Having, over the last two years, thrown in quick succession Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Fox News, Charles Krauthammer, Dinesh D’Souza and Forbes magazine under the bus, Obama decides there actually is a shovel-ready project he can approve of: tossing out the rest of the MSM:
President Obama resumed his role as media critic last night, inspired by a questioner who asked what’s surprised him since he took office.The answer: The 24/7 media.
“I’ve been surprised by how the news cycle here in Washington is focused on what happens this minute, as opposed to what needs to happen over the course of months, years,” Obama told the crowd at George Washington University. “The 24-hour news cycle is just so lightning fast and the attention span I think is so short that sometimes it’s difficult to keep everybody focused on the long term.”
Obama added that “the things that are really going to matter” two decades from now “are not the things that are being talked about on television on any given day, or appear on the Internet on a blog on any given day.”
It is somewhat ironic that Obama made these comments at an interactive town hall that included questions on Skype and Twitter.
It’s also somewhat ironic, in that arguably, the rise of CNN* on cable TV in the early 1980s created that cycle; and CNN was instrumental in helping to keep their presidential candidate’s campaign afloat during its worst hour — and this is how he repays them.
CNN would also bake a cake (shown above) to celebrate one of Obama’s signature “achievements” a year after helping to get him into office; but so much for that idea — “There’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects,” the president now admits.
As Hugh Hewitt notes, “Wow. That’s a candid admission of complete failure by the president:”
Every Republican candidate in the country should be repeating the president’s candid admission of naivete on the so-called “stimulus,” and asking in the next breath when we get one on Obamacare. Instead of apologizing to the world, the president should start apologizing to voters for the enormous waste of the next generation’s wealth and the crippling of the health care system to boot.
Given the president’s acknowledgment that the such spending projects don’t exist and thus cannot work to grow an economy, why is he still out campaigning for even more eruptions of pork-barrel spending?
Prof. William A. Jacobson of the Legal Insurrection blog reminded his readers on Wednesday that he predicted this result even before the president took office:
William A. Jacobson, December 6, 2008, as reported by Legal Insurrection Blog (emphasis mine):
Obama is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Infrastructure projects are not a good way to provide short-term stimulus, much less long-term job creation. Obama’s infrastructure plan is a road to nowhere.
Just think of 2008 as “A Monetary Lapse of Reason” — between the voters, the president they elected, and his supporters in the media and congress who convinced themselves that “The New New Deal,” as Time magazine dubbed the president-elect’s plans in December of that year were sure to work just as smoothly as the first one did.
* Yes, prior to becoming a closed-circuit video muzak system for airport departure lounges, our top historians believe that this channel actually once experimented with running as a cable television network early in its career. Its origin and purpose, still a total mystery.
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