'America Disappoints Her President Once Again'

“America just can’t seem to stop letting Barack Obama down, can it?”, John Hayward writes at the Conversation, the Breitbart.com group blog:

On Friday, President Obama returned to one of his favorite topics, infrastructure spending, in a move widely interpreted as the latest pivot to job creation. As transcribed by the Weekly Standard, he used his rather grating “America can do better” formulation to insist on more money for roads and bridges:

“We still have all kinds of deferred maintenance. We still have too many ports that aren’t equipped for today’s world commerce. We’ve still got too many rail lines that are too slow and clogged up. We’ve still got too many roads that are in disrepair, too many bridges that aren’t safe,” said the president.

“We don’t have to accept that for America. We can do better. We can build better. And in a time of tight budgets, we’ve got to do it in a way that makes sure taxpayer dollars are spent wisely.”

Obama announced today his plan. “I’m expanding on a proposal I made in the State of the Union. I’m calling it a Partnership to Rebuild America. It’s a partnership with the private sector that creates jobs upgrading what our businesses need most -– modern ports to move our goods; modern pipelines to withstand a storm; modern schools worthy of our children,” he said.

America just can’t seem to stop letting Barack Obama down, can it? I’m sure we could compile a bipartisan history of political leaders urging Americans to “do better” in one area or another, but it seems like a particularly constant verbal tic of Obama’s, since he’s unwilling to concede the tiniest smidgeon of government responsibility for the unsatisfactory state of national affairs.

Matt Drudge had a little fun this weekend with that particular tic of Mr. Obama. As fellow Insta-guest-contributor Ann Althouse has noted, Drudge “does commentary. You just have to figure out what he’s trying to say with his juxtapositions — Drudgtapositions.”

Like this one last night, juxtaposing our first president in a painting behind our 44th, and a link to a write-up on his infrastructure-obsessed Friday speech in Miami:

Heh. That’s just brutal.

Hopefully though, the Easter service that the president attended today will put him in a more forgiving mood. Or not:

At the Easter service attended Sunday by President Barack Obama and his family, the pastor railed against “captains of the religious right,” according to the White House pool report cited by the Washington Post. The service, led by Rev. Luis Leon, was held at Saint John’s Church at Lafayette Square, which is where the First Family worships most often, though they have not formally joined any particular church in Washington, D.C.

The Post article notes that the Easter sermon targeted conservatives as racists, sexists and xenophobes:

According to a press pool report of Leon’s sermon, the minister criticized what he called ”the captains of the religious right.”

People often want things to go back to the way things used to be, before “work got difficult and faith got confused, and life got more confusing,” Leon said, according to the pool report.

“You cannot go back,” Leon said, citing the words of Jesus. “It drives me crazy when the captains of the religious right are always calling us back … for blacks to be back in the back of the bus … for women to be back in the kitchen … for immigrants to be back on their side of the border.”