that boredom is an overt sign of lack of knowledge.
Excellent point.
Examples that easily come to mind are how Americans are so invested in the narrative that cricket is boring (despite zero knowledge of it), which is exactly the same phenomenon as when foreigners say that NFL Football is boring (again, despite zero knowledge of it).
Wow, that’s pretty insightful. I’m gonna have to copy that and ruminate on how that applies to so many “intellectuals” who have that ennui or lassitude about life in general.
This is absolutely correct. It is typified in a show on BBC America where the hosts of the show pick out a topic of the week and say “how hard can it be?” Then proceed to find out by bolixing up the whole thing by trying to do it on their own. It’s amazing what they find out. I found it out and I see it a lot in people who denigrate other people’s jobs. When I first started working, a long long time ago, I had the idea that things were inherently simple. Boy was I wrong. You can’t know much about anything till you really study it and get past the boredom of knowing nothing about it. After all, How Hard Can It BE???
Well said Gloria and a likely reason for Obama’s boredom. If he is indeed bored. But I am not so sure he is all that bored. I think he likes to fence, to engage his opposition all the while attempting to come off as a nice guy. He seems to like that.
This is a fascinating post. I have observed that really smart people are never bored-it’s the opposite, they’re interested in everything and unfailingly curious.
agreed
Wonderfully put. My mother used to say ‘if you’re bored, you’re probably boring- why don’t you go and learn something or do something, bake a cake, clean a floor.’ – That was hard to hear at the age of 14, but I haven’t been bored since.
Reminds me of the old saying:
“You’re not bored, you’re boring.
my mother used to say that. … and also if I’m not in bed by ten to come home.
Excellent post. Very, very interesting! Would you share a link(s)?
Well sure, and if as one of our great ones has left for us: “The purpose of education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place to spend one’s leisure time.”, well, . . . what more need be in remark, . . . except for the fact that, he signed pieces of legislation upon which particular infants have been put to death, our President might be perhaps, to be pitied, . . .
Not surprising he has been so often bored. He has been given everything in his life and hasn’t had to work at anything. That’s the windfall if you happen to be a radical coming of age in 2004 who is half white half black, half Christian half muslim, half American half something else, half male half something else, clean and articulate, and a master liar who has covered up everything in his life, and the beneficiary of Soros and GS criminal economic destruction. Valerie Jarret’s ludicrous assertion about Bill Ayer’s tome aside, the man has never done anything that required a 4 hour day in his life. Now we reap the fallow field.
As for 2012, it won’t matter what his approval ratings are in 2010. The turnout in 2012 is going to set a record that won’t be matched ever, and the criminals aren’t going to stop at anything to stuff the ballot box. 2008 was a day on a merry-go-round compared to what 2012 is going to be.
Armageddon.
Tea Party activists will be quietly challenging the roles. Tens of thousands of dead zombie voters will be removed.
http://www.northhoustonteaparty.com/true-the-vote/
Proreason, he’s a “metronational”?
More to your prior point, he has not had a debate, nor has he had to go through proper vetting or proper defense of any positions.
Since the lapdog media provided cover for him, instead of coverage of him, his every move has been a gilded lily. His whole adult life has been a gilded lily.
Unless he is upsetting the apple cart, then trying to fly in with cape and tights to “heal” the situation, he cannot play out the fictional superhero existing in his head. He surely must have been the masked avenger of his own Walter Mitty dreams, …of his father, of his half in one world-half in another, sitting an sleazy barstools, trundling off to Jakarta, raging against not fitting neatly into a world…unless it was one of his own creation.
He had to tear down this world and build a different one. One that had a father he could dream of, one that treated enemies as friends and friends as enemies.
One that treated criminals as civilians and civilians as criminals.
One that treated citizens as foreigners and foreigners as citizens.
One that treated patriots as terrorists and terrorists as patriots.
You see, he was always the foreigner, he was always the outsider, he was always the fatherless little boy, not Christian nor fully Muslim, not Black, not White, not Luo, not American, …he had to develop a superhero cape to wear…and try to figure out a way to fly.
Proreason, his boredom comes because somebody (or a lot of somebodies) gave him the cape, the tights and an emblem to wear on his chest. And intruded on his dream with stark reality.
He isn’t who he has always pretended to be. And real life is much less fun and exciting, it’s boring to be just a guy who doesn’t fit in.
yes …or you could just say he is a f..in nutter
His sanity is irrelevant except for where it affects his policy choices and the people who support him really don’t care about it. Calling him names does no good. We need to show him and his policies for what he/they is/are because the MSM won’t. It is imperative that more and more people see the truth about him and his ilk.
Excellent. Short,simple,and entirely correct.And although few people resort to name calling the President here,it is immature and counter productive.T.
I could go on about how poorly he speaks, how he hasn’t said done or produced (that is in the public domain) anything that speaks to intellect. that his halting speech shows he wasn’t involved in writing his speeches etc.
I could show many examples of the disconnect with the american experience, the envy, the abuse of power, and on and on. At some point you need to stop and call a spade a spade. I was never one for diplomacy, it is a compromise and I don’t wish to compromise.
he is a f..in nutter. that is as polite as I will put it.
“His sanity is irrelevant”
lol. This has to be the wildest comment I’ve ever read on any forum.
To flatly state that the sanity of a president is irrelevant is about as far out as it’s possible to go.
But it was fun to hear somebody defend a nut by making an even nuttier claim.
And oh yes, of course Obama is nuts. With his background anybody would be.
“Has there ever been a man who arrived at the presidency so bored with the quotidian details of American life as Barack Obama?”
Probably not. But there is a person who has arrived who is bored with the details of American life, and that would be Ron Radosh. Just saying.
What made Obama? A speech he delivered adequately, written by others, without a single memorable line in it. What was memorable was that, miracle of miracles, the Left had found a moderately attractive non-threatening and sort of articulate black man, who the Left then proceeded to promote hard, as the second coming. The man himself is a nullity. There’s no there there.
never challenged …wtf ! he has never done anything !
…bored to death …yes please come to the conclusion.
“Even men born into wealth and privilege such as JFK and FDR appeared much more connected with the American people than our current president.”
JFK and FDR worked their butts off to get elected to the presidency. They felt compelled to understand the common person—if for no other reason but to curry their favor and votes. Obama had to do almost next to nothing to move into the White House. White race guilt opened the doors for him. I am unaware of any other elected nation leader who did so little to earn the ultimate prize in the entire history of the United States.
I have said before that electing an African-American to the office of POTUS was a healthy thing for the nation to do. It’s just a damn tragedy that it had to be Barack Obama.
