The saga of Dr. Jayant Patel is that of a man who concealed his incompetence by never staying in one place long enough for consequences to catch up to him. But though he buried his true track record, Patel took care to bring with him enough social proof to persuade a new set of victims to trust him. As long as he could stay one step ahead, he was gold. It wasn’t as if nobody suspected Patel wasn’t all he claimed to be. One gets the sense that many of his patients had doubts even as they looked up to him from the operating table, but never enough to challenge him openly; to impel them to say the one thing that would have saved them: ‘I don’t want this doctor, get me another’. And yet the truth was that he was probably trying; trying hard to be a doctor. One of the charges against him was that he treated patients that’s weren’t even his. Maybe he figured he needed practice. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But that didn’t help him because the basic problem was that Patel was incompetent. He should have been something else. And getting an incompetent to try harder only gets you more incompetence.
Patel killled 17 people and removed many more organs and limbs than can easily be counted, often for no medical reason whatsoever. Wikipedia has a summary of his career. At each stage, “Dr. E. Coli” as he came to be known in Australia, was suspected of being a dud. Yet such was the system of deference built into the medical system that he went on long after he should have been stopped.
Patel was born in Jamnagar in Gujarat, India. Whilst nearly all of his training was conducted from within the United States of America, he had undertaken his initial surgical studies at the M.P. Shah Medical College in Saurashtra University, and obtained a master’s degree in surgery. After graduation he moved to the United States where he received further surgical training at the University of Rochester School of Medicine as a surgical intern and resident of surgery. Whilst Patel was working at a hospital in the city of Buffalo in 1984, New York health officials cited Patel for failing to examine patients before surgery. Patel was fined US$5,000 and was placed on three years’ clinical probation. In 1989, Patel moved to Oregon and began working for Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Portland, Oregon. Medical staff alleged that he would often turn up, even on his days off, and perform surgery on patients that were not even his responsibility. In some cases, surgery was not even required, and caused serious injuries or death to the patient.
After a review, Kaiser restricted Patel’s practice in 1998, banning him from doing liver and pancreatic surgeries and requiring him to seek second opinions before performing other surgeries. Further, after reviewing four cases in which three patients died, the Oregon Board of Medical Examiners made Patel’s restriction statewide in September 2000, and New York State health officials required him to surrender his license in April 2001.
After this, Patel decided to leave Oregon for Queensland. The Queensland Health Department employed him without conducting due diligence regarding his qualifications and experience; and it allowed him to become director of surgery at Bundaberg Base Hospital in 2003, under the “area of need” program, which hires overseas trained doctors for regional areas. He continued to practice in a similar manner to which he did in New York, with his surgical work being described as “antiquated” and “sloppy”, and some nurses even claimed that they hid their patients from him when they knew that he was in the hospital. He attracted the nickname “Dr. E. coli” as a result of these actions.
A BBC report alleges Dr. Patel killed as many as 87 people. His surgical technique was nothing short of remarkable. Even Dr. Frankenstein would have been impressed.
One charge relates to the care of Aboriginal woman Marilyn Daisy, who developed gangrene in her leg after she was allegedly left without treatment for weeks following an amputation. …
In another case, a woman’s life support machine was reportedly turned off because Dr Patel allegedly wanted her bed to operate on another patient.
Nurse Toni Hoffmann told the inquiry that Dr Patel had tried to drain blood from a man’s heart with a “stabbing motion”. The man died later that night.
“All the nurses in intensive care were seeing these patients dying every day and we couldn’t do anything,” Ms Hoffman told the inquiry in March.
“We’d taken to hiding patients. We just thought ‘What on earth can we do to stop this man’,” she said.
‘What on earth can we do to stop this man?’ The answer of course, was to get another doctor. But it never came to that until Dr. Patel fled Queensland to get away from the cops. He was arrested by the FBI and extradited to Australia where he is now facing charges. But that’s no consolation to the scores of patients who now limp around without legs, sans arms, without stomachs, missing an esophagus — or dead. However the New York Times and Maureen Dowd have another approach to incompetence. They think that if a man isn’t up the the job he just needs to get on message or try harder. The subject of their exhortations is Barack Obama. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have their doubts from the first about whether he was up to the job, just that they suppressed them or thought that he wasn’t trying hard enough. Holding back. Dowd says: “Sometimes on the campaign plane, I would watch Obama venture back to make small talk with the press, discussing food at an event or something light. Then I would see him literally back away a few moments later as a blast of questions and flipcams hit him.” So what he needs to do, in her view, is improve his press relations and everything will be “on message” again.
Obama refuses to deal with the media world as it is. He’s holding out for the media world that he wants. But that will never be. That disdainful attitude toward 24-hour cable culture is slowing his political reflexes. We’re seeing that in the oil spill. I don’t think it’s personal with him. It’s not that he despises reporters as human beings, like Nixon. He does scores of interviews and he doesn’t rage behind closed doors. But if he doesn’t make more concessions to Washington as it is, he’s going to hurt his presidency.”
Now that Obama has been hit with negative press, he’s even more contemptuous. “He’s never needed to woo the press,” says the NBC White House reporter Chuck Todd. “He’s never really needed us.”
“Obama refuses to deal with the media world as it is”. It never occurred to Dowd that he couldn’t deal with the world as it is, not just the media part of it. But she saw his failure to deal with them not as sample of his competence, but as an indicator that he didn’t care enough. On the contrary he needed the Press very much, but in a negative way. He needed them to do nothing. Nothing, that is, except accept the social proof of his competence. He was the proof they’d been waiting for. And just as the proof Dr. Patel knew medicine was because he was doctor, the President was presumed a capable executive because he ran a campaign. The proof was entirely circular, but through some peculiar myopia no real questions were asked. To demand the sealed transcripts, to ask about the absence of articles for the Harvard Law review, to raise the non-existent legislative record was deemed churlish. UnAmerican. Bigoted. The fact that he had come so far was proof that he was qualified to come so far. And there the matter rested.
Until the policy ICU began filling up. The BP problem isn’t the first demonstration of the President’s curious incapacity. Peggy Noonan wrote, “he was supposed to be competent. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president’s political judgment and instincts.” Like Dr. Patel’s patients, the number of mangled policy cadavers has piled so high in the backroom that even New York Times is asking when President Obama finally shows the talent he’s been hiding for so long. The Gray Lady writes:
The country is frustrated and apprehensive and still waiting for Mr. Obama to put his vision into action. … Americans need to know that Mr. Obama, whose coolness can seem like detachment, is engaged. This is not a mere question of presentation or stagecraft, although the White House could do better at both. … But a year and a half into this presidency, the contemplative nature that was so appealing in a candidate can seem indecisive in a president. His promise of bipartisanship seems naïve. His inclination to hold back, then ride to the rescue, has sometimes made problems worse. …
These are matters of competence and leadership. This is a time for Mr. Obama to decisively show both.
Show me! Show me! What’s he’s decided to show, according to Jake Tapper, are his magnificent oratorical skills in the awe-inspiring setting of the Oval Office. “After returning from his two-day visit to Mississippi, Alabama and Florida on Tuesday, President Obama will address the nation from the Oval Office — the first time he’s done so. That the president has chosen the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico as the first time he uses the trappings of the Oval Office speaks volumes not only about the environmental and economic catastrophe caused by the oil spill, but about the political threat it potentially poses to the President.”
And that may be the best that Barack Obama can do. Give a speech. He’s good at that. It’s not his fault that he has no executive experience. He never ran a company. Was never mayor of a city. Achieved nothing in his role at the Chicago Annenberg Foundation. He was never governor. The press knew that all from beginning. Like Dr. Jayant Patel, the President walked into the room on his own say-so. And nobody wanted to say ‘show me’. So having failed at that it is slightly unfair to lay the blame entirely on him.
Barack Obama’s incompetence, if indeed he is incompetent, results directly from a flawed political and media process that allowed such a candidate to go forward. It’s a failure of quality control. It’s an indictment of the gatekeepers and of the media in particular. They didn’t look the gift horse in the mouth and now it turns out he’s wearing dentures. It wasn’t President Obama’s fault that he aspired to a job he had no preparation for: a man’s entitled to try for as much as he can get … will you give a billion dollars, please … but only a fool would let him. And the fools in this case would do well not to ask for him to try harder. At some point the only way they can redeem themselves is to stop digging and realize that they, not he, are to blame for this fix. Maybe it’s significant that Maureen Dowd, having facilely advised the President to improve the message, senses what it may come to in the end. Joe Biden. Dowd writes about the underappreciated Vice President.
It was the press that delighted in Biden’s foot-in-mouth syndrome in 2008 and played up the exacting Barack Obama’s occasional chagrin at the über-exuberant Joe as they began their odd-couple partnership. Yet the vice president is so lacking in any vengeful feelings for past reporting that left him for dead, I sometimes wonder if he’s really Irish. …
One Obama aide remarked that Biden is “the most beloved person in the White House.” … So, as The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz writes, the more press-friendly, emotionally accessible, if gaffe-prone Biden has become “the administration’s top on-air spokesman.”
How ironic. Instead of The One, they’re sending out The Two.
It’s innuendo so far. The time for Rahm Emmanuel to worry is when Biden becomes the most beloved man in Democratic politics.
Tip Jar or Subscribe for $5
God Help us.
Lord, hear our prayer.
Now that Obama has been hit with negative press, he’s even more contemptuous. “He’s never needed to woo the press,” says the NBC White House reporter Chuck Todd. “He’s never really needed us.”
SAY WHAT? The press is the gatekeeper to the broadcast, Obama is nothing without the press, wtf is wrong with Todd?
–
Very nice essay, wretchard. BUT, you are berating the obvious. As I mention all the time on IT job site blogs, and occassionally here, this is the AGE of incompetence, not because competence isn’t needed, but because it is not recognized, nor rewarded. We want SCOTUS judges with no records. We want outsiders for Washington. Well, we got one. I don’t know how to locate the problem, but it’s not just Dr. Patel and Dr. Obambus, it’s rampant all around. BP’s competence in the oil slick is no better than Obama’s. As I just noted, with ABC hiring Christiane Amanpour for their This Week show, no competent journalist will be *doing* a Sunday morning show.
“Roles not goals” is how I heard Gen-X working habits described, as opposed to Boomers or Greatest Generation “management by objectives”. If you’re in the chair, you have fulfilled all possible requirements thereof.
Where does one find the handles to address this?
No executive or command experience -he is incapable of making a decision in a timely fashion and the ones that he does make are through the lens of ideology.
Always the ideology, it is his true religion.
In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny:
“What’s up Doc?”
Sounds like a funny movie, too.
Could Obama be removed from office for practicing without a clue?
A number of folks have brought up the possibility that BO is malevolent as well as incompetent. In the 1980s there was a medical parallel in Michael Swango, a doctor who poisoned patients (and colleagues) as well as having a reputation for laziness and questionable competence. “Even [in his student years at Southern Illinois University Medical School], he had a noticeable fascination with dying patients. He was also known as lazy, and was nearly expelled for faking checkups during his obstetrics and gynecology rotation. Eventually, the school let him graduate on the condition that he repeat the course work.”
Like Patel, Swango usually managed to stay one jump ahead of the law and even forged documents in order to return to medical practice after serving time in jail for attempting to poison co-workers at an ambulance service in Quincy, Illinois. “In 1989, Swango found work as a laboratory technician for ATICoal in Newport News, Virginia, now Vanguard Energy, a division of CITA Logistics. During his time there, several employees sought medical attention with complaints of persistent and increasing stomach pains. He was employed until 1991, when he resigned his position to seek out a new position as a doctor. The FBI questioned employees on several occasions several months after his resignation.
After his release in 1991, Swango forged several legal documents that he used to reestablish himself as a physician and respected member of society.”
