Former Fraudulent Conservative and JournoLister Dave Weigel Defends Obama from His Own "Lazy" Remark

If you want to psychoanalyze the president — and who doesn’t? — you can say that the very fact that he said “lazy” reveals that he has a deep-seated hatred of Americans. (Keith Koffler has a pretty good run down of the things Obama has said that form this critique.) A Pro-American president might have taken that question and talked about trade deals without saying the governemnt [sic] had been slow to act on them. People use words for certain reasons. But the “lazy” people in this reference are bureaucrats, not average Americans.

Oh, it doesn’t matter. I expect this to stay in the “Obama reveals his true self!” hall of fame with the “American exceptionalism” video.

In the context, Obama may be talking about “bureaucrats” (though he never uses that word), but it’s clear that he’s also talking about American business not pursuing international business and investment. He often speaks in such generalities that it’s tough to know who his precise target is, but yes, he’s calling Americans “lazy.”

Where is the evidence of this “laziness” on either the part of bureaucrats or American business? The American worker is as productive as ever, despite a terrible economy and having to deal with more than 4,200 new regulations this year alone. Uncertainty stemming from the looming onset of ObamaCare is contributing to business hesitance to hire new workers — they don’t know what their per employee liability is going to be. Uncertainty in the general regulatory environment is keeping even more money on the sidelines. The administration’s decision to delay (read: scuttle) the XL pipeline betrays that its priority is on politics, not jobs. The NLRB’s suit against Boeing and the administration’s handling of the Delphi non-union pensions show that its heart is with the unions that are making it more expensive to do business in America. That’s not laziness, it’s just bad policy.

If Obama really has a problem with “lazy” “bureaucrats,” why hasn’t he fired any?

The American worker lucky enough to have a job isn’t sleeping on it, and unfortunately neither are the bureaucrats. The “government” wasn’t even slow to act on the trade deals; Obama was. He sat on the latest group of free trade deals for more than two years before sending them to Congress for approval. And even that delay can’t really be attributed to his being lazy so much as having misplaced priorities. He spent the first year of his administration on ObamaCare and the stimulus. President Obama is quick to blame nameless others, and quicker to use that blame to deflect attention from his own ghastly policies. That’s what his “lazy” comment shows.