Electing a black man simply, simply for the purpose of being able to say you’ve elected a black man, ignoring his ideological flaws, and his flaws as an individual, was a bad idea.
Well Dean, it may be that, by my standards and your’s, our dear “RebeccaH” is just a little bit too racist; for, to her notions, political health for the nations consists in electing some one or another, of a particular skin complexion or genetic make-up, . . . so, you know, school grades or ability in thought wouldn’t be all that darned considerable—and, so what if he usually drops consonants. Just don’t worry about it—are those kinda things “ever gonna to put any beans in yer belly”, ay?
Its not his pigmentation thats the problem its his POLICIES
Its not because he is Black ( well half white a bit Kenyan Black and a lot of Kenyan Arab but he looks Black and thats all that counts to the vast majority 96% or more of ignorant Blacks who vote for him simply because of that and support him STILL) no its because he is RED.
It is an interesting phenomenon, electing someone as a way to say who YOU are, or are not. We did so much of it in high school. In the 70′s the one black kid in the white school got elected class president–SEE! WE ARE NOT RACIST! WE ARE NICE! These days, the Muslim kid or the Hispanic kid or the gay kid gets elected. SEE, even though the school is 85% middle class white kids, WE ARE BIGGER THAN to just elect the brilliant white kid… We are so cool, so open-minded…we chose the nonentity who just happens to belong to the downtrodden-group-du-jour. Now we can check off the “done that” box of having elected a black (OK, half-black) president and move on. But I hope the whole Obama experience has taught us that (hello??)IT DOES MATTER whether the leader of our country is up to the job or not. This is not high-school, folks.
Voting even in part for someone because of the color of their skin is racist whether that persons skin is white or black, it’s still racism. Racism is STUPID!
I put it this way. Barack Obama will probably not be the last black president, nor perhaps should he. But hopefully, for at least a few generations, he will the last president elected because he is black.
My sincere hope is that the Obama administration creates some socialism antibodies in the body politic. It isn’t his skin color that is the problem.
[...] The Audacity of Hope. He procrastinated for a long time and then, facing his deadline, wrote nearly a chapter a week.” [...]
Just checked: AOH content listing: Prologue, Ch1…Ch9, Epilogue, i.e….. 11 chapters -
AOH is 384 pages, back to back -
Subtract matters, blank pages (end chapter/ new chapter x 11, other blank pages: 384 – 30 = 350
Divide 350 at 11 chapters = approx 35 pages each -
So this guy was able to write 35 pages a week?
Wow – now we’re talking someone really smart -
Nobody said he was stupid. He just doesn’t put his intelligence to good use.
my guess he would be one of the first to be “voted off the island” …so the term stupid applies.
and it is true his handlers don’t care so much …but that has got to be changing. he is getting hard for them to keep him looking somewhat rational.
[...] I beg it may be remembered, by every Gentleman in the room, that I, this day, declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the Command I am honored with. [...]
… but now it’s different because (approx): “now, you have me/ Barack Obama” (??)
Once again, the people around Obama claim he has “extraordinary talents” but where is the evidence of same? He’s “bored” with the presidency in the same way my dog is bored when I try to teach him algebra; they’re both so clueless they can’t even feign interest.
Talk about sleepwalking or sleeping, americans have been asleep too long. Our Muslim president is a dangerous man,and will destroy us. Stay asleep and he’ll get it done before 2012 !!
In Nov 2008 the American people made the ultimate affirmative action hire. Not surprisingly the high point of this hire has been Obama’s inaugural address. Unfortunately the media spends much time praising or denigrating Obama or his antitheses. Let it go and move on to thoughtful reporting and commentary on the changes we’ve experienced and are yet to experience; and what is required of the politicians and their constituencies going forward.
“I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me”
Care to prove the original context for that? Go on. You know you want to.
here’s the link for the context
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2113790/posts
No, that is a secondary quote. What was the question, and what was his full answer?
Back to you for a second try …
Best I could find is this:
“I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me. And I’m not interested in isolating myself. I feel good when I’m engaged in what I think are the core issues of the society, and those core issues to me are what’s happening to poor folks in this society.”
Informing the interviewer that he wasn’t interested in merely being a financial success and moving to the suburbs, in “No Cushy Post for this Pioneer Harvard Law Review Chief Plans to Work in Inner City”, by Allison J Pugh in The Akron Beacon-Journal (19 April 1990)
”
So, when he was younger his social/political focus was extremely narrow and since that time he’s shown almost no desire at broadening his scope of interests. The man’s qualifications begin and end at “inner-city community organizer”. He was faking it as U.S. Senator and he’s been faking it as President.
Exactly. The original interview is apparently not obtainable. Nobody here knows exactly what he said, or what he was responding to, so you all just make up the context to suit yourselves. It’s very likely that a 28 year old, up and coming law school graduate was simply talking about where he wanted to live and work, and you’re projecting onto that, 20 years later, assumptions about presidential policy.
That’s not very honest, is it?
Looks like ol’ poopy britches needed stitches after being elbowed during a TG b-ball game:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101126/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama
Too bad the doc didn’t sew his mouth shut.
that would take a lot more then 12 stitches …a lot more.
LOL, Loki had his lips sewn shut as punishment for a misdeed and he didn’t learn a thing from it. Neither would B.O.
I had a grade school teacher that told the class if we were bored it reflected on us not the world. There are many things in the world to draw ones interest if you are alive and thinking, if you cannot appreciate anything and you are bored, then you are the one with the problem. If you are bored, you are the one who needs to change, not the world to accommodate your boredom. I am 60+ plus now and still remember this insight.
The only thing I’ve seen that knocked Obama for a loop was the amazing and totally unexpected arrival of Sarah Palin on the scene. Do you remember the electricity? I stared at the TV thought, “Who IS this woman? NOW we have a race! McCain has a chance.” Obama himself and his team were genuinely taken aback.
Do you remember what he said after his initial shock and confusion? “They have no idea what they are up against.” It was hissed like a street thug’s threat.
Whatever boredom Obama’s exhibited since, he was certainly not bored with Sarah Palin. And he and his attack dogs of the left have never ceased attacking her every word, though she is now a private citizen. If she is so lacking in gravitas and worldly wisdom, so thoroughly unqualified and downright stupid, why do they not ignore her as an inconsequential nuisance?
As Rush says, the left will always tell you who they fear.
I think Joe the Plumber caught him by surprise. He intruded on Joe and his son’s game of Catch, then turned and ran when Joe asked him the first difficult question he’d ever been asked. I paid extra at a Tea Party to meet Joe the Plumber so that I could thank him for his act of statesmanship.
However, Sarah Palin is the gift that lives rent-free in Barack Obama’s head, 24/7.