After further legal problems in the United States resulting from his use of a fake identity (Daniel M. Kirk) and resume, among other things, Swango (like Patel) went abroad. First to Zimbabwe, where his patients again began dying from poisoning. “He was charged with poisonings, but he escaped from Zimbabwe before his trial date, and hid elsewhere in Africa and Europe. A year and a half later, in March 1997, he applied for a job at the Royal Hospital in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, using a false resumé.
In June 1997, he embarked upon a double flight from Africa to Saudi Arabia. He had a layover between flights at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Illinois, and it was there that he was arrested by United States federal authorities.” Swango is presently serving a life sentence at ADX Florence in Colorado.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Swango
I suppose having a generation or two of kids who are brought up in schools where everybody wins, and we should never judge anybody, that is, we always judge everybody – equally … can lead to the situation where we don’t question Drs. Patel & Obambus.
At a certain point, the Democrats in the government will mutiny, and it will likely occur in the Fall of 2010, around election time. The leaders in the Party will be the ones to throw Obama over the side, just like the command group on the USS Caine were the ones to overthrow Capt Queeg.
I couldn’t care a whit whether Obama remains President, what worries me is how this episode damages the Republic; the confidence and trust of the citizens is what keeps this USA going, and that confidence is waning. We already mistrust and despise the workings of our government, yet the only remaining institution that has near-universal respect of the citizens is the Military. At some point, a military man with sterling reputation and high ambition will come along to beguile us away from the messy business of democracy and lead us to a government that is more ordered.
America agonistes. Everyone in the carnival of insanity that installed the monster must be eviscerated and shamed so they never raise their heads again. I’m fearful, however, that having exhibited such astronomical heights of insanity, corruption, and stupidity in their choice to look the other way, conceal, or deny, that those responsible for Obama’s installment are akin to sociopaths, incapable of comprehending the obscenity of their actions, and their crimes against our civilization. They have maimed America – perhaps irretrievably. Their hatred of Bush, their hatred of America, in fact, is what created this Frankenstein.
The press failure to vet Obama as the would any other candidate can only be attributed to racism. They were afraid that if the looked and asked the usual questions that they might have discovered the flaws in his character, training, philosophy, and education that are now all too readily apparent. They wanted to see a man of color succeed and if that meant ignoring his flaws so be it. Now we have got a mess and we are stuck with him for another 2.5 years. Thanks a lot Ms Dowd et al.
Excellent and devastating piece. Joe Hill has it right as well. No good liberal Baby Boomer reporter wanted to dig too deep into Obama’s past; to ask too many questions that probed too hard might derail the chances of the potential first black president. And as Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, Obama, with his exotic background, sleek visage, smooth delivery, and sophisticated education was the one they wanted–they couldn’t have supported “Minister” Farrakhan or Jackson or Sharpton. Per Biden, he was “clean and articulate.” But as many are finding out, such things don’t qualify someone for anything substantive.
The MSM is the unindicted co-incompetent, co-dependent of this ‘Greek’ tragedy.
A Gonnabee elevated to the top slot normally destroys the organization.
Other common traits of the Gonnabee is an office full of props and plaques. ( One Gonnabee packed his office ‘library’ with his college algebra primer and associated ‘smart guy’ texts.)
The Emperor’s favorite prop is Air Force One. Its imperial style and military protocol is a tonic for his ego.
Actually solving anything is beyond him. He’s here to reign.
Fantasies about being tough, “some ass to kick” are typical of the Gonnabee.
The Emperor is destined to take Buchanan’s rank away from him. He’s already kicked anti-Semitic Carter out of the line.
As for the safety of the Republic — we are blessed that he is as limited in skill as he is.
——
BTW, it is increasingly apparent that BP has no good options and is basically waiting for Godot.
The closest parallel is the Kern County blowout in 1901. That ran 200,000 bbls a day for about nine months.
The BOP is almost certainly obstructed by casing steel thrown up from the depth.
——
For the record: soaps and surfactants are the wrong way to go to save the environment. Instead fungal spores are the antidote to hydrocarbons. Various funguses run riot in crude oil — and once doped in place grow exponentially.
Likewise, there are a host of microbes in the ocean only too happy to metabolize hydrocarbons — which are mighty close to the chemistry of dead fish.
——-
BP should be going for a negative pressure suction hood and make sure that the lifting pipe is heated/insulated.
Gas separation is best performed at depth so that the methane can travel in a separate pipe. The methane would be used to provide power and heat via turbo-generators.
This ‘milker’ would pay off quickly and could be constructed from second hand ships and equipment. Build the separation plant from a tanker and sink it down to the problem via submarine ballast/scrap iron. The Separator would also separate out the sea water. Power would come down by high voltage submarine cable.
Separation by specific gravity might be accelerated with centrifuges.
Just one notion shot over the transom….
An Oldie but goodie
from April 26. 2009
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/04/26/left-to-ourselves/
***
Sigintel @4 noted that Obama is “incapable of leading.”
As one who teaches courses in leadership and management for a living, I have very definite ideas about what is and is not effective leadership. In my estimation Obama fell far short of the mark long before he took office. To my eyes his lack of executive acumen was glaringly obvious and I worry that the depths of his ineptitude have not yet been fathomed.
One thing that concerned me about candidate Obama was his complete lack of high level executive or leadership experience prior to declaring his candidacy. Last fall I noted in conversation with a colleague that whereas the top Republican candidates all had been governors, mayors, private sector executives and/or held military command roles, the Democrats’ top three were all lawyers.
Recently I dug into this trend a little more deeply. Using Wikipedia I looked over the bios of all 43 presidents prior to Obama. Every single one of them has had at least one of three types of executive experience prior to becoming the Commander in Chief:
* they served in the defense of the country, in the military, at ranks from a 1st lieutenant to Supreme Allied Commander, and/or
* they were Governors of US states or territories and/or
* they served as Vice-President or as secretary of one of the major departments of the government, e.g. State, War/Defense, Commerce
By my reading of the bios on wikipedia, among our 44 presidents BHO is the only one lacking these three types of leadership or executive experience. While none of the three is guaranty of being a good president, I am not encouraged about the prospects of anyone so wholly lacking in them.
April 26, 2009 – 10:13 pm Link to this Comment
***
When management hires a person without the aptitude or experience for the job, the consequences are at least partly management’s fault. The resulting problems tend to demoralize everybody, including the person who sees himself fail and loses confidence as a consequence. The reason experience is important is that it allows a person to test himself against gradually increasing resistance so he’s ready for the big test.
Poor President Obama — and I think he deserves at least some sympathy — should have done a stint as governor or as the mayor of a big city, or maybe as the head of substantial corporation before becoming Chief Executive. The political process should have insisted on it. The fact that it didn’t is part of the problem. Sending President Obama into the Oval Office was like sending someone who had never played football at the professional level before into the Superbowl.
The generic management skills: planning, budgeting, control; turning an idea into an actionable plan; the discipline of holding focused meetings; the ability to work through agencies — are common to some extent throughout the private and public sector. He never had any sustained experience at this. Perhaps using the campaign to “prove” he had the skills wasn’t an adequate proxy. The first indication he would be in trouble was when he started hiring all kinds of Czars. That was going to screw up his lines of authority something fierce. It would make everyone and hence no one responsible for anything. That’s probably the reason the government responds so slowly. Nobody knows who takes the incoming ball.
The second danger sign was when he announced this huge, complicated set of initiatives. He was going to rearchitecture foreign policy, remake domestic policy and do much else besides. This kind of advance on a broad front can easily wind up dissipating resources, creating strategic drift and worst of all, confusing the hell out of everybody. Bureaucracies are like bands with a fixed repertoire. They can play 31 different tunes pretty well. But they don’t play very much else and getting them to do something new is like pulling teeth. The Post Office likes to deliver letters. If Martians arrived tomorrow the Post Office would try to deliver letters to the Martians. So when you announce a whole new program you are playing to a bureaucracy’s weaknesses. He should have realized it takes a lot of effort to make a little improvement. But it only takes a little effort to start a goat rope.
Lastly, he let the money get away from him by letting Pelosi run with health care. He wound up having to manage the consequences of that. The same kind of problem bedevils his foreign policy. He’s relying on contingent events — what other world leaders do — to make his plan happen. There are too many variables wild to control the process.
Now if had made these mistakes earlier in his career, he might have known better going into the White House. Nothing teaches a person so well as failure. But now he’s failing center stage, learning on the job, running behind the curve and that will compound his mistakes. A person behind is in a much less forgiving environment than a person who’s ahead. A chess player in this kind of mess would try to simplify. Exchange the knights and the bishops if you lead in rooks. But he’s doubling down. He’s asking BP for more money and for $50 B more stimulus money. Abroad things are just hanging together. Ten plates and a knife are spinning in the air. Wait for it. Maybe he’ll pull through but it will require a lot of luck.
Poor man. And who’s he got to advise him? Rahm Emmanuel. Who’s protecting the country? Janet Napolitano. It’s sad when you think about it. Maybe the political process has gotten too focused on trivia and bears at least some of the blame.
Our host writes:
“Barack Obama’s incompetence, if indeed he is incompetent, results directly from a flawed political and media process that allowed such a candidate to go forward. It’s a failure of quality control.”
Naming his placement into the presidency as being the result of quality control failure is true, but one is then required to ask how and why, with a press in place, the filter and tripwires failed.
I don’t know if they have affirmative action or some equivalent in Ozland, Wretchard, but we do here. And to one extent or another, this is affirmative action writ huge. It is the nurturist fantasy taken to a large and dangerous extreme. The fantasy is that we can take literally anybody, send them to all the “right” schools, make sure they are connected to other Ivy-leagers, give them an accent and speaking cadence that signifies to the NPR-listening crowd that he’s really, really smart – and he can be successful at literally any job.
The idea that native skills and extensive difficult training in real-world stuff are the true basis for competence, productivity, and real-world problem solving capability is anathema to this crowd. They’ll do anything to try and prevent that notion from prevailing.
The nurturist left are running a Pygmalion experiment of epic proportions, and will resist the conclusion that they have failed with every ounce of their being.
The irony of course is that there are thousands of minority individuals who could do the job of president wirh competence and excellence but their rise to the office wouldn’t satisfy the type who support Obama because they will have risen by virtue of hard work in the private sector, or by rise in leadership in the military, and so would not fit the Eliza Doolittle narrative that is so desired in order to “prove” that in the end their cherished idology was correct and they “won” the late night “ull session they had at Princeton or Yale or Harvard, all those decades ago.
That’s bull session.
Meanwhile, the worst ethnic violence since Uganda continues in a central Asian nation that is a supply base for our efforts in Afghanistan. No one seems to know why, nor to care, nor to plan to do anything but deplore the violence. Obama’s administration has trouble focusing on one problem at a time. Don’t bother him with multiple crises.
Compared to Kyrgyzstan, Vietnam was easy to spell and find in the atlas. Maybe we’ll offer them a package of foreign aid that includes our surplus vowels.
# 12 Starling:
Two years ago I performed an exercise similar to yours, and got similar results. I compared Obama’s experience with other Presidents who had been US Senator. I constructed the following metric, and applied it to Obama and Presidents who had been elected Senator. Obama’s score: No Vice Presidential experience, no US Cabinet experience, no House of Representatives experience, no Governor experience, no military experience. There was only one President who had been US Senator who had the same performance on this metric: Warren Harding. Not an example of a highly regarded President.
Harding got a lot of criticism for his performance in Teapot Dome, in dealing with oil leases. Thus far Obama has not done well in his experience with oil. Harding ran for Governor, but wasn’t elected. I have not found any indication that he had served in the military. He did own and run a newspaper, which counts for something.
Obama’s only executive experience was in doling out~$100 million- matching funds indcluded- of research money as head of the Annenberg Challenge. Conclusion: schools blessed with Annenberg research funding performed no better than schools who had not been so funded. The research money Obama doled out did not get results. It only put money into the pockets of the researchers.
