The Media Bloodletting, Part III [UPDATED, VID LINK FIXED]
Well, President Obama has lost Kathleen Parker. Here’s the damning bit from her column today:
Is it true? Is Obama responsible for our near-dire circumstances?
I have never been a fan of presidents who place blame on their predecessors or who accept credit for events that couldn’t have been engineered so soon in their tenure. Politicians will always massage the data to tell the story their way. Bill Clinton’s happy economy surely owed some credit to Reagan. George W. Bush’s ill fortunes surely had at least some of their roots in Clinton’s lack of attentiveness. Obama clearly inherited a load of fertilizer, but his policies also have exacerbated those effects. Obama’s successor most certainly will benefit or suffer to some degree from seeds the current president planted.
Nevertheless, it is probably fair to say that Obama’s ideas were too big for America’s appetite. It would have been nice had he made a few incremental repairs to the economy and left the transformative events for a less stressful time.
Parker’s handwringing was brought on by this very clever “Mourning in America” ad by Citizens for the Republic. But the question is: Where were you two years ago, Kathleen?
The American public was sold out by Parker, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan and Chris Buckley — all those conservative commenters who helped Obama pass himself as a moderate. Look, the Complicit Media was 100% in the bag, which is why we needed those “moderate” conservatives to help blow the lid. Instead, they joined the game.
So, Ms. Parker, I know you don’t like Presidents who “place blame on their predecessors.” But we’d respect the hell out of a columnist who can voice the occasional mea culpa.
We’re waiting.
In the future, everyone will have Kathleen Parker’s support for 15 minutes, . . . if that long. (All apologies to Andy Warhol.)
I’m not sure “Sold Out” is the right phrase here. If we all go back to the common thinking during the election, most people realized what Obama *wanted* to do… but we all thought that with the economy the way it was, that there was no way that he could pull it off. We figured that even the Democrats knew we couldn’t afford the bill.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that few people figured that Democrats would be as stupid as they turned out to be. So to say that she sold us out is probably unfair. She, like many others, just didn’t think he was stupid.
The American public was sold out by Parker, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan and Chris Buckley — all those conservative commenters who helped Obama pass himself as a moderate. Look, the Complicit Media was 100% in the bag, which is why we needed those “moderate” conservatives to help blow the lid. Instead, they joined the game.
What you said.
(Sorry, I’m just too busy to write the verbal applause you deserve on this recent stuff, but you’re kicking ass this week.)
You said that last line out loud in a Ted Knight imitation, didn’t you.
This may be straining at gnats, but I’m both amused and disturbed by the imagery of this mixed metaphor: “Everyone’s angry. But anger is cheap and tired. Rode hard and hung up wet, as we say down South.”
The phrase is “rode hard and put away wet”, and it refers to horses, meaning the horse was rode hard, and put away (in the barn) sweaty, w/o a proper brushing. (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rode%20hard%20and%20put%20away%20wet)
So I guess where Kathleen is from, they hang up horses?
But we’d respect the hell out of a columnist who can voice the occasional mea culpa.
Change “respect the hell out of” to “have moderately less contempt for” and I’m in.
it is probably fair to say that Obama’s ideas were too big for America’s appetite.
It is more fair to say that Obama’s ideas are very tired retreads of what Lincoln was calling “the same old serpent” 150 years ago, and that nobody should care what Kathleen Parker has to say about “America’s appetite” unless she’s making us sandwiches.
Not even.
She probably uses too much mayo.