Ed, and kind responders,
May I suggest that you are all barking up the wrong tree?
This President has been put on the proverbial psychiatrist couch more often than Charlie Brown in the old [i]Peanuts[/i] comic strip. And we get lots of wasted bandwidth trying to figure out a question we can’t answer.
We would all be much better off if we stopped trying to find out [b]why[/b] Mr. Obama does stuff, and found ways to effectively oppose [b]what[/b] he does. The only way that real change is going to happen is if political conservatives and libertarians find a way to convince a growing number of people that the mythology of the political left (that their way is the best way for people) is truly a myth.
That means somehow we need to find out what makes people in California, New York, Vermont, Illinois, and other deep blue places think Mr. Obama and his ilk have the answers that are right for the country. That is the kind of analysis we need today. How Mr. Obama’s brain works is irrelevant; why he decided to be a socialist of one ilk or another is meaningless. What matters is how to end his miserable decision making power before the last best hope of mankind destroys itself.
Concentrating on anything else only hastens our demise.
“That means somehow we need to find out what makes people in California, New York, Vermont, Illinois, and other deep blue places think Mr. Obama and his ilk have the answers that are right for the country.”
It’s the unpublicized side-effects of the flouridation of their drinking water.
Trust me on this.
No one EVER did a long-term study on what would happen to the children of pregnant women who unknowingly ingested uncontrolled dosages of flouride, did they?
So. like Romans going bugsy from using lead pipes for THEIR drinking water, we have sunk into the miasma of widespread moonbattery.
But our teeth look GREAT!
“That means somehow we need to find out what makes people in California, New York, Vermont, Illinois, and other deep blue places think Mr. Obama and his ilk have the answers that are right for the country.”
Exactly. How can their issues be reframed so that the Conservative position is revealed as the proper response? I thought VDH’s piece on NRO ( http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/253954/illegal-immigration-moral-victor-davis-hanson) on the immorality of illegal immigration exactly right. Instead of a cost/benefit analysis which is not compelling to those who want to stand up for the little guy, VDH shows how unfair and unethical the current situation is.
Fixed the link for you, Anglo-Saxon:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/253954/illegal-immigration-moral-victor-davis-hanson
the education system. the left have FULL CONTROL.
they don’t brainwash everyone, they don’t have to. They do brainwash enough.
I don’t know much about art, but I’ve been lead through exhibits by experts who explain things and connect things. Much better. It is necessary to know things in order to be able to think about things, to be able to pass the time without external stimulation.
There are people whose lives include times which would make boredom look like heaven.
Obama has, apparently, not had those experiences.
An open CHALLENGE to all the loyal Obamanation worshipers who post on here in his defense. I notice that in doing so not ONE of you attempts to challenge the FACT that all of those documents listed below are HIDDEN. So take the list of documents that he is HIDING and give us a point by point explanation why each one is being HIDDEN or alternatively show WHERE that information is AVAILABLE for scrutiny. Only when you have done that can you then throw out your wild accusations of conspiracy nut against anyone. The ones who ARE CONSPIRING are the ones who are HIDING the documents not those merely asking to see them and only a blind worshiper would have the reverse morality to see it any other way. So lets see what you are made of.
Oh and just in case you want to pretend you dont know what is missing here is a list .
Here apart from his Vault Birth Certificate are just some but my no means ALL of the OTHER documents and information the Obamanation is HIDING.
There is a lifetime of “missing” documentation — but it must a coincidence — it has to be a coincidence — just keep telling yourself, “it’s a coincidence.”
Obama/Dunham divorce — Released (by independent investigators) Soetoro/Dunham marriage license — Not released Soetoro adoption records — Not released Punahou School records — Not released Soetoro/Dunham divorce — Released (by independent investigators)
Soetero/Obama name change documentation – Not released Selective Service Registration — Released — Probable counterfeit Occidental College records — Not released and vigorously defended Passport records — Not released and official government passport files scrubbed clean by John O. Brennan — now Obama’s terrorism and intelligence czar
Just a coincidence???????????
Columbia College records — Not released Columbia thesis — “Soviet Nuclear Disarmament” — Not released Harvard College records — Not released Harvard Law Review articles — None Illinois Bar Records — Not released Baptism certificate — None Medical records — Not released (unless you count a one-pager from his personal physician saying Obama’s healthy)
Just a coincidence????????
Law practice client list — Not released University of Chicago scholarly articles — None Annenberg Challenge Board Minutes — None Illinois State Senate records — None Illinois State Senate schedule — Lost
Almost 50 years old and there’s no paper trail — coincidence, Would you hire someone with this curriculum vitae? The man is completely undocumented. You don’t know anything about Obama — operative word, KNOW. None of us really do because he and his life are undocumented — an impossible coincidence — and Obama fiercely defends the release of what documentation is available. Some of us believe that something isn’t on the level and that we are entitled as United States citizens to ask any damned politician who he is, what his politics are, what his agenda is, where he came from and who sent him. You do know Obama could end all of this with a single phone call — why doesn’t he press the button?
Born to a Muslim Father adopted by a Muslim STEPFATHER , ALL his Paternal Families are Muslims even his Kenyan Grandmother who his LYING Election Committee told us was a Christian has just returned from the Haj. He was brought up and schooled as a Muslim in BOTH the State and MULTI FAITH schools he attended in Jakarta. BTW when Barry was in Indonesia you had to be an Indonesian CITIZEN to go to State School, so THATS why the Passport , College and Student loan records are HIDDEN.
He took KORANIC STUDIES a Muslim ONLY subject at school a fact he himself ADMITS in his book DREAMS. He is on record as saying ‘If the Political will goes against them I WILL STAND WITH THE MUSLIMS” and also “the Muslim call to prayer is one of the MOST beautiful sounds on earth” .
He can also recite the Shahada in perfectly accented Koranic Arabic , must be a result of his MENGAGI studies as subject only DEVOUT Muslims take. BTW Muslims say anyone who says the Shahada, which calls Allah the PARAMOUNT God (why is the so called ONE God Paramount are there other LESSER Gods????) and also say Mohammad is his messenger , IS A MUSLIM.
So what is Barry Soetero the man who tells us he has ‘ALWAYS been a Christian” well for a start he is a BLATANT BAREFACED LIAR>
you are correct …the muslim greeting is not to be spoken by non muslims
…oh yeah you are correct on all the other stuff too. and like you say the apologist just try to change the subject and spew talking points. like is it possible that they are that stupid ? rhetorical question.
This is eye-opening post. I knew about the academic records, but not the other missing records. With the missing academic records, I always suspected that Obama’s grades don’t mirror his so-called “brilliance”.