PA Cat: Swango’s terrifying career had one positive effect: it forced hospitals to tighten up their physician credentialing process. At the hospital I work at, physicians are vetted very throughly before they come on staff and any “red flags” are reviewed. When I’ve looked at old physician files from the 1980′s, it’s astounding to me how little documentation was required. No surprise to me at all how Swango got on staff as easily as he did
#13: “Abroad things are just hanging together. Ten plates and a knife are spinning in the air. Wait for it.”
Wretchard, you are an amazingly gifted writer. Thanks, thanks, thanks.
We have no kindergarten records, Punahou school records, Occidental College records, Columbia University records, Columbia thesis, Harvard Law School records, Harvard Law Review articles, scholarly articles from the University of Chicago, passport, medical records, his files from his years as an Illinois state senator, his Illinois State Bar Association records… and etc.
I’ve seen no evidence of a credible work ethic from Obama while in office.
We have a narcissistic dilettante for POTUS who does not really care much for this country as it is.
Not good.
Perhaps not Patel, but Frank Abagnale.
Airline pilot, surgeon, lawyer,… President.
One need only be great at APPEARING to be cool, detached, in control…and be able to emit an air of superiority….the confidence game.
Of course, it helps if you have a shill. And what bigger, more powerful shill can there be, if not the legacy media?
And…if the payoff is our entire national treasure, absolute power, destruction of political opposition, ….this is a long con worth playing.
Patel killed several dozen people…the Grifters of the Gateway have helped to potentially kill the most powerful nation on earth. Or certainly leave it bleeding and permanently scarred.
The Gateway Grifters want their booty. Leftist pap to feed to their mindless and chirping brood. If Barack Abagnale doesn’t cut them in…can the shill really turn on him? No, not really. Not while the con is still in play…and we…it’s permanent marks still have a few paltry coins jingling in our pockets.
It’s an indictment of the gatekeepers and of the media in particular. They didn’t look the gift horse in the mouth and now it turns out he’s wearing dentures. It wasn’t President Obama’s fault that he aspired to a job he had no preparation for …
You’re right about the first part – the gatekeepers were asleep at the wheel, suffering too much BDS, or on drugs. As for it not being his fault – it was obvious to anybody (even himself, unless suffering from an overinflated ego) that he had insufficient preparation for the job. This opens him to the accusations I have seen (even here) that he is an active agent of change for the worse, not a champion of what made the USA great. I only hope it is true (what I’ve read) that the USA is not obstructing the Saudis in not obstructing the Israelis in their next big op. If not, USA foreign policy is looking very sick.
Wretchard:
And just as the proof Dr. Patel knew medicine was because he was doctor, the President was presumed a capable executive because he ran a campaign. The proof was entirely circular, but through some peculiar myopia no real questions were asked. To demand the sealed transcripts, to ask about the absence of articles for the Harvard Law review, to raise the non-existent legislative record was deemed churlish. UnAmerican. Bigoted.
……….
And, of course, there is no birth certificate.
You could count the NY Times as a birther when it came to John McCain
A Hint of New Life to a McCain Birth Issue
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: July 11, 2008
In the most detailed examination yet of Senator John McCain’s eligibility to be president, a law professor at the University of Arizona has concluded that neither Mr. McCain’s birth in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone nor the fact that his parents were American citizens is enough to satisfy the constitutional requirement that the president must be a “natural-born citizen.”
Joe Hill,
press failure to vet Obama … can only be attributed to racism
This is correct. There is I believe a reason the MSM lead by the New York Times invested so heavily in convincing the general public to buy into the Obama narrative. It was to externalize the consequences of their own prejudice.
The greatest failure of the liberal media was the success of George Bush in responding to 9-11 and then leading the nation into Iraq. That threatened to destabilize the entire corrupt international aristocracy that was funded through Oil For Food and staffed governments, media and NGOs. Bush threatened to rip the lid off of all of it and at that critical time the media proved unable to stop him. What crippled them? My theory is that it was a self inflicted wound based on their own prejudiced expectations.
In March and April 2003 the United States crushed Saddam’s forces so rapidly that vast quantities of intelligence data including Oil For Food files were captured. On May 1st President Bush delivered his “Mission Accomplished” speech. The power of the media to control him was at a low ebb. A few fringe elements responded with snark and a story was manufactured about the looting of a museum, as if that cost would have justified leaving Saddam in power, but other than attempting to ignore the story of what Bush had achieved and who his enemies were the media allies of his enemies proved curiously passive in their response. It took years to create in the public mind the perception that the victory was really a defeat that could support the installation of the extreme left into positions of power. What explains the weakness of the New York Times during the crucial months of April and May of 2003?
May 11 was when the Times published its extraordinary confession in the Jayson Blair fraud and plagiarism scandal. Blair was the archetype of the over-promoted affirmative action candidate placed in a position of influence for which he was not qualified. For weeks the capacity of the Times to impose its ideological vision on the world was crippled.
By fostering the candidacy of Barack Obama, a man arguably less formally qualified for his position than Blair or Patel were, the Editors of the Times have made the entire nation complicit in the consequences of their racism. This is the soft bigotry of high expectations. It is common for Confidence Scheme criminals to make their victims perform some gesture that makes them arguably complicit in some small way. That is why totalitarians insist on making everyone vote even where the vote is meaningless. Now they can say, “How can you criticize us when you voted for him too?”
re: My post # 20
Has Obama become bored with being president?
January 29, 2010
This is about the time Barack Obama becomes bored with his job.
He’s in his second year as president, and he’s discovered that even with all the powers of office, he can’t do everything he wants to do, like remake America. Doing stuff is hard. In the past, prosaic work has held little appeal for Obama, and it’s prompted him to think about moving on.
Begin with his first serious job, as a community organizer in Chicago. Obama got a little done, but quickly became frustrated with small achievements. “He didn’t see organizing making any significant changes in things,” Jerry Kellman, the organizer who hired him, told me in 2008…
As I have been saying all along, Biden would make a FINE POTUS. I am not real keen on his politics but there is no way he is un-American. Plus he is one of the cleanest politicians in D.C.
With Biden we would know that his decisions were made because he thought the were what was best for America, not because he wanted revenge for being black or having no father.
This also why the bogus Birth Certificate is such an issue. IIRC, it’s 121 days until the election. Once Congress is Republican, then they can demand access to his real Birty Certificate. If it’s there, fine, he can be impeached for one of his bribe attempts. If it’s not there, then he can be impeached for being unqualified to hold the office of POTUS. With no BC, it’s very easy to undo ALL the legislation he signed. Including 2 of the worst Supreme Court picks ever.
Biden takes over and we get on down the road.
@LotM (24): did you mean to say “This is the soft bigotry of LOW expectations” ?
One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out or least define a hypothesis upon is this: where does BS come from? Where, for example, do things like the Y2K Frenzy, Global Warming, and other imbecilities originate? No matter what one thinks of Barack Obama there are just some things he can’t be guilty of. It’s almost like the problem of evil, or a close cousin. But it seems to me that in any case this poor man isn’t the cause but some kind of effect. Which of the following is true? I certainly don’t know.
Hypothesis number one. If the voters replace President Obama in the next election America will be on the road to recovery.
Hypotehsis number two. If the cabal which mints these bad memes is rooted out then America and the world will be on the road to recovery.
Hypothesis number three. Things were always this messed up. But because of the Internet, we’re only now noticing.
Hypothesis number four. Things were always this messed up and nothing we can do can improve it.
In this context incompetence is either an historical outlier or the norm. The norm brings us to three and four. The outlier answer brings us to one and two. But I know I’m missing something without quite knowing what it is. Which brings me to hypothesis number five: we’re in discontinuity where previously competent behavior has now become dysfunctional. In other words there was a time when Maureen Dowd would have been honestly accounted a good journalist. But not now, for reasons that are hard to explain. Things are falling apart and we can’t know what works yet without extensive trial and error. History is in one of these forges of God where something different is coming into existence. That means President Obama has no real significance except to mark this strange period. But he neither caused it nor can lead us out of it.
Obama has never had his abilities tested until now. Being a community organizer has no standards, and no way to measure success. Poverty cannot be fixed by giving money and benefits to poor people without condition. What Obama and others do is present a large problem and attack the problem with solutions that have not worked since they started with LBJ’s Great Society. In short Obama has now been tested and found incompetent.
Wretchard writes:
Poor President Obama — and I think he deserves at least some sympathy — should have done a stint as governor or as the mayor of a big city, or maybe as the head of substantial corporation before becoming Chief Executive.
It wasn’t President Obama’s fault that he aspired to a job he had no preparation for: a man’s entitled to try for as much as he can get …
Now if had made these mistakes earlier in his career, he might have known better going into the White House.
Wretchard,
As the quotes above show, you are just too nice a person. Obama deserves no sympathy, his victims and future victims do and will. His narcissism will end up killing lots of people, somewhere. Your tone suggests that he somehow merited the Presidency, but just wasn’t ready yet. No person with his personality disorder should be allowed anywhere near power, but they always want it.
Obamas approach to management – he would rather talk about kicking someones ass than getting off his ass and doing something.
starling,
did you mean to say “This is the soft bigotry of LOW expectations” ?
The play substituting High for Low was deliberate. Low expectations explains shoving a weak candidate into a class and then lowering test standards. If you don’t care if they really learn and assume that they can’t learn but still want some benefit from having them in the room, money or social approval usually, then you admit the weak candidate with low expectations. If you believe that race is in itself a qualification, the “wise Latina” or “authentic” urban youth forged in the crucible of adversity, that is with the help of government and political activist indoctrination equivalent to skill building experience at a series of jobs and inculcation of a moral code that was best achieved in the traditional family centered society then you have possibly unwarranted high expectations about a candidate like Obama. You expect the narrative to produce results.
In the Founders Constitution who was responsible for ensuring that the tendency of mob enthusiasm and aristocratic intrigue would not combine to produce unqualified Presidents? That was to be the role of the Electoral College. The EC was intended as a geographically dispersed brake by which the leading men of each State could soberly perform the vetting process. Unfortunately they rapidly became reduced to a rubber stamp that ratifies the popular vote.
Perhaps it would help to restore the original intent of the system if the College was not only placed on a firmer basis with long term appointments, as I have previously suggested, but was used to explicitly screen candidates. Then the top two of whom would be subsequently submitted to the public for a vote.
I see in the above comments a common thread of “How could the electorate be so stupid as to fall for this Leftist/Marxist mess?”
We (as conservatives, and in some cases, downright rabid ranting rightists) may disagree with the majority that voted for the mess we have, but they had what they thought were good reasons.
The Republicans/conservatives mucked up their opportunities to straighten out the incipient financial messes on the horizon when they had the reins of government. A lot of my conservative friends were really pi**ed off at what they perceived as fiscal malfeasance.
Bush and his advisers, much as I liked a lot of what they did, made no effort to explain the situation we (as a country) were in to those who were not foreign policy junkies. All a lot of the electorate saw was that the America that they loved and respected had suddenly started blowing up places and killing people with no prior attack or provocation (remember that there are a lot of people that do not follow world events too closely in America because they are too busy making a living and raising a family).
As Cannoneer would say (or perhaps not), Bush made no effort to prepare the psychological battle space here at home at all. In my opinion, Bush was/is a good man but a poor communicator.
I could go on, but you probably get my drift and will either agree or not. But I will end with this thought – We need to win the hearts and minds of ALL Americans to clean up this mess and calling them names and accusing them of stupidity and evil ain’t the way to do it (This is an area I have to work real hard at myself and I’m improving in some small ways).
programmer
Ridgerunner:
Absolutely right. Wretchard, you are being too nice. Obama even admitted in his own autobiography that he gives white people, particularly white liberals, just enough of the ” good negro” image to hook ‘em into thinking he competent and cool .
