'961 Days In, Obama Becomes Sick and Tired of Someone Dawdling about Jobs'

Andrew Malcolm of the L.A. Times has your headline of the week, which Ace paraphrases, as a reminder of Obama’s pledge to Matt Lauer of NBC in early 2009 at the apogee of hopeychangium: “Closing In On His Own Self-Imposed Three Year Deadline For Fixing The Economy, Obama Becomes Very, Very Angry About Dawdling.”

For those who didn’t watch the speech last night, here’s a 44-second summation:

And for more quick visual aids, Veronique de Rugy puts the last three years into devastating perspective:

As James Taranto notes in today’s “Best of the Web,” Dana Milbank of the once — and likely future — Obama-friendly Washington Post wasn’t too happy about how the speech played to its live studio audience:

It looks as if we were on to something in July when we called Barack Obama “President Dangerfield.” His speech last night didn’t do much for us, but the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports he brought down the House with his comic stylings:

Many in the audience thought it was a big, fat joke.

“You should pass this jobs plan right away!” Obama exhorted. Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) chuckled.

“Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary–an outrage he has asked us to fix,” Obama went on. Widespread laughter broke out on the GOP side of the aisle.

“This isn’t political grandstanding,” Obama said. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) guffawed.

“This isn’t class warfare,” Obama said. More hysterics on the right.

“We’ve identified over 500 [regulatory] reforms, which will save billions of dollars,” the president claimed. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) giggled.

It was, in a way, more insulting than Joe Wilson’s “you lie” eruption during a previous presidential address to Congress. The lawmakers weren’t particularly hostile toward the president–they just regarded the increasingly unpopular Obama as irrelevant.

Hey, maybe he shouldn’t keep his day job after all!

Fittingly, the president’s Captain Dunsel act came on the 45th anniversary of the premiere of “Star Trek.” And Milbank notes that it wasn’t only Republicans who made a mockery of Obama’s travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham of a speech to a joint session of Congress. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy of New York asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to autograph a copy of “House Mouse, Senate Mouse,” which if we recall correctly is an account of Nancy Pelosi’s tenure as squeaker. And David Wu, “forced to resign this summer over accusations of sexual impropriety, nevertheless showed up for the speech,” though he wasn’t wearing a tiger suit.

Do we have to talk about the substance of the speech? Yeah, we guess so. As expected, Obama called for a new “stimulus,” though he didn’t call it a stimulus. The price tag, according to a White House fact sheet, is $447 billion. That’s an increase of just under half from the $300 billion that had been floated earlier, though it’s still well short of the $800-plus billion for the first, failed stimulus.

There are two competing explanations as to why the 2009 stimulus failed: It was the wrong medicine, or the dosage was insufficient. We agree with the former, but either way it’s hard to see an argument for less of the same. In any case, the 2009 stimulus passed without a single Republican vote in the House. Now nothing can pass without Republican votes, and the new Republicans were elected in a revolt against spending. This was not a serious proposal, merely a campaign speech. Congressmen were right to laugh.

When the Only Tool You Have Is a Hammer
We laughed out loud last night when Andrew Rosenthal tweeted that “President Obama needs an editor. His speech was too long.” Rosenthal is an editor–editor of the New York Times editorial page. Does he really think that someone like him could solve Obama’s problems?

But of course — if only because the intertwined relationship between Obama and the MSM. Besides, why should Mort Zuckerman and Fareed Zakaria be the only journalists to say they once advised the president?