Today’s 20 Minuten run a story about Obama’s Kenyan granny praying that He would convert to Islam.
http://www.20min.ch/news/ausland/story/Oma-will-Obama-zum-Islam-bekehren-14685759
Is this proof that He is not a Muslim?
Mm. Thanks for the bigger list.
I thought (mistakenly, it seems) that his Occidental records were released because someone filed suit?
The thing that stuck in my mind (though I saw no documentation) was that it was stated that he received some kind of Fulbright scholarship for foreign students while at Occidental.
I did notice when they released a copy of his US passport recently the date of issue was blacked out. I thought that was particularly weird.
My guess at the time was that he had just gotten it — or just gotten it before he went to Europe when he was campaigning? He and those who mocked SP for her parochialism … she would have had her passport when she visited her NG guys and gals in Kuwait as governor. Heh. I am sure he has one before. Being a cosmopolitan internationalist, and all that.
But here’s a question: Under what passoport did he travel to Pakistan?
Enlightening in its detail, there remain the behaviours of officials of the Justice Department and Courts, all of which officials swear/affirm on oath to Uphold and Defend the Constitution of the USA. Yet in this instance refuse examination of the election of 2008 for CONSTITUTIONAL legality.Despite reasonable reservations from responsible quarters,never presented in other election.
Officials preferring to dismiss the reservations as lunatic or otherwise irrelevant to the nation. In addition I believe information pertinent to employment in public service must be, by law, available on public record.
The Presidency of the United States is a PUBLIC SERVICE position, EMPLOYERS of the President are the citizens of the USA. Entitled to any and all pertinent information, ON PUBLIC RECORD.
No person is compelled to present for public office if he/she chooses not to divulge information of provenance, and qualification for the job.
WHY in this case is, has there been, no official / public examination of Obams’s refusal to make documentation available for public view ? In the USA, a nation in which ALL citizens are equal under the Law?
The Black African “Christian” Grandmother ( the one in her own words at his mother’s Kenyan AFRICAN bedside when he was born) is just one of many many ,unchallenged by the Lame Stream Media, LIES told both BY and ABOUT the Obamnination.
As it stands, Obama is the only president in history whose birthplace is unknown to the public a fact that would be stated on the actual birth certificate. Interestingly, his family has mentioned two different hospitals in Hawaii as the place of birth.
Obamas refusal to release his birth certificate does mean that Obama remains one of Americas most mysterious and opaque presidents ever.
Obama, for example, has not released many other documents regarding his public and private life.
Many of these documents were sought by reporters, who easily acquiesced when Obama said he would not release them though most presidential candidates release them as a perfunctory matter.
Among the key documents that Obama continues to shield from the public:
Obama released just one brief document detailing his personal health. McCain, on the other hand, released what he said was his complete medical file, totaling more than 1,500 pages.
Obama refused to offer his official papers as a state legislator in Illinois. Nor did he produce correspondence, such as his schedules of appointments or letters from lobbyists, from his days in the Illinois state Senate.
Obama did not release his client list as an attorney or his billing records. He maintained that he performed only a few hours of legal work for a nonprofit organization with ties to Tony Rezko, the Chicago businessman convicted of fraud in June 2008 but did not release billing records that would prove this assertion.
Obama ignored requests for his records from Occidental College, where he studied for two years before transferring to Columbia University.
Obamas campaign refused to give Columbia, where he earned an undergraduate degree in political science, permission to release his transcripts. Former President George W. Bush and presidential contenders Al Gore and John Kerry all released their college transcripts.
Obama did not agree to the release of his application to the Illinois State Bar, which would have cleared up intermittent allegations that his application may have been inaccurate.
Obama did not release records from his time at Harvard Law School.
During the presidential campaign, McCains campaign released a full list of all online donors. Obamas campaign still has not released the names of those who donated at least one-third of the $750 million he raised.
Ironically, Obama accused the Bush White House of being “one of the most secretive administrations in our history,” and chided then-Sen. Hillary Clinton for not releasing her White House schedules.
in fairness most of those documents would be blank pieces of paper.
Dear “Gen. P. Malaise”: After reading our “Pragmatist’s” serious piece above, your “blank pieces of paper” (Though, that’s not quite how it would be.), just rully hit me—”Thanks, I needed that!”.
Gen. P. Malaise the problem with the Obamanation and the lack of investigation of him by both the PC moonbat Lame Stream Media and the oh so RINO Republicans is no one knows if there is even just a ‘blank’ sheet there or not. There was a complete lack of investigation of the Obamanation and a complete lack of concern that there was no investigation into Obamaa. When even a cursory look exposed so many questions and so many suspect colleagues, mentors and associates both criminal, Communist, Black Supremacist and Terrorist both Domestic and Islamic. It was all out there on the web long long before American voters in their sublime stupidity voted him in to office and THAT is what is really scary.
you are correct in everything you said. it is an uphill battle as the liberals and RINOs are blocking all attempts for any light to shine lest they get burned in it too.
it is more like the mindset of germany when hitler got his rise. many then knew what a sorry case he was but the mob mentality won out.
you can see the same reasoning put forward by the trolls. they don’t let reality enter their discussions and attack bully and ridicule. they never back their claims and deny everything.
keep writing …yours are comments I always read.
cheers
The bottom line for Obama is, rather impressive in comparisons to other socialist presidents accomplishments after being voted in the White House. The only difference is that Obama didn’t “entitled” his accomplished objectives. He expanded government health care with a trap for future single payer government run health care…..expanded government controlled education….expanded wide sweeping financial controls…etc.
Considering all that he [has] been able to accomplish, I suspect he is willing to be a one-term president and can or will snooze his way out of office and leave his domestic policy legacy to historians to place him along side his other socialist presidents of the past.
He’s “bored” with the presidency in the same way my dog is bored when I try to teach him algebra; they’re both so clueless they can’t even feign interest.
Excellent comparison, Buck. Obama’s bored for several reasons: 1. His mega-narcissism causes him to think he knows more than everyone else; thus, he’s unteachable. If you try to tell him something you think he might not know, you just get the blank stare, which is either a stare of contempt (“You stupid idiot – I already know that), OR, a stare of emptiness (“I have no idea what you’re talking about”). 2. He isn’t interested in improving the lives of Americans – his true goal is to break the bank so that we have to start over, his way, the socialist way, the Cloward & Piven way. 3. He doesn’t want to learn, he isn’t mentally curious, no one in his inside circle challenges him (“Nothing focuses the mind like adversity.”), and he isn’t interested in improving anything – all indications of intellectual laziness.
In Nov 2008 the American people made the ultimate affirmative action hire.