Obama knows he is a con man. We are his marks. He has practiced some version of this con all his adult life. And Doug is right; he is getting bored with this job and needs a new con job, as all sociopathic con men do. ya know the thrill is kinda gone now. This responsibility thing is a real drag.
The question is did he really manage his campaign? David Axelrod ran a very similar campaign with Deval Patrick with many of the same themes. And Buraq got plenty of help from the gatekeepers in the media and Bernacke, Paulsen, Soros and a whole cast of despicable players.
Josh, great couple of posts.
Wretchard
I have thought about your hypothesis as well. For number 5, I think it is the amount of alternatives we have now that allows us to see the incompetence or competence of people/ideas/etc.. Even 20 years ago, we just didn’t have the media options we have now, so we didn’t really know how bad/good things were…
I also think your hypothesis number 3 is accurate. History shows things are always screwed up and sometimes through sheer luck America does the right thing.
Don’t forget, the Messiah is just an empty suit that 1) people projected their ideas upon and 2) was/is a useful “idiot” for the progressive agenda. Even Hillary wouldn’t have been this incompetent and she wouldn’t have bowed to the progressives as much. She wouldn’t have let Pelosi and Reid run wild.
All the progressives saw a chance to back someone that they could lead around by the nose. That is what we now have.
God help us and November can’t come soon enough.
We can blame the mainstream pop-culture media for not vetting Obama. Their shilling was truly sickening. But this is nothing new. This time it was more blatant and over-the-top than probably any time in the past, but are we really that surprised? This is what they do. It’s like getting outraged about what cockroaches do.
We are forgetting to blame someone else: us. As in a drug war, who should be blamed? The producers or the consumers? The reason the mainstream media is nothing but pop-culture drivel is because that’s what we demand. How many of us watch “So You Think You Can Dance”, but not “The News Hour”? How many of us consider CNN to be actual legitimate “news”? How many of us get virtually all our news from TV, even if we pretend it’s from sources more serious than John Stewart’s “The Daily Show”? How many of us are so enamoured by celebrity and style that we care about nothing else?
People get the government they deserve. Like it or not, we deserve Obama. We are trashy, shallow, gossipy, and fawning over any form of celebrity. We probably spend more money on our unlimited-talk-and-text-messaging plan every month that we put away for our kids’ educations. We incarcerate our infants in day-orphanages, shuttle them around to orchestrated sports extravaganzas, and plop them in front of the TV the rest of the time. For intellectual stimulation, they text-message endless nonsense to their compatriots, or fantacize they are heroes in a video game. Are they going to make informed social and citizenship decisions in twenty years? We are enamoured over gaudy, flashy, hip little cheap plastic gew gaws, but don’t care if they actually do anything useful over the long term. We elected such a trinket, and are now stunned that Wal Mart won’t take it back after it proved to be a useless piece of junk.
We voted for him because the pop culture media told us to. Didn’t your mother say to you, regarding peer pressure when you were a kid, “Well, if all the other kids jumped off a bridge, should you, too?” Well, we jumped, along with all the other kids. Whose fault is it that we are now getting splattered on the rocks below?
We are a nation of addicted zombies, and pop/celebrity culture is our drug. We have met the nitwits, America, and they are us. We can theorize and agonize and preach and fret, but are we going to compete with the 200 cable channels of 24-hour celebrity gossip and snarky big-mouths? It’s like trying to convert a crack whore to green tea. Rotsa ruck. We’re doomed.
“At some point, a military man with sterling reputation and high ambition will come along to beguile us away from the messy business of democracy and lead us to a government that is more ordered.”
SUBSCRIBE
better that than the slightly more articulate version of Alvin Greene who’s running things now.
There is one entity not explicitly mentioned, the Party, the Democratic Party.
A Party’s main responsibility is to win elections with candidates who espouse a certain view of what government should be doing. Implicit in this is that the Party pledges that they have found the person they are putting up for election to be in accord with the Party’s views, and that that person is found by the Party to be qualified to do the job of the office for which they are nominated.
Obama should serve as undeniable evidence that the Democratic Party cannot be trusted in their judgment as to the qualifications of any of their candidates. Whatever they are using as a model for selection criteria, it is faulty.
wretchard & all – but what is *Pelosi’s* excuse?
and the rest of the dems who vote for this stuff? and the MSM that spews propaganda for it?
That means President Obama has no real significance except to mark this strange period. But he neither caused it nor can lead us out of it.
He’s the bowsprite of the S.S. Incompetence.
–
Back to my corporate anthropology and wretchard @ 28, “management” today is done bottom-up: middle-management’s style is all brown-nosing the guy/gal above them. No managers look down at what is actually happening in their domains. Again, BP and Obama seem to share this equally. This is an immense change, a virtual reversal, of predominant style over one generation (not the brownnosing was ever rare, but for it to be overwhelmingly predominant is news).
Now, in corporateland, the guy at the top is often a figurehead (see above), a ceremonial figure. Maybe Obama is more corporate (modern variety) than many give him credit for. Isn’t this what people accuse *Republicans* of – giving the nomination to the guy whose turn it is (Bob Dole)?
Don’t hate Obama because he’s beautiful.
–
Make excuses for Obama as one might, his incompetence will hurt us. Just as those kids who are passed through the grades without learning have an “excuse” in that “it’s the system”, but that doesn’t do them a bit of good out in the real world, and at some point, yes, the real world rules.
“Where, for example, do things like the Y2K Frenzy, Global Warming, and other imbecilities originate? ”
Experts. The problem with experts is that their expertise in a narrow field tends to give them tunnel vision. So events outside that field which impact them have to be major to attract their notice.
Take the Y2K. Those ‘experts’ were part of the new breed that considered main frames running off Fortran and COBOL useless and inconsequential. They completely overlooked the fact that most serious computing in the year 2000 was being done on mainframes. A Business that had just invested 15 million in a 4341 and the support for it wasn’t interested in blowing another 25 million for a distributed network.
Most of the networks being put together at the end of the 20th century used some version of Microsucks software. One of the key sales points of those networks was the ‘canned’ software, which was supposed to eliminate the care and feeding of the data processing depatrment. That was always a major problem for the MBA’s, so they like it a lot.
So if the world had been ran on Microsucks based systems, the the Y2K bug would have been a real problem, since ALL date based calculations were based on the world starting on Jan, 01, 1980 and ending on Dec, 31, 1999.
Main frame systems don’t have that problem. There is an almost infinite number of ways to calculate dates. One of the things ones does to pass one’s Fortran course is create an algorithm that calculates the difference between dates, then use it to calculate interest, elapsed time, etc.
I did mine on calculating inventory requirement for stocking sanitary napkins on a just in time basis for an Arab Shiek’s Harem of 40 wives. My professor liked it.
Global Warming is a fact. As is global cooling. Put together, they are climate change. No arguments about that. The argument is over what causes these observed phenomenon. Examination of objective data would indicate a solar condition creates climate change.
Unfortunately, politics had entered the ring and objective data has been tossed out. There are enormous sums of money to be transferred by those politics. So those that wish to ‘assist’ in the decision where that money is transferred from and to present data in favor of their decision. How real that data is doesn’t matter.
Remember Bryce’s definition of Politics;
“Politics is a compound Latin word, Poly means ‘many’ and tics are small blood sucking insects”.
Josh, good point with the corporate analogy, that does resonate, and it reminds me of the Enron case. First point – this is NOT intended to exonerate Ken Lay in any way, I view a negligent man who allows criminal activity to take place under his watch to be just as guilty as the men who actually planned and committed the crimes.
But having said that, I think the testimony during the Enron trials laid out a good case that Ken Lay was indeed nothing but a jovial, emptyheaded salesman who others had found so useful that they backed his rise to the top for their own reasons. (Jeff Skilling and Andy Fastow, the CFO, and their associates being the prime movers here) But having read through some of that material, I got the distinct impression that not only was Ken Lay not aware of the financial machinations that were going on, I suspect that he *never* understood how that company was making money. He just took whatever his lieutenants told him at face value, and most of all he never questioned them when they told him the company had so much money because HE was such a great Leader! He basked in all the adulation and believed all of it without question.
And then he spent all of his time jetting around to golf course and conferences. He never even figured out the Skilling and Fastow worked double hard to make sure that he only made it into the main office a few days a year. Why should he bother? They had things under control!!! And to the day he died I don’t think he ever truly understood what had happened. In his own mind, he honestly did believe he was innocent. He never “got” it.
For Lay, substitute Obama. For Skilling, Axelrod. And for Fastow, Emmanuel. The words have changed, but the Song remains the Same.
The other night on Fox News Ron Williams responded to a discussion of the administration’s fumble of the Gulf Oil leak by saying:
“It’s true that these people have incredible vision of where the country should go and what programs are required but we need to realize that they are not the people you want in place when that phone call comes at 3AM.”
Okay, so all calls to the White House after 11PM should be routed to a certain ranch house outside of Crawford, Texas?
It was very common in the Air Force to run into an officer that has washed out of pilot training and who would say “I could take that airplane off just great and fly it like a real SOB but I just could not learn to land it.”
Unfortunately, the need for piloting skill of that type is pretty much limited to the Japanese Empire 65 years ago and certain Islamic groups.
At best, Obama is the Pilot Who Can’t Land. At worst he is Mohammed Atta.
I’ll have to agree with Joe Hill’s argument that reverse racism won Obama his office. In fact, I think the same dynamic has determined his life from the very first. That the media was totally complicit will, as I have said for 18 months now, be an interesting case study for schools of journalism, if there any such institutions in the future.
Just pondering how a change could come about that would move Obama off center stage, I’m thinking Hillary might be the one to do it. If, after the November elections, we see her resign her job at State and begin to talk about “saving the party,” we will know she is laying the groundwork for a primary challenge to Obama. And, like Nixon going to China, a woman could probably mount a campaign against our first African-American president without charges of racism. So watch Hillary.
F
#36 Mick and #39 Josh—
I agree. Unfortunately many people have acquired the bad trait of confusing the image for the substance. Given a choice they would rather have a shiny Porshe with a blown engine than an old, ugly, but reliable Toyota to take them to and from work.
Its all about the image and the social connections. To many people once that’s established competence is assumed even when there’s none. And the truly bad thing is that such people seem to be deeply attracted to each other and such behavior becomes self-reinforcing amongst the group, and essentially the bad end up driving out the good. But this dynamic is self-limiting. Once the level of competent people diminishes to a certain point the system crashes, whether it be in a corporate or political context. A crisis will appear, and the hollow people in charge won’t have a clue as to how to handle it.
I think we are there.
wws @ 41: Enron … well, the suspicion there, mummified into law as Sarbannes-Oxley, is that Ken Lay didn’t want to know what went on, though according to his office he “should” have – should have wanted to know, and should have known. Thirty years ago, even a figurehead would be held to those standards. Today, I guess not, SOX or not. I suppose I salute the motivations behind SOX, though in real life, I don’t see it having much or any effects. Do any of y’all?
Obama seems happy to *know*, his problems seem elsewhere. He seems to have exactly no motivation to *do*. As I suggest, modern management doesn’t do, doing. Stuff is just supposed to happen, y’know, worker bees will work. Very much in Obama’s training as a community organizer. Just mau-mau the problem, make political speeches (and threaten to kick ass by causing riots in the streets), and go home to a nice dinner next door to Bill Ayers.
Mick @36 writes: We are a nation of addicted zombies, and pop/celebrity culture is our drug.
I think you have identified a major part of the problem. And it may be insoluble because most human beings are probably hardwired to be fascinated by gossip. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip for evolutionary psychology’s hypothesized adaptive functions of gossip in primeval times.
Competent for what, exactly? To play God and re-model society according some ideological utopy? Nobody is competent for this. Even Joe Stalin and Chairmen Mao failed miserably, and they were 3 heads above Obama in any case. Just choosing such goals is already a hallmark of incompetence.
I worked for a lawyer prior to Obama’s election. Of course he was a Democrat as are most lawyers. And his favorite TV show was American Idol.
I heard him say the following regarding Obama to someone on the telephone: “He LOOKS so presidential.”
Nothing else was required.
Obama as an affirmative action president, empty suit, narcissistic sociopath, mirror image of Bush Derangement Syndrome, poster child for the Peter Principal, beneficiary of American decline — all of these things are aspects of the truth.
But it is also the case that ideas have consequences. It is not a coincidence that this is our first president educated in the post-modern landscape of 1980s American higher education. Everyone here knows what the offending ideas are and that they have a legacy of seduction and failure that go back to the Garden of Eden. They have begun to lay waste to Europe and are (once again) laboring to snuff out the Shining City on a Hill, having eroded our self-confidence and turned the good to bad so as to precipitate the suicide attempt that is Oh,Bummer.
Here, again, are most of these ideas as summarized in a blog entry by Eric Raymond at Armed and Dangerous in Feb of 2006 and posted here by Canoneer #4.
“In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again:
There is no truth, only competing agendas. All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism. There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor. The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable. Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it. The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.) For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors. When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions. As I previously observed, if you trace any of these back far enough, you’ll find a Stalinist intellectual at the bottom. (The last two items on the list, for example, came to us courtesy of Frantz Fanon. The fourth item is the Baran-Wallerstein “world system” thesis.) Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia.”
W @ 28.
I have the same feeling of unease. I often ask is this similar to Thomas Kuhn’s thought’s about the beginning of a paradigm shift? or chaos
theories going non-linear? It is clear to me that the stars are
realining.
This is not always bad, but it is always disruptive.
My best guess is that having left the community of common agreement
in the 19th and early 20th centuries the bifurcated society now
in place (at least in the west) is do for a tidal change, recreating
a common community.
Do I think Barack Obama is a con man? Yes. However, the real blame goes to the suckers whose fantasies he appeals to.
Barack Obama is a creation of white racism. He caters specifically to the variety of white racist who is both deeply hostile toward black people and deeply not wanting to be seen as hostile toward black people. Such racists want to be absolved of their own prejudice, so they will vote for Barack Obama as a “Get Out of Jail Free Card” against white guilt.
This is a key demographic in America’s electorate. Some white people (who self-describe themselves as “white”) crave a “reverse Willie Horton”. Just as “Willie Horton” ads were particularly effective among suburban and college town white voters who are both anxious about black people while wanting to be seen as not racist toward them, Barack Obama caters to precisely the same audience.
Even Barack Obama’s racist associations with Jeremiah Wright are used to absolve white people of their own past racist associations. Far from being an actual “post-racial” president, Barack Obama presents himself as a racial version of a medieval indulgence.
Even now, Barack Obama is not only a “safe” man who “looks nice”, but can be seen as an article of conspicuous consumption where self-indulgent donors can use their money and self-indulgent voters can use their votes to promote a seemingly messianic figure whose halo of exaltation will rub righteousness upon them by association.
The problem Barack Obama faces is that people expect perfection from their messiah. They expect him to deliver on their deep desires even when (and perhaps especially when) they contradict one another. He let his campaign staff depict him with a halo. That is dangerous! When a politician lets himself get depicted as a comic book superhero, he can be legitimately faulted for not being able to clean up a massive oil spill with a snap of his fingers. He’s supposed to be a messiah, after all!
Do I feel sorry for Barack Obama? Yes and no. On one level, he deserves no sympathy because he is reaping what he has sowed. On another, he may be far more naïve than he is usually given credit for. He reminds me of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It may just be that he simply doesn’t know any better than to act the way he has.
For example, there’s a phrase “bringing people together”. It sounds nice, but it is actually highly polarizing. When a politician says he is “bringing people together”, he is saying that he plans to take all of the credit for any political compromise. That wipes out any incentive for other politicians to risk their own political careers, given that Barack Obama plans to take 100% of the credit. This is especially true in the Middle East. Why should Middle Easterners take any risks to “make peace” when all of the credit gets taken by the President of the United States?
Barack Obama makes racist appeals. He must be called on that. However, if his opposition turns out to be just as racist as he is, he might actually win reelection.
Doug @25
In the article linked by Doug, Byron York wrote: “throughout his life, his reaction to frustration has been to look for a bigger job. What does he do now?”
If Obama is not psychologically stable enough to climb back from the limb he insisted on perching himself on, a Reichstag fire is real possibility.
Biden warned us that Obama whould face a major crisis early in his term that would “test the young President”. So far it(a real crisis) hasnt happened. The economic malaise, the Christmas and Times Square terrorist plots and the BP oil spill have shown how incompetent Obama is as a crisis manager….but they really havent been a crisis like Truman(Berlin), Kennedy(Cuba) or Bush II(9-11) faced. We really aint seen nothing yet. The rubber will meet the road when Israel, who Obama has willfully dissed and left dangling, strikes Iran/Syria/Lebannon and when the Straits of Hormuz are ablaze, oil goes to $150/barrel, gold to $3,000. Then Obama will really have a crisis on his hands. Surrounded by his flock of progressives, who are also clueless as to crisis management, except to try and exploit it for political purposes, the One will lock-up or crack-up and we will witness a “failed Presidency” in action. Since Obama relies only on rhetoric and political pressure tactics, the world will see the “paper tiger” US for what it has become, a failing republic with corrupt and criminally weak leadership
“Barack Obama’s incompetence results directly from a flawed political and media process that allowed such a candidate to go forward.”
Fixed it for you.
As you draw the parallel between a killer doctor, one that is perhaps homicidal, and an incompetent CiC, one that is perhaps malevolent, you make a strong point. We are the patient. We chose the doctor (CiC). And we may very well die or at best, AT BEST, be maimed or crippled. YIKES!
I disagree. I do not think he is anything but a reader for the puppet-masters. As him to speak extemporaneously and he falters, stutters and mis-speaks at a hgih rate of error. IOW, he can hardly string a sentence together.
50. michaelhoskins said “I often ask is this similar to Thomas Kuhn’s thought’s about the beginning of a paradigm shift? or chaos
theories going non-linear? It is clear to me that the stars are
realining.”
I’ve been thinking along the same lines, especially in regard to Kuhn’s theories about how and why scientific revolutions evolve. Maybe we are well down the path toward something huge, as you say, a tidal change. The 20th century has run its course, the era of simple ideologies may well be over. I too am uneasy about what will take its place, but I’m also hopeful.
How ironic. Instead of The One, they’re sending out The Two.
Well, I’ve commented before that with the left in charge, Irony has become a World Historical Force. So we get a jobs programs that increase unemployment, tax increases that don’t bring in more money, arms agreements that make us more vulnerable, Nuclear nonproliferation initiatives that will create dozens of new nuclear states, and serial apologize that ain’t accepted — and peace efforts that bring us to the brink of war. Oh, and an advanced energy policy that would produce a retreat.
But it has more to do with being a leftist than lacking leadership. In fact, better a leftist that lacks leadership than, you know, the other sort.
We all knew that President Obama never had the experience of being an effective boss — but now we see that he has never had an effective boss. If he had an effective boss, he would have a model — a place to start.
He decries the “cozy relationship” between regulators and the regulated. Gee, like that hasn’t been noticed for the past three hundred years. If you eliminated the “cozy relationships” he is busy creating, his administration would no longer have an economic program — which would be an improvement.
For Decades the Interior Department, the EPA and the Justice Department has attracted individuals that want to prevent the private economy from doing things. In the meantime, those who wanted to help business run more effectively have either fled or are dead. Those who have captured these agencies erected so many hurdles (requiring so many studies, meetings and memos)that nothing can get done on short notice. Yet they still need clients, so they end up granting wavers while disowning the results. It is a situation that calls for Presidential leadership, not a Presidential nap.
Well, at least everyone involved can say, “If it were up to us, there would be no drilling anywhere!” And that includes the Beyond Petroleum Corporation. So you see, it is all Sarah Palin’s fault.
“I too am uneasy about what will take its place, but I’m also hopeful.”
Hope? I lost all hope the day Obama was elected, but I do still have some curiousity about how things will play out.
33. programmer
“In my opinion, Bush was/is a good man but a poor communicator.”
I agree wholeheartedly, now we have the opposite.
Forgotten man:
IOW,
mene, mene, tekel, upharsin
Very, very wanting.
#33 Programmer
“Bush and his advisers, much as I liked a lot of what they did, made no effort to explain the situation we (as a country) were in to those who were not foreign policy junkies.”
The single greatest failure of his presidency. A close second was not aggressively pursuing remedies to the imminent housing bubble because he was afraid that Barney Frank and others would accuse him of racism.
To have the bully pulpit and not use it is almost criminal. May the next center/right president have the wisodm and charisma to do so effectively.
I am coming to wonder if elective office can become analogous to the “Great Machine” from Forbidden Planet.
It is as if the Presidential elections have become a means for voters to project their emotional fantasies onto the world stage. Perhaps voters desire neither leadership ability nor managerial skill nor any particular political platform. Instead, they want someone who exemplifies some “national” attribute, an idiosyncratic story line, or just looks cute.
It is as if elective office on a massive scale has become a means to aggregate all of the neuroses of the electorate and distill them into a political campaign. Perhaps the question is whether refined insanity is a bug or a feature of modern democracy.
With the analogy of obama as an incompetent, murderous physician and we the somewhat willing victim, I continually ask ‘what can we do now, before it’s too late to recover’? There comes a point in time, when we are not just at the brink but indeed just holding on by the last blade of grass. We’re facing global war with Islam, we’re facing global financial destruction, we’re facing destruction of our health care system and we have a ‘let them eat cake’ chief executive.
How do we recover from these catastrophes?
“Obama refuses to deal with the media world as it is. He’s holding out for the media world that he wants.”
Hmmm…Let me fix that…
“The left refuses to deal with America as it is. They’re holding out for the America that they want.” Obama is merely being who he is.
Very nice essay, wretchard. BUT, you are berating the obvious. As I mention all the time on IT job site blogs, and occassionally here, this is the AGE of incompetence, not because competence isn’t needed, but because it is not recognized, nor rewarded.
Yes, Josh, I’ve noticed this as well, in spades.
I personally spend the majority of my waking hours trying to deal with, respond to, and implement the demands of the inept, the clueless, and the deluded. Such joy.
From Politico.com awhile ago:
“One senior House Democrat said it is baffling how one group of people can be so good at campaigning and so bad at politics”
(how about “so bad for the country”, but that’s for another day)
What’s there to be baffled about? MSM is supposed to be the umpire, but they were actually part of Obama’s team. They refused to call any strikes when candidate Obama was at bat:
70 mph batting practice fastball, waist high, right down the middle (missing transcripts) and the MSM calls, “ball one!” The same pitch again (Rev. Wright) and the MSM calls, “ball two!” You get the idea. With umpires like that I could have progressed from the sandlot to the Major Leagues.
Then, after He reaches base (elected President) the umpires marvel at His masterful campaign.
(And to be fair, his opponent was more akin to my old sandlot team than the NY Yankees.)
#65 Jimbo–
With all due respect, its not just the MSM trying to determine the winner by making dishonest calls. it is baffling how one group of people can be so good at campaigning and so bad at politics Campaigning and politics are intimately connected in the sense that maintaining a fighter jet is connected with flying it. Without both sets of skills the other is meaningless. But on another level they are barely connected at all. Few if any pilots know anything at all about how to maintain a F-22, and few if any of the technicians who maintain them know how to fly them.
They have (in a sense) a symbiotic relationship, but the skill sets are not even distantly related. And so it is with “campaigning” and actually getting things done in political circles.