Also excellent, Ben C. Obama is the perfect example of the flaw(s) with AA, and that is, that people who are promoted based on their skin color and not whether they are actually prepared for the job end up botching almost everything they touch. This is NOT to say that we are not ready for a black President; we are, but this President wasn’t ready for the job. There are plenty of black Americans who are ready and for whom I would cast my vote for President: Alan Keyes, Thomas Sowell, Alan West, Ward Connerly, to name a few.
I predict Obama will be a one-termer, just like the previous disaster Carter.
What the backers of Affirmative Action are saying is, “we want you to be hired because of the color of your skin, not because of any merit you possess”. That makes them as racist as the KKK members who do things like burning a cross in someone’s yard because they have darker skin than theirs.
Chris, Indeed you are correct. Not that I agreed with everything that George W said but according to Wikiquote, he introduced the phrase “soft bigotry of low expectations” in a speech to the NAACP during his 2000 campaign. This phrase nails precisely the problem with affirmative action. It establishes competence for the job on a sliding scale as a dependent variable with the independent variable being skin color. It is racist, insulting, divisive, and manipulative.
I was looking at the woeful building stats today and recalling that Obama, when he first became president, said that “suburban sprawl stops now!”
He kept his word.
Modest men tend not to become president but Obama is, I think, the first president who finds the office beneath him. On the other hand, if from a relatively early age I had things handed to me and was told it was because I deserved them and had great achievements based not who and what I was, not what I had done, by golly I’d start to believe that I was getting all this because I deserved it.
By the way, Valerie Jarrett and the others who tell us how vast and penetrating Obama’s intellect is may well be right, but can someone show me actual evidence? I hear what a great speaker he is, how lofty his rhetoric, but can anyone show me? Where is the insightful passage, the phrase or paragraph that sums up a position or makes plain a complicated issue?
For that matter, Obama’s presence has drenched the media and yet he does not seem to be able to communicate his positions and sell his policies. Doesn’t this tell us anything? Oh, wait, I forgot, it just shows the deep-seated racism of the American people.
of course it is idiotic to have Jarrett say stuff like this…maybe she said something about how much this has changed since he got to the WH?
but I would guess that this is a rather stupid affectation. perhaps he is messaging his empathy with his loser-type constituents…young and bored….maybe strung out slackers.
that might fly if you lived in a small town in 1950 and desperately wanted to go to Hollywood and star in film….or whatever. but I think it is pretty much impossible for an intelligent person now, with the internet, and the world, at your command.
Bored? Please, no hobbies? no curiosity? no interest in learning something new? If so, we’re in far more danger than I’d have hoped.
I believe the burbs would or does bore Obama for a myriad of reasons.
1. There’s not ‘enough’ people on welfare, Section 8 Housing/HUD, food stamps, public school ‘free lunch’ program, felony convictions on one’s record, single parent households with children from multiple partners, those not possessing car insurance, registration, heck I’ll throw in license for good measure; who should otherwise shakedown a bank(s) with the help of a ‘community organozer’ and hence ‘ENTITLED’ to a nothing down, low interest home loan.
2. Suburban families on average have a lower divorce rate than those in urban areas.
Thus Obama’s chip on his shoulder for loving, dual involved parental household is ALIEN to the guy. He feels squirmish around such niceties.
3. Perhaps it’s because the burbs consists of blue collar types for the most part. plumbers, framers, roofers, foundation lymen, sheet metal workers, stucco installers etc., You know, people who actually have a SKILL and can use their hands. Come on, you know. An actual ASSET to society.
4. For all intents and purposes, Obama’s most poignant years, his teens took place in the Hawaiian suburbs, where he excelled at nothing!
A C+ student (in Hawaii.. hahaha), an average basketball player (though he sure likes to portray himself as something more) in a division which is still pitiful.
5. Maybe Obama had taken up surfing in hawaii to, you know, to not be so ‘bored’. Nope. Maybe paipo boarding? Huh-uh. Skimboarding? No way.
Obama was photographed in Hawaii a few years back ‘bodysurfing’. You know, the very same thing 10 year olds vacationing from middle America, who have never except in that instance experienced the ocean.. partake in.
The guy suffers from what MANY posters have commented already. The guy has an opinion on EVERYTHING and actual knowledge, validity to his assertments are nil/near nil.
The man blatantly displays his boredom for he’s taken/been given the easiest of 2 paths throughout his uneventful 49 years. Yet his admirers place a wreath on his head.
Obama’s a modern day, real life Veruca Salt.
Obama is a Marxist, a revolutionary. THAT is EXCITING! Such live for the struggle. It makes them HISTORICAL! The suburbs are boring.
Now he has the power, but actual governing is boring. It is work! Work is boring! He is shiftless.
Notice that he was only excited during the campaign. It was the war of rhetoric. That was the revolution! Exciting!
The dog chasing the car has caught it by the bumper, and does not know what to do next. The chase is exciting. The hunt! After a hunt, though, you get to kill your prey and eat it. A car bumper? Not so much. It was always a false hunt. As is revolution.
(Maybe if he got to kill millions, like other Communist leaders, then it would be exciting? Scary thought. Do they kill, just to cement their power, or do they kill, because it validates the hunt? Because it makes the excitement real? Is it really about nothing more than the excitement of the kill? Is it really so banal as that?)
And upon what do you blame your…ahem…development? DDT? Thalidomide? Alcohol? Crack?
BTW, to add to your fears – everyone who has breathed oxygen has died. Or will die. Outlaw O2.
I think perjoratives are called for here.
Excellent points all.
The political partisans who prop up this current occupant of the Oval Office sre sounding as intellectually barren as he. I had a conversation with a liberal at Thanksgiving. He stalked off when I posed the simplest questions (If it’s a “class” problem, what “class” are you? Response — confusion and bewilderment).
The guy’s a Manchurian Candidate. The version with Frank Sinatra, not Liev Schrieber.
I can think of a number of things to call Obama and Biden. Brilliant doesn’t make it on the Top 100 list.
That was one of the more interesting and informative discussions I have read on this topic. I have always dismissed big O as an empty headed figurehead of progressive leftism with his only asset his ‘blackness’ which is in itself unearned; but there appears to be to him than that, though what it is I am still unsure.
True genius doesn’t get bored waiting for intellectual challenges. It goes out in search of them. It pits itself against adversaries like cancer and death and outer space. It gains humility when the answers don’t come easily and learns to strive in the face of impossible odds. Eventually,building on others that have gone before, true genius adds to the sum total of Human knowledge and the world is a better place for their efforts.
Obama has the boredom of a con man surrounded by easy marks.