Put another way, perhaps crudely, is that the different skill sets can be viewed as having the same relationship as exists between a pimp and a prostitute. They both have their roles but as a customer you would never consider the two to be interchangeable for your purposes. Unless, of course, you are very, very strange.
It is interesting in both cases that what brought us such manifest incompetence to begin with was the innate understanding that it was OK to destroy for the sake of multicultural diversity. I can assure you that either of these men were discriminated “for” over innumerable domestic applicants. This is craven racism at its best. Obama would have been eventually president in my estimate. Rushing him to the spot before he even had articulated a platform guaranteed failure.
So symbotic is the relationship between Obama and the media that the incompetence of one fuels incompetence in the other. Even Farheed Zakaria has noticed this and I heard him commenting on it today. He was analyzing the role of “emo” in the response to the BP oilspill. The media along with supporters such Spike Lee most notably were telling Obama what he needed to do was get emo. To own the rage. The WH promptly complied, issuing the “Plug the damn hole” story and then sending Captain Obama looking for “ass to kick”.
Everything should be straight, then, right? Of course not, and now what? In the end they all look like childish, incompetent, boobs more focused on emo, process and posture than the technical problems. The tragedy is that such might actually be what they all are.
People ask: Is this the grit that lay behind the self-vaunted “reality-based community”?
# 56 HDgreene
“For Decades the Interior Department, the EPA and the Justice Department has attracted individuals that want to prevent the private economy from doing things.”
Large organizations have what some people call “a sense” of what should be done, of what they think about, of how they commit their resources. It is a step above and beyond actual policies and procedures. It is why, for example, that the USAF did not develop precision guided munitions and armed UAVs until decades after it actually became technologically possible to do so. The Air Force is run by pilots and they did not have the “sense” of what was possible and desirable in those areas.
The Interior Dept, EPA, OSHA, USCG, etc. has been immersed in a culture that denied the desirability of offshore drilling for so long that it was unthinkable for them to put resources into that area. Congress decreed that offshore drilling would be severely limited well over 25 years ago. A manager in any of those organizations that tried to put resources into developing technologies for oil cleanup, capping leaking wells, conducting safety inspections or do any of the things that are logical Federal responsibilities would get told no, even in the unlikely event he thought of it in the first place.
Consider that the country largely runs itself and will recover (like a well-designed aircraft) when the controls are released.
Meaning it’s hard to do better than default, and easy to worse. VDH writes about the academic guild mentality this week and its view of / contempt for us kulaks. Some senior democrats better tell Mr. O to let go of the stick (start removing regulations until the ship recovers) before it’s too late.
66. Tcobb
touché
I think we are falling victim to Pop-Culture and politics is because we have asked everyone to vote including illegal aliens. Even morons who haven’t a clue should go out and guess what is best for the country. It creates an environment of witless oafs that can be exploited by the political class. Needless to say, this makes for poor politics and suggests that our elections should be run like American Idol. When government allows public employee unions to vote for goodies and to spend employee’s money for bribing the same government even without the employees consent, the system becomes corrupt. We live in a corrupt state. We are so screwed.
Re: # 28. wretchard
“One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out or least define a hypothesis upon is this: where does BS come from? Where, for example, do things like the Y2K Frenzy, Global Warming, and other imbecilities originate?” Or tulip mania? Or, on a smaller scale, “Power lines cause cancer”?
Positive and negative feed-backs usually finely balanced or rapidly come into an equilibrium in natural systems. Such BS happens when: 1. negative feeds are actively suppressed or 2. corrective cross-signaling is out of whack for some (often natural) reason and “plus” is separated from needed “minus” by space (isolated systems) or time (time delayed systems). I think we have the case #1.
“sending Captain Obama looking for “ass to kick”
This would be considered counterproductive by most executives. Once the name calling starts in public, it is a matter of CYA from there on out. ‘O’ might go for this though. He needs to mollify “his people”.
#73 grrr–
IMHO it comes from gossip. Whether the gossip is grounded in fact or even appears remotely possible given the known facts is immaterial. The main factor that governs its transmission is the emotional effect it has, either negative or positive. Cold reasoning has little if anything to do with it.
Stupidity is the curse of the human race, and a high IQ will not immunize one from it, nor will a degree from an Ivy League college. There is no vaccine that can prevent it. Some people recover from it, and some people never do. Its like Malaria. The fever may strike you at any time no matter how long ago the last bout was, but it always has the potential of coming back when it is least expected, just like the Spanish Inquisition.
And so long as we are not in the grips of the fever we need to carefully filter the words of the people who are. They may very well be sincere in what they say but the demons that they see are oftentimes just ordinary shadows in the corner, hallucinations spawned by the fever.
Kuhn never wrote anything about a New Dark Ages, but that’s as likely as not the next phase. See Asimov’s “Foundation”. Plato believed in such cycles, as did our founding fathers. Lay back and enjoy it, folks, or try to set up your own little Foundations in which to ride it out.
@LotM (32): yes, I should have known that you meant exactly what you said. You do, after all, choose your words with great care.
“”where does BS come from?”"
It comes from all the university degrees that have no work or purpose?
Wretchard #28:
I have studied history and even written some analyses of it and I concluded that people – even very intelligent and educated people – have the darndest way of wandering off in the wrong direction – in the pursuit of mythologies, is the way I describe it.
As to why this is, I have no idea. And I really have no idea why some people or segments of society seem to do this all the time, one right after the other. You would think they would learn. But I have noted that in each case in which a mythology becomes popular or important, there were constituencies that saw it in their favor. One example of this is the Space Shuttle.
Y2K was a disaster only in terms of the resources wasted on it. There was money to be made, though, and some people pushed it. Russia even told the US that they could not guarantee that some of their non-Y2K compliant ICBMs might not just spontaneously fire on 1 Jan 2000. The result was that much of the Y2K funding allocated for DoD was sent to Russia.
Soon after Y2K came the Planet X threat, which was a real nutball idea, based on telepathic messages a woman received from space aliens. Planet X had nowhere near the impact of Y2K because there was no money to be made.
AGW is accompanied by a vast apparatus to separate people from their money. Did you know that there are county governments in the US that are selling carbon credits as a way to get some income?
There is a shortwave radio station that claimed Y2K was The End. Their answer was to sell handcranked shortwave radios with which you could keep up with their messages after all other forms of communication ceased. It appears those same people are now pushing the idea of a massive Global Cooling era that will cause mass starvation; I don’t know what they are selling now but I’ll bet it’s something.
So it appears that these nutball ideas happen all the time, like viruses and bacteria attacking our bodies, and every once in a while one is seized by people who see an advantage to it. Call it an opportunistic infection.
Wretchard,
As the quotes above show, you are just too nice a person. Obama deserves no sympathy, his victims and future victims do and will. His narcissism will end up killing lots of people, somewhere. Your tone suggests that he somehow merited the Presidency, but just wasn’t ready yet. No person with his personality disorder should be allowed anywhere near power, but they always want it.
The quality of Barack Obama’s character is slightly separate from the nature of his capability. We choose not to grant people power over our lives based on our assessment of two things; the possible malice of their characters and the possible shortcomings of their abilities. The lack of President Obama’s track record created data holes in both categories. Nobody knew what he could do and nobody knew what he was.
I did not expect much of his character but was really surprised at his performance. That may save him in the end. There’s nothing so dangerous, either to a country or a person himself, as a bad smart man.
The advantage of having a long history in public life is that it is hard to remain an unknown quantity for too long. That’s one of the reasons why a lot of politicians try to get elected to high office while young. They haven’t got a past that can catch up with them yet. With a term as mayor or governor, it’s hard not to have a good or bad past, one way or the other. President Obama had a very slim public resume with lots of holes that remain to this day. To fill that gap, we were told what he was — by himself through his autobiographical books, and by the media, what was in that gap. So we have a guy from the Hawaii records office who goes in and says “I have seen this document and that document”, like some kind of announcement of the election of a Pope. And it may be the announcement is all true, but you can’t help getting the heebie jeebies at the procedure in a secular, democratic setting.
The thing is, we still don’t know what he is. You say bad, I say how bad? We suspect incompetent, but how incompetent? Just when we think we’ve hit the lower bound we find that we haven’t. I think the NYT guys mentally drew their own lower bound of his capabilities and felt themselves safe. Like Piroth at Dien Bien Phu, when he figured he had enough artillery. But they didn’t know anything for a fact either. It was just ‘how bad can it be?’ And now they may be finding their estimates are off. But how far off? That’s the drama.
The problem before us is this. Is he competent enough to basically get everything to 2012 in one piece? Maybe a little battered, but basically intact? We’re about to find out. And the reason MoDo and the rest of them are having a new look at Biden is that for the first time, they’re not sure that he can.
We should have found out a whole lot of things sooner.
RWE @ 79: It’s neutral variation. “Think of it as evolution in action.” It’s diversity – it’s a strength that we – as a tribe, as a species – try out every possible (and many impossible!) ideas. Of course, most of them are bad, but that’s what makes the game.
We’re about to find out. And the reason MoDo and the rest of them are having a new look at Biden is that for the first time, they’re not sure that he can.
We should have found out a whole lot of things sooner.
Grady: “If I knew then what I know now.”
Fred (Redd Foxx): “If I had now what I had then!”
Josh @ 2 wrote:
We want outsiders for Washington. Well, we got one.
I disagree with this characterization. When voters say they don’t want Washington insiders, what they mean is that they don’t want people with a Beltway mentality, i.e. pols who are far more concerned about what the Washington press & other pols think of them than what their constituents think (except at election time, where the pretense is made that the pols care what the constituents think); pols who are experts at backroom deals that lead only to the advancement of themselves and their cronies; pols who in their little dark hearts would love to put a carbon tax on baby flatulence if they thought there was revenue there & they could get away with it.
This is EXACTLY what we got with Obama. Don’t let the fact that he had been a Senator for only, what, 20? months or so before he began running for president fool you. He was Mr. Beltway long before he was a Senator.
……..
Re: the “he ran a flawless campaign” meme …
I have heard this from so many people, even Obama critics. But I have to say that I have serious doubts that this is the case.
In terms of actual management, I mean the architecture of campaign strategy, selecting the team, building the “whiz-bang” features of the campaign … was it Obama who did that? Or was it, say, more David Axelrod and Chris Hughes, to name just two? The myBO site was “THE” defining feature of Obama’s presidential campaign. I’d bet dollars to donuts that the brass tacks of laying out how that site was going to work … as opposed to just the vague idea of “I’d like to create a website where suppoters can come and self-organize for activities like phone campaigns, door-to-door canvassing, etc.” … was more Hughes, and others, than Obama.
Remember that with Obama, we are talking about a man who has no legacy or paper trail evidencing that he has ever created or built anything other than his own persona. Not one dern thing. So why are we supposed to automatically accept that he was the grand master of presidential campaigning, the expert strategist and organizer, the Boris Spassky of 2008 … as opposed to, say, just a pretty skilled actor being told when and where to hit his mark?
It takes great faith, and I think unwarranted faith, to assume that the United States is like some large craft that will soldier on despite all the slings and arrows that her leadership may throw at her own people.
Yes, it is true historically, but that means nothing at all. Nothing. The meat grinder of history does not give a damn what any given flag looks like.
We might look back and successfully identify those properties and qualities in the American experience that made her so smashingly successful in the past, and in comparison the US of today will come up lacking. However, there is no guarantee today that the horse you rode in on will keep you in the dance.
Even so, I prefer to ride out on the horse that brought me to the dance, because that’s a proven data point on which to cling even if it may be wash atm. I guess I’d rather be a cowboy, but I detest the planned, uniform America that’s been taking shape for a long time now. Just why that new America leads to death I cannot put my finger on nor articulate well, but that’s my feeling.
And, I’ve got to say this about it: it ain’t your grandfather’s America. We’re on terra incognita.
If the experts, who have a lot more training on this than I do, are right then hurrah. I’m probably very wrong, but they seem like a bunch of jackasses.
Josh: Lay back and enjoy it, folks, or try to set up your own little Foundations in which to ride it out.
Or at least a Galt’s Gulch or two.
RWE on global cooling: I’ve been waiting for them to plow open the Going-to-the-Sun Highway so I can go see all the “melting glaciers” in Glacier National Park, and it still won’t be open until June 18, at the earliest.
bw @ 83: We want outsiders for Washington. Well, we got one.
I disagree with this characterization.
Well, I see your point, but isn’t Obama first and foremost “The Other”? We can debate whether that makes him a Washington type or the opposite.
As HST said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Cowboy @ 84: It takes great faith, and I think unwarranted faith, to assume that the United States is like some large craft that will soldier on despite all the slings and arrows that her leadership may throw at her own people.
I agree with that, it’s the romantic fallacy that things are perfect until man / Washington screws them up. State of nature, nasty brutish and short, and all that. It’s when you realize the WORK it takes to maintain the status quo rather than chaos, the achievement that it comprises, that you turn conservative – that is, realistic. See Francisco’s introduction to Rearden in “Atlas Shrugged”.
O is the Kafkaesque messiah.
O is full of hope and fear signifying Nothing.
…-
Kafka On The Gulf”
“So, there are no messiahs. Kafka himself told us as much: “When the messiah comes,” he famously quipped, “he will no longer be necessary.”
Is there any hope in the situation? This is where on our darker days, Kafka is a bleak New Orleans prophet. He was often dark, though never a nihilist. He lived, always, at the edge of faith. Once, his friend Max Brod asked him if there was any such thing as hope in the universe. “Yes,” Kafka replied, “of course there’s hope, plenty of hope—for God. Just none for us.”
I know that punch line sounds grim, but right now it hurts so much it’s funny. In the land of disaster, even a bitter laugh is a start.”
http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/35721/kafka-on-the-gulf/
Easy to be bored when you are a sock puppet, teleprompter POTUS ran by Marxist USA, ayers, van jones, center for american progress/marxixt and soros.
At least Soro’s oil wells in Brazil will have new, cheaper drilling rigs, thanks barry.
Who guarantees Brazil drilling loans?? Who guaranteed BPs projects?
The LA Times mentions in passing that what was purported to be Obama’s birth certificate is not Obama’s birth certificate.
LA Times
More questions about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, still
June 30, 2009 | 2:22 am
(See below for the certificate of live birth provided by the Obama staff a year ago, even though technically that’s not a birth certificate.)
The LA Times mentions in passing that what was purported to be Obama’s birth certificate is not Obama’s birth certificate.
Let’s start a rumor, he has no navel!
Wretchard writes “the saga of Dr. Jayant Patel is that of a man who concealed his incompetence by never staying in one place long enough for consequences to catch up to him. But though he buried his true track record, Patel took care to bring with him enough social proof to persuade a new set of victims to trust him,” and then justifiably makes the comparison to President Obama. Yes, Obama concealed his incompetence to many voters, although not all, and he does have an amazing track record for burying his “true track record,” such as birth certificates and school grades, at least for the time being. In reading all of this reminded me of another infamous con artist, Frank Abagnale, Jr. of “Catch Me If You Can” fame. Remember, he is the man who successfully conned millions by posing as a pilot, then a doctor, and then an attorney. It truly has seemed since the beginning, that Obama thinks that all he has to do is look the part. At one time, there were those who thought that he sounded presidential (he was so good at spinning lies), but there are few who listen to him, with or without a tell-a-prompter, who believe that anymore–even the press is less impressed these days. So why aren’t Obama’s poll numbers much lower than they are? It is also interesting to note that Mr. Abagnale was eventually caught for the primary crime of forging cheques. Here again, Obama seems to have quite a bit in common with the notorious cheque forger…after all isn’t Obama essentially writing cheques that are essentially bouncing, for his stimulus packages, and health care, and whatnot? What Obama and Abagnale don’t have in common is that the film of Abagnale’s deeds received financial and critical success, which looks to be elusive for Obama’s presidency. Perhaps, Obama thinks he is playing “Catch Me If You Can”?
Considering the thread topic, this old Onion piece from Nov. 2008 seems more relevant than ever:
http://tinyurl.com/2ehxakl
Except that we probably have to up the amount to, oh, several trillion.
I’ve been a part of US presidential campaigns at the highest level four times. Let me assure you that when it comes to US presidential campaigns the candidate has very little input into the management of the campaign. That’s because he simply can’t. The task is too big to be both the guy out on the hustings kissing the babies and also the guy back at HQ watching the pennies, or the guy setting up the next media spot, or the guy setting up the next fundraising spot, or the guy handling the media, and so on.
Any candidate for President of the United States does not run his own campaign, and no way is possible for him to run his own campaign. Unless, I suppose, Leonardo Di Vinci ran for president but I think even then he’d be hard pressed because the problem is one of sheer scale. The candidate is the commodity, an entity crying out for management. Barack Obama did not run his own campaign, he was a consultant of it. That’s not to pick on him, every modern presidential candidate is in the same boat.
That’s the reality. That’s why, when Obama trotted out his campaign leadership as a qualification for the presidency I gut-laughed out loud.
He’s a poseur, and he damn well knows it. He knows he doesn’t shit marble, he knows he doesn’t frolick with unicorns, and he knows he can’t lower sea levels. He’s the rankest amateur ever to assume the office of President of the United States. Every one of the 19th century “inconsequential” presidents were far more accomplished than he will ever be. Heck, one nameless, forgettable, and borderline disastrous 19th century American president actually devised a novel proof of the Pythagorean Theorem while in office. That’s what men like that did in their spare time – they accomplished stuff even if it had no bearing.
Obama? He’s a put-on. A confidence man. That’s all.
Charles: The LA Times mentions in passing that what was purported to be Obama’s birth certificate is not Obama’s birth certificate.
You’re still doing the Birth Certificate Conspiracy thing?
But the certificate is specific about Obama’s birth in Honolulu, down to the 7:24 p.m. time.
“It’s crazy,” said Janice Okubo, director of communications for the Hawaii Department of Health. “I don’t think anything is ever going to satisfy them.”
Okubo, who said that she gets weekly questions from Obama ‘Birthers’ that are “more like threats,” explained that the certificate of live birth reproduced by Obama’s campaign should have debunked the conspiracy theories. “If you were born in Bali, for example,” Okubo explained, “you could get a certificate from the state of Hawaii saying you were born in Bali. You could not get a certificate saying you were born in Honolulu. The state has to verify a fact like that for it to appear on the certificate. But it’s become very clear that it doesn’t matter what I say. The people who are questioning this bring up all these implausible scenarios. What if the physician lied? What if the state lied? It’s just become an urban legend at this point.”
I think the media is about to re-double down on their support for President Obama. Here is Tina Brown tooting her vuvuzela on the President’s behalf.
We also know that Bush stuffed agencies charged with overseeing our safety, like FEMA and the Mine Safety and Health Administration, with incompetent political cronies—nothing nuanced about that—and that under the Bush-Cheney rule of Big Oil, the Minerals Management Service agency became a crew of corrupt, lethargic backscratchers signing off on egregious lapses in offshore drilling safety in return for the usual cheesy perks of the good ol’ boy business culture. (If you want a laugh, take a look at the picture in Rolling Stone this month of the now-former MMS associate director Chris Oynes. Even the most foaming liberal movie director would hesitate to cast this 300-pound Rush Limbaugh lookalike clamped in a necktie.)
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-06-14/barack-obamas-gulf-spill-oval-office-speech/?cid=bs:archive1
Excuse much, Tina?
I think they are afraid the Democrats will loose Congress unless they bash Bush instead of Obama.
What is interesting is that during the Campaign they were telling us all about the “Republican Culture of Corruption” and “rule of Big Oil” and how they, by contrast, would ride to the rescue of the environment. So right after the election they recruited the best people to replace the Bush appointees, right? No?
In fact during the 2008 run up in oil prices, the Democrats attacked the Oil Company’s for not exploiting all the available offshore oil leases. I remember commenting that some were in quite deep water and not economic to drill. But the Democrats insisted. Or were they just playing politics? And what are they doing now?
I had a long discussion with someone about Wikileaks. The gist of my problem with something like Wikileaks is this. How do you verify the truth of a classified document? The reason Wikis work is that they assume no privileged point of view. Suppose I claim that the Harvard Bridge is 364.4 smoots long and put it on a Wiki. Well somebody can go out and reproduce the measurement. If there’s a piece of code on an open source project which I claim adds two numbers, anybody can go out and run the code and see for himself if it’s true.
Where information is based on public domain info, the trail of evidence stops at the source document. But we all have equal access to those documents, or reasonably so. What about stuff that is dropped in Wikileaks. It might be true, but how do I know? Suppose someone dead-dropped a document claiming the US had a secret plan to kill x, y and z? But according to the site, the data lineage is destroyed, or at least anonymized so that nobody can say where it came from, except for Wikileaks employees, only one of whom, Assange, is identified. Maybe it’s true, but how I know?
Now let’s suppose Wikileaks got a Secret Document claiming Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Does this make it any more true or false than other claims? But wait. There’s the Honolulu Birth certificate. We have no reason to doubt that it exists, but unlike the Harvard Bridge, none of us in principle, can go look at it, unless we had “standing”. And this I think is the unnecessary source of the problem. Ideally you’d put the birth certificate out there and like Christ after the Resurrection, invite Doubting Thomas to put his hand in the wound.
The President is under no obligation to do that. So we all assume it’s real because of the consequential inference that the State of Hawaii wouldn’t have certified if it didn’t exist. Fair enough. The unease comes from all those indirect proofs of competence and provenance that we now find lacking in some way. Finding out whether something is true or false can eat up tomes. Did the Zimmerman Telegram exist? Were the Rosenbergs spies? Did the Gulf of Tonkin incident happen?
In the end you accept that you know only imperfectly. I think the Harvard Bridge really is 364.4 smoots long, but I haven’t measured it.
He knows he doesn’t shit marble, he knows he doesn’t frolick with unicorns, and he knows he can’t lower sea levels.
Cowboy, I hope you’re right.
I entertain some doubts that Obama is a legal citizen, but I don’t see that it makes much difference at this point.
Josh – Obama’s citizenship is irrelevant. The courts have ruled on this. Even if you produced a Kenyan birth certificate, techically, it doesn’t matter. Barack Obama was judged to meet the qualifications for office. Game over on that front.
hdgreene – Yes, you are right. For a time while McCain/Palin were on about “Drill, Baby, Drill!” the Congressional Dems were actually browbeating oil companies for not being more aggresive in exploring the areas they could have. They were hypocrites then, much less now.
The United States Congress votes each year on an “Energy Bill”. The Bush and also the Clinton administrations did attempt to smack some sense into that process, but for naught.
We haven’t had an intelligible energy policy in this country for many year. As if anybody cares (and they don’t).
Cowboy – agree on the energy policy, and if there’s one thing I hold against Dubya, that’s it – if he didn’t have the cojones to go to Iraq (or SA) and simply take their oil, then he should have started a crash program by 2002 for energy independence.
… not a matter of his cojones, I know, political process, democrats, world opinion, yada yada. so, energy independence, OK?
Conclusion: schools blessed with Annenberg research funding performed no better than schools who had not been so funded. The research money Obama doled out did not get results. It only put money into the pockets of the researchers.
Those with the right timing to read Stephen Diamond’s blog when it wasn’t password-protected, could have learned in great detail about that Annenberg Foundation caper. With Obama as Chairman, it spread $160,000,000 of combined Annenberg, and donated, wealth around, to Obama’s pals in the ‘community organizing’ racket. They preferred culturally ‘sensitive’ exercises over focused teaching of math or science or literacy, and two separate studies in the end agreed they did the kids’ education no good.