Always like to post these when relating to Obama’s laziness, just incase we have some newbies:
The very astute Richard Epstein, professor of law at University of Chicago, noted that “I like Obama but I reject the suggestion that he is an intellectual. He is an activist merely mimicking the mannerisms of an intellectual.”
In response to the question, “How good is Obama’s mind?”, Epstein replied: “His mind is pretty good, but it is a clever ‘means-ends’ mind. He has never written a scholarly article in his entire life. ”
I am Obama’s age and knew many students like him: preppy third world wannabes and poseurs who loved to give the impression that they were both scholarly and engaged by namedropping authors like Fritz Fanon and Edward Said, both of whom Obama has cited as influences.
No real love of books, or of reading and thinking. All just a display for appearance’ sake.
The respected Thomas Lipscomb contends he didn’t write either of his books.
After Obama graduated from Harvard Law, he did not to seek work as a clerk for a prominent liberal judge, as most of his Harvard colleagues did. The work of a law clerk is demanding and it is doubtful that Obama was capable of completing such a challenge. Instead, Obama was hired by a Chicago law firm. But he didn’t do any heavy lifting there either. Instead, he spent all his time writing notes for his first book. As Allison Davis, a founding partner of the firm wrote:
Some of my partners weren’t happy with that, Barrack sitting there with his key board on his lap and his feet up on the desk writing the book.
Obama referred to himself as a “law professor,” but – in truth – he had only served as a Senior Lecturer
spent some time with the highest tenured faculty member at Chicago Law a few months back, and he did not have many nice things to say about “Barry.” Obama applied for a position as an adjunct and wasn’t even considered. A few weeks later the law school got a phone call from the Board of Trustees telling them to find him an office, put him on the payroll, and give him a class to teach. The Board told him he didn’t have to be a member of the faculty, but they needed to give him a temporary position. He was never a professor and was hardly an adjunct.
The other professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty meetings, and it was clear that the position was nothing more than a political stepping stool.
According to my professor friend, he had the lowest intellectual capacity in the building. He also doubted whether he was legitimately an editor on the Harvard Law Review, because if he was, he would be the first and only editor of an Ivy League law review to never be published while in school (publication is or was a requirement).
The Doug Ross blog post is a telling reminder President Obama was never a professor. He was never even close to being a professor. Professors publish articles, compete for tenure, conduct research, win grants, and speak at national and international conferences. They attend faculty meetings where their expertise and skills are challenged in lively debate. In this world, the time professors spend teaching classes, creating exams and grading papers – the majority of Obama’s work as a Senior Lecturer – has only limited significance and prestige.
Obama’s insistence that he was a law school professor shows that he sought the status of being a law school professor…yet never proved he had what it took to compete among the academic elite.
a report from Carol Platt Liebau, managing editor of the Harvard Law Review at the time of Obama’s presidency there [emphasis mine]:
[W]hen he was at the HLR you did get a very distinct sense that he was the kind of guy who much more interested in being the president of the Review, than he was in doing anything as president of the Review.
A lot of the time he quote/unquote “worked from home”, which was sort of a shorthand – and people would say it sort of wryly – shorthand for not really doing much. He just wasn’t around. Most of the day to day work was carried out by the managing editor of the Review, my predecessor, a great guy called Tom Pirelli whose actually going to be one of the assistant attorney generals now.
He’s the one who did most of the day to day work. Barack Obama was nowhere to be seen. Occasionally he would drop in he would talk to people, and then he’d leave again as though his very arrival had been a benediction in and of itself, but not very much got done.
It reminds me a little bit of my experience with him when he was president of the Harvard Law Review. You know, I hesitated to say a lot about this during the campaign because I really thought maybe it wasn’t fair. That maybe, finally, when he got to be President, this would be a job big enough to engage and hold Barack Obama’s sustained interest, because really, is there a bigger job out here?
Sound familiar?
Through Facebook, I recently got in touch with an old friend of mine from college who has been practicing law in Chicago for the past thirty years. She worked at Sidney Austin back in the day, and her recollection of both Barack and Michelle echo your observations almost exactly.
…………”the other professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty meetings, and it was clear that the position was nothing more than a political stepping stool. …………
glad you posted this Maryann.
now everyone (who can actually form their own though, sorry matthew) can hate him too for his unqualified and lazy nature.
there were many voices saying all this before he was elected but they were drowned out by the apologists (again sorry matthew).
Is that really the best you’ve got?
Brilliant reply from a brilliant 0bama apologist – I expected nothing less.
Anyway, it really is remarkable how far he managed to get without substantial accomplishments. The “notes” he wrote while on the HLR came to about seven pages IIRC – less than a typical first year writing assignment. At my school, the whole point of getting on a journal was so that you could publish your own full-length scholarly article. It was often impossible for 1L writers to get anything published regardless of how good they were; having a leadership position such as the presidency went a long way towards giving you a chance to write at length in your publication.
That 0bama failed to do this as a 2L or a 3L really says a lot – still, his employers overlooked it. I suspect that they were worried about lack of diversity – even large law firms have few “Black” associates, and even fewer Black senior associates/partners. Because of this, they must have jumped at the chance to hire someone who “looked black” and had the right pedigree (despite abysmal writing and speaking skills).
A big firm can afford an incompetent, Affirmative Action attorney or two – he/she can be shunted off into a project where little damage can be done, while everyone else picks up the slack. A nation, on the other hand, cannot. Unfortunately for us, it’s our fate to be ruled (not led) by a lazy, Peter Principle-esque incompetent – with a huge racial chip on his shoulder, to boot.
Most people who go through higher level education or who find themselves in the middle/upper ranks of a corporation recognize this type of person – basically they are play-acting, don’t really know what they are supposed to know, don’t work very hard at anything except getting ahead and spend an inordinate amount of time dodging responsibility and scrutiny.
When BO came on the scene I immediately pegged him as this type of person but could not convince too many friends – liberal and conservative alike.
Such people sometimes can rise quite high where they proceed to ride parasitically on the momentum of the organization and the work of others. If something good happens by chance under their tenure they will capitalize mightily as if it were their personal genius and hard work that caused it.
I think this is one reason why BO has been such a failure. At the POTUS level, he had to first build the teams and organizations to support his presidency and didn’t even know the importance of picking knowledgeable, experienced and highly skilled people appropriate for each role. Only ideologically pure sycophants were considered – and hired.
Good job, Maryann. I’ll file that note away somewhere.
Do you know if he ever wrote anything for the Harvard Law Review? From what’s been made public, he wrote only one article in his whole life (there’s enough circumstantial evidence to support the theory that Bill Ayers wrote most of Obama’s books).