And that was the sum of Obama’s executive experience before 2008. Pity the MSM forgot to inquire or investigate. Said MSM bears most of the responsibility of our current cipher in the White House – their groupthink allowed no skepticism of this politically correct anti-Bush when describing him to the voting public.
“Josh – Obama’s citizenship is irrelevant. The courts have ruled on this. Even if you produced a Kenyan birth certificate, techically, it doesn’t matter. Barack Obama was judged to meet the qualifications for office. Game over on that front.”
Factually inaccurate, sir. Until it gets to the Supreme Court, that is. IIRC, it was a circuit court that ruled on a case brought by a democrat to a democratic Judge. The actual technique is called a poison pill. Now to appeal the case ON THE PREVIOUS GROUNDS will require a Title 12 ( error against the Judge) action, Which would take years.
There are other grounds that can be used, up to and including the Health care Legislation. It’s just a matter of some one wanting to spend the money. If I had a few extra million sitting around, I would spend it on that.
As it stands now, that money is better spent getting Congress flipped. Once Congress is controlled by Republicans, the fact that there is something funny about Obama and under the Constitution he doesn’t appear to be qualified for POTUS becomes political powerful. If the Democrats retain control of Congress, then any suit brought would be delayed until way after the Usurper has served his two terms.
I’m not sure America will survive that, so the whole issue becomes moot.
Consider Ellsworth Toohey (sp?).
I have long wondered what in journalism attracts so many malefactors.
Many of them seem to enjoy the positions of influence (authority) without responsibility.
They criticize and abuse, and until recently have not had to suffer the consequences for their malfeasance.
Of course they have been helped by the destruction of our educational system by the unions.
46% still believe the one is doing an ok job.
Mick @ 36, I read you loud and clear.
Onesimus
Programmer @ 33:
“As Cannoneer would say (or perhaps not), Bush made no effort to prepare the psychological battle space here at home at all. In my opinion, Bush was/is a good man but a poor communicator.”
In fairness to President Bush, I would argue that this was a result of a realistic tactical assessment; When your rivals control the established forms of communication (AKA “Old Media”) then anything you say merely puts you at the mercy of those who would twist your words and make you look bad. Lest anyone think I’m kidding consider the TV interviews that were edited to make Sarah Palin look ill informed that we’ve heard about. In a circumstance like that to pick a fight you can’t win is folly and to feed such people a silence they cannot use is merely the best way to play a very bad hand. I suspect that Mr. Bush made his bet on what Glenn Reynolds calls “The Army of Davids” and I will leave it to history to decide whether that was a shrewd or a mistaken bet.
That said, I will remind everybody of one basic fact: We have survived some very incompetent Presidents in the past in circumstances worse than this. So there is no reason to think that we cannot do it again. ^_^
Re # 91. Maid Marion
“Obama concealed his incompetence to many voters” The prob. is not his “concealment”, but voters’ incompetence. When some clown bases his voting on a sentiment like ‘Hilary was there for 8 years, let someone else to get there’ (I heard this one myself), there should be some voters’ screen.
BTW, I’ve read the book at least 5 years before it was made into film, and it was much better.
josh/45; where you were wondering about SOX effect –here’s WSL saying cost to economy has been so far one trillion dollars. Theres 80 some-odd comments on the article, note.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574571662869948676.html
“Let me assure you that when it comes to US presidential campaigns the candidate has very little input into the management of the campaign. That’s because he simply can’t. The task is too big to be both the guy out on the hustings kissing the babies and also the guy back at HQ watching the pennies, or the guy setting up the next media spot, or the guy setting up the next fundraising spot, or the guy handling the media, and so on.”
Well, the same is true of being President. That is why when I evaluate a candidate for that office, my main question is, “Who does that candidate ‘hang with’? Who are their friends? Who is really going to be ‘running things’?”
No conspiracy thinking here. President Bush famously had Karen Hughes and Karl Rove from the Texas Governor days. President Obama has Mr. Axelrod and Ms. Jarrett. David Axelrod may be idealogical, but he seems competent enough. Valerie Jarrett is quite idealogical, and I don’t think she gets let out much. Mr. Axelrod, I believe, has a better reputation for thinking through what he is going to say publically.
bl @ 106: Oh, I’m sure, but I was asking if it had any of its *intended* effects! The trillion dollars is all side-effects and negatives.
“explained that the certificate of live birth reproduced by Obama’s campaign should have debunked the conspiracy theories”
Maybe if the certificate didn’t say on the bottom that it was invalid. That’s right, read the dam thing!
In the black border on the bottom it says;
“Certificate is invalid if altered”
Look up at the top of the certificate where the control number should be. It has been blacked out. That is what the word ‘altered’ means. A perfect example. Look it up in a legal dictionary.
So Obama has based his eligibility to be POTUS on an invalid birth certificate. Meanwhile, there is a birth certificate from Kenya floating around.
With all this smoke in the air, fanned by Obama’s refusal to settle the issue by releasing his alleged birth certificate, any one claiming there isn’t a problem has mental issues.
This argument is like the AGW nutters. Birthers are saying that there seems to be a problem and we need to get to the bottom of it. Obama protectors are claiming birthers are the nutters and there is nothing to see here, move along please.
I’m as you guessed, a birther. I’m not that concerned about it. History will record the facts, eventually. Those facts will be that BHO was NOT eligible under the Constitution to be POTUS. I will be dead by then, so it is of no personal import.
As far as the USA, none of the legislation he signed will be affected unless Congress wants it to be so. What will be affected are his Supreme Court appointments. Congress will still have to impeach them, but it will be a slam dunk. And afterward President Biden can nominate them again.
So from a practical POV, it doesn’t matter.
That is an entirely different argument from BHO being eligible to hold the Office of President. Say that he is now POTUS and I agree. Say that is eligibilty doesn’t matter and I would like to point out that the latest poll among serving officers in the US military shows that 25% plan on resigning immediately if DADT (don’t ask, don’t tell) is repealed. It looks like the % of enlisted that won’t re-up is about the same. So we are looking at about 300,000 of the worlds best military suddenly being back home with time on their hands. If BHO’s lack of legitimacy becomes a rally point, the 4th world has a serious problem.
Never forget that the US Military is sworn to the Constitution, NOT POTUS.
Wikileaks is *perfectly* suited to be a conduit for Dark Ops – the Russians used to be masters of this game, and probably still are. Although anyone who knows how to give off the sheen of credibility to Assange and his minions can play.
regarding Obama’s birth certificate – I still beleive that he really was born in Hawaii, but that the birth certificate recorded his race as “White”. And the reason for hiding that certificate is that he never wanted to try and explain publicly how a White Boy grew up to be a Black Man.
Although it is a nice way to visualize the innate fraud that has been at the center of his character since his birth.
“Here is Tina Brown tooting her vuvuzela”
I just want you to know that your phrase brought up some truly disturbing images for me.
WWS @111: yes, me too. A brilliant turn of phrase, though. And completely apposite.
starling,
You do, after all, choose your words with great care
Heh, fooled you. Most of the time, I am completely sloppy and self indulgent.
OT
Just blogged on a minor political scandal in New York that could explain why my phone did not ring after I personally dragged Mayor Bloomberg over the victory line last November. Don’t yell at me, the alternative was Thompson and the Democrats.
The “birther” line, like the adoption issue, remains to me a distraction that is used to discredit his enemies and keep people from pressing on the other points where his “Natural Born” status is more likely to be shown as lacking. Those being his travel on a foreign passport and his claim of foreign nationality on his financial aid forms, both after his 18th birthday. My suspicion is that the thing originates from the Axelrod shop and is periodically stirred by them.
It’s very hard to encapsulate why people vote the way they do, because so much is driven by rank ignorance and stupidity, like the idiot white woman in South Carolina who voted for mystery candidate Alvin Greene because he “sounded like” the soul singer Al Green. Nuh huh.
I’d say a big part of people’s voting is simple racial and ethnic identification. Blacks vote for blacks, Hispanics for Hispanics, Jews for Jews, Italians for Italians, and so on. And then of course there’s the fun-house mirror image of this, the very large contingent of self-loathing whites who vote precisely against their racial and ethnic identifications, hence the army of White Liberals voting for Obama simply because he was the black dude. And NO other reason.
The other major component is social pressure. You vote based on the way you think your friends vote, and on the social pressure to vote a certain way. Anyone in New York City in 2008 that even hinted at voting for McCain was not merely scorned, but laughed at and designated some kind of mental defective or agent of Satan. It’s hard for people outside such areas to understand just how pervasive these pressures are. And probably the hardest thing to do politically is to somehow crack through that ice shield and cause the zeitgeist to shift.
Overall, I’d say less then 20% of people vote based on a reasoned review of a candidate’s positions.
Totally off topic, sweetest story I’ve read in years:
Australian ‘angel’ saves lives at suicide spot
Even Dr. Frankenstein would have been impressed.
Victor Frankenstein shouldn’t be insulted like that – he was competent. After all he turned lumps of dead tissue into a living being, and presumably his skill at assembling them was more than adequate.
Dr. Patel, on the other hand, was evidently a hack.
(Also, PJM? This opt-out crap for the Daily Digest? Low-rent bullshit. PJM as a business never fails to disappoint.)
Also, few have ever seen a more memorable song & dance than Puttin’ on the Ritz as seen in Frankenstein and Gene Wilder’s reenactment.
Obama has a magnificent track record. He has destroyed our existing health care system and planted the cancer called Socialized medicine.
He has stopped further building of coal based power plants. He has stopped gas and nuclear power. He has taken a minor oil spill and transformed it into a major catastrophe that will stop all oil and gas production in the US. Further he has taken control of automotive production in the US and now has an excuse to end it.
From now on we walk to work or take public transportation. No power after sunset or before sunrise and then, only when the wind blows. Those of us who survive will be in harmony with Mother Nature.
The Obama administration could put this to rest by releasing his long form birth certificate. But he doesn’t. Instead of just releasing his long form birth certificate he has paid his lawyers over 1 million dollars from campaign contributions since Sept 08 to squash the suits brought on the issue. Why bother?
from obama’s own site factcheck.org by way of fightthesmears on his dual citizenship at birth
“When Barack Obama Jr. was born on Aug. 4,1961, in Honolulu, Kenya was a British colony, still part of the United Kingdom’s dwindling empire. As a Kenyan native, Barack Obama Sr. was a British subject whose citizenship status was governed by The British Nationality Act of 1948. That same act governed the status of Obama Sr.‘s children.
Since Sen. Obama has neither renounced his U.S. citizenship nor sworn an oath of allegiance to Kenya, his Kenyan citizenship automatically expired on
Aug. 4,1982.”
…………..
In short, Obama was a dual citizen ie US/Kenyan–even before discussions of his status when his father was from Indonesia.
Can a dual citizen be considered eligible to be president under the more stringent terms which call for someone who is “natural born”.
I think not.
sv/118; that’s the picture alright. what King George III, Ulysses S. Grant, the Kaiser, Hitler, Tojo, Mao, Stalin, Saddam & Osama could not do, young Barry Soweto just glided right through, and without anybody much noticing –yet.
ckil/119; don’t you think that whole thing might be one of the reasons the commie crime plutocrat syndicate pulled him for the job?
of course they’d have to have fixed the press first but that’s a half dozen bigwigs, doubtless already in on it. Now, if the situation warrants, suddenly the MSM will be on it, provoking a huge crisis, which the even the worst outcome for them will be a Biden presidency, and a hundred year moral superiority for the left, on the endless charge of racism, which surfaced over a minor technicality and ruined the first black president, thus proving what they’ve always said about the USA –it is an ugly cruel racist ofay culture. Whichever way it would go, it’s a “win-win” for the left –would be their thought.