Dear Mike check this out
http://beldar.blogs.com/beldarblog/2008/06/why-didnt-obama.html
here an excerpt , make sure to read some of the comments:
With which background, perhaps you can better appreciate the most peculiar thing in Ressner’s and Smith’s article on Obama (boldface mine):
One thing Obama did not do while with the review was publish any of his own work. Campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said Obama didn’t write any articles for the Review, though his two semesters at the helm did produce a wide range of edited case analyses and unsigned “notes” from Harvard students.
How remarkable is this for Harvard? I have no first-hand information, obviously. But among the legal celebrities whom Ressner and Smith quote in their article is Susan Estrich, who they describe as “the USC School of Law professor who served as Michael Dukakis’ campaign manager in 1988 — and who broke ground as the first female president of the Harvard Law Review 14 years before Obama took the reins” (emphasis mine, brackets by Ressner and Smith):
Estrich believes that Obama must have had something published that year, even if his campaign says otherwise. “They probably don’t want [to] have you [reporters] going back” to examine the Review.
Oh, pish-posh. If Obama had actually authored one of the unsigned student notes that was published, he surely would admit to it — it’s another objective credential, and he and his campaign certainly brag about his supposed constitutional law expertise at the drop of a hat. Given that he never published anything while an instructor at the University of Chicago Law School later, it would be his only written evidence (besides his magna cum laude degree) of genuine academic excellence in the law. Thus, Estrich’s comment leads me to believe that the Harvard Law Review, too, had a “Publish or Perish” requirement — but it’s one that Obama didn’t meet for reasons that are entirely unclear, and that he’s now “scrupulously managing his biography” to obscure.
My bologna detector tells me there’s more to the story here. So which of his former co-members or -editors will be the first to squeal on him? Or is there the Rule of Omertà among them?
Brief legal notes on abortion rights (totaling about seven pages) were credited to him.
By way of comparison, some of your 1st year Legal Research assignments are at least 10-15 pages. The two longest full-length papers that I wrote as a 2L & 3L, on the other hand, were about 35-45 pages (despite this, both were VERY general explorations of some complex topics). Most students’ papers were about this length, although some were longer if there wasn’t a word limit.
These papers were not hard to do as long as you stayed focused – the hardest thing for me was making sure all of the citations were correct. This makes it all the more shocking that 0bama did so little at Harvard, even though he had a golden opportunity to write something substantial.
Shame, shame, shame on us for electing such a man. This is what happens when people rely on the MSM for news or “analysis”.
As far as connecting to the “common people” (most of us) Obama truly does not know what the American Experience is. He cannot do it. He does not want to do it. He really does not connect to any culture.
As most of us know — he was born off shore somewhere (Hawaii, Kenya, whatever). His parents and grandparents were not committed to the American dream or the American Experience. Dunham’s parents were fellow travelers.
Obama’s childhood was very culturally disconnected. When he did end up in Hawaii (thanks Mom, for leaving me) Communist Frank Marshall Davis was his mentor. His school was atypical. He had no connection to the main land.
He talks about his “Kansas roots” as if he spent summers on the farm. There are no Kansas roots. There are no American experience roots. He doesn’t know who we are. And he doesn’t care.
If he didn’t have the power to be so destructive I would almost feel sorry for the guy. But I wouldn’t loose any sleep over him.
What I don’t understand is, how could someone as gifted as David Remnick be fooled by this guy?
I am very interested in US history, and this mystery, and lack of documentation, on Barack Obama is astounding. A serious question: can it be that the mystery will remain even when he (presumably) sets up his presidential library? Surely that should include all his pre-presidential papers, including personal records, and from his time in Indonesia, university, the Illinois Senate, etc. If not, the contrast with the amount of material available in the other presidential libraries would be obvious. At some point a serious historian will try to write a scholarly life of Obama, like Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. Would Obama like to go down in history as the US president who did the most to hide the facts of his own life, so that in the future it might be easier to write a proper biography of (say) Chester Arthur than of Barack Obama? That would be an odd legacy.
he doesn’t care. DOES NOT CARE. DOES NOT SEE HIMSELF through anyones eyes but his own. he is a narcissist.
on his last wasteful tour he joked to the president of Indonesia that he didn’t have an ipad but had an ireggie.
if bush had said something like that the racial intonations of which there are many would be headlines for months. but this freak gets a pass.
I just finished reading “Daughter of Time”, by Josephine Tey, and the proverb at the beginning of the book struck me: “Truth is the daughter of time.” I guess eventually we’ll learn the true story of Obama-or as Shakespeare would have it, “The truth will out.”
One can only hope that future generations will not be blinded and bound by racist affirmative action and moonbat left wing multi culti Political Correctness and will be able to cut through the multiple layers of protection and find ‘real’ Obama and then be able to call a ‘spade a spade’ in a manner of speaking
You got that right, and the people who voted for Obama because of the color of his skin haven’t learned their lesson, they are still pushing the idea that the next President has to be a black to show that our voting against Obama wasn’t based on racism. They are projecting their own racism onto the intelligent people who are more interested in competence and beliefs rather then skin color.
Let’s compare Obama with Harry Truman. Truman came into the Presidency almost completely unprepared. FDR never told him anything, and rarely met with him. (Truman got the VP nod solely to assure that FDR would get the vote.)
But Harry was dedicated, a quick learner, and determined. He put the “Buck Stops Here” sign on his desk and worked hard. He made a few mistakes, but in the end, historians mark him as one of the better Presidents. He was instrumental in getting the state of Israel on the map (in spite of the British).
Obama, on the other hand, seems to consider the Presidency as a 9 to 5 job, with the occasional weekend in New York, and world trips to apologize for America’s supposed grievances.
Maryann quotes Liebau:
“[W]hen he was at the HLR you did get a very distinct sense that he was the kind of guy who [was] much more interested in being the president of the Review, than he was in doing anything as president of the Review.”
Let’s update that to today:
[W]hen he was at the White House, you did get a very distinct sense that he was the kind of guy who [was] much more interested in being the President, than he was in doing anything as President.
Mike, if you want to see Epstein’s interview on Uncommon knowledge it’s quite revealing.
My favorite sum up of Obama is the first quote I copied in my post “He is an activist merely mimicking the mannerisms of an intellectual.” BINGO, like your interpretation of him just liking the Air force one rides, the food, basketball with stars, then just play acting at the podium.
You got a real sense of the man when he sat with the Republicans and some real “qualified ” brains got at him , remember Paul Ryan, Obama was looking at him with that scornful distant gaze , the one that say’s I have no idea what your talking about.
I have this fantasy where Baracki boy goes to work for Mc d’s starts at the bottom cleaning toilets floors etc.. then works the fryers, the cash, etc.. then they move him up to receiving, then he’s on delivery then he’s visiting every factory that makes anything and everything for mc d’s then he’s at the corporate head office, then they take him to the Ronald McDonald house and he asks how it is that they can be so generous and how did they accomplish such an amazing thing. The head honcho tells him it’s from the profits and then and only then does he have an epiphany.
They never give him the managers job at a location though because I don’t think he is qualified (seriously) Think of past Presidents if they could run a Mc Donald’s they could be President.
Remember this:
Yesterday, President Obama stated, “Profit and earning ratios are starting to get to the point where buying stocks is a potentially good deal if you’ve got a long-term perspective on it,”
Obama’s gaffe is laughable if it weren’t so frightening. It’s indicative of his ability to pontificate on a subject in which he has little or no background or understanding.
In fact, Obama’s background offers a disturbing vision of how he views America. The majority of Obama’s adult life was spent on the South Side of Chicago. This section of the Windy City is a dichotomy of liberal elites, safely ensconced in their Hyde Park enclave, surrounded by the misery and despair of the Chicago slums.
I do not consider what this on the job training president is doing to be sleepwalking, instead I believe he is stumbling drunk through this job without a clue as to what damage he is doing along the way.
Wonder if he can get away with that excuse? No he is definitely blind drunk with everything he does and it is showing!
Actually I got to thinking. My parents came to Canada in 1962, escaping from communist Yugoslavia at the time. Dad like most immigrants at the time believed with hard work and a little risk you could enjoy the offerings of free market capitalism, and so it was. When his company became somewhat successful he took us to Disney. He wanted to see American ingenuity on display. I will always remember him walking around in total amazement commenting non stop to the point of boring us as kids “look how clean it is, look not a piece of garbage on the ground, look how the lines move, look how organized it all is, only the Americans are capable of this.”
I think being able to run a Disney Park for a year should be the qualifier for any POTUS. Imagine what they would learn.
Now if this isn’t prog bait I don’t know what is!!
I have often thought of Obama as an educated Idiot. By this I mean someone who is book smart but life stupid.
I would add the man is educated way beyond his intelligence. If he was bored as a Senator, and he is now bored with being President, as this piece indicates, then he has no business being there. The job of Presidency requires focus, energy, study, thought, and intellect; our current Presidenct possesses none of these. He advanced through law school, at the law firm, to a Senate seat, and now the Presidency, by Affirmative Action. We are now seeing the disastrous results. He is the first President younger than me (I’m 54) and I just hope and pray we can live through the rest of his term.
I feel a little sorry for Obama. It’s not only obvious that he’s in way over his head, but it’s also obvious that he’s tired of playing the game. His socialist upbringing and Third-World concept of how America works had led him to believe that being president was like being a pharoh or a king: you live a lavish lifestyle while the ignorant masses worship and adore you. Your word is ultimate Law, and nobody has the right to challenge you. Meanwhile, all the important decisions are made by your underlings. Imagine his shock when those millions of “bitter clingers” who he had hoped to control through their healthcare suddenly coalesced into a force to be reckoned with. And the shock was even greater when they stood up en masse and reminded him, in no uncertain terms, that HE works for THEM. And he may not have even known that!
To make matters worse, he can no longer rely on the propaganda machine of his flunkies in the Old Media. They’ve been marginalized and made irrelevant. Time and again, they’ve been made to look like clueless, partisan fools by the expertise and investigative courage of “citizen journalists”.
With all these factors working against him, combined with his total ineptitude in both domestic and foreign policy, it’s no wonder that Obama doesn’t want a second term. Now the Dems have no choice but to suck up to Hiilary for 2012. She’s all they’ve got. She’s the only Democrat left standing who still has a fan base. But that’s like asking somebody who wasn’t invited to the party to come in and clean up the mess made by the partygoers. Hillary would have to swallow a whole lot of her pride to step into that black hole.
http://www.analitica.com/bitblio/coll/diente.asp
I am my college professor’s favorite pupil. He calls himself a “philosophical progressive” (whatever that means) and he tells wonderful stories about Mao Zedong and how deeply spirtual it is to become a Progressive. He told us not to pay any attention to those horrible rumors that the Conservatives preach to us about Brother Mao’s murder of 60 million. I know it’s a lie, that’s what a girl on Facebook said. After all, President Obama had a Mao ornamate hanging fron the White House Christmas tree, right on cool. After learning all of these new political ideas, I went out and got the latest Che Guevara t-shirt. It is so rad. My professor went to Harvard like Obama did so I know he loves Che too. My professor said Hollywood helped to revive another leftist martyr but my uncle (who was in the Army) said Hollywood has dutifully churned out yet another cinematic agitprop paean and that I should read to try to discern why many supposedly democratic, civil libertarian liberals still swoon over this Stalinist mass-murderer. What ever that means, later dude.
“My name is Ozymandias, King of kings…”
Pre-election Obama was mouthing off how American suburbs bore him.
Well, it’s two years later. And nothing bores me more than Obama.
Классный блог, я тоже пишу для схожию тематику) про Тайланд пишу, можешь чтить у меня.
Хм… желание, и в правду любопытный блог! Было необыкновенно интересно почитать про Тайланд. Составитель этого блога, не обижайтесь, Ваш блог мне тоже понравился!
Хм… правда, и в правду небезынтересный блог! Было непроходимо интересно ценить про Тайланд. Автор этого блога, не обижайтесь, Ваш блог мне тоже понравился!
Хм… правда, и в правду любопытный блог! Было непроходимо интересно ценить про Тайланд. Составитель этого блога, не обижайтесь, Ваш блог мне тоже понравился!
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Ниче такой блог, мне понравился, однако рукоприкладствовать не буду! Простой занесу в закладки
Ниче такой блог, мне понравился, но подписываться не буду! Просто занесу в закладки
Ниче такой блог, мне понравился, однако расписываться не буду! Просто занесу в закладки
Начинать не знаю, не соглашусь с ровным пацаном, сообразно мне беспричинно обыкновенный блог. Есть интересные заметки, но они у всех есть.
Ну не знаю, не соглашусь с ровным пацаном, по мне так обычный блог. Есть интересные заметки, однако они у всех есть.
Ну не знаю, не соглашусь с ровным пацаном, сообразно мне так обыкновенный блог. Уписывать интересные заметки, однако они у всех есть.
Недвижимость Ивано-Франковск
Ух… уже декабрь же, согласен) опрометью эпоха летит, беспричинно не успеешь оглянутся и уже 11 января на работу нуждаться)
Ух… уже декабрь же, да) лихо период летит, так не успеешь оглянутся и уже 11 января для работу надо)
Так ладно вам, не ругайтесь, надо жить дружно
тем более лихо неофит год)