Too Smart for His Own Good?

Three anonymous (probably Leftard) 'experts' subject President Obama to a thorough examination -- without meeting him -- and form the following diagnosis:he's a complex dude, and that's why we don't understand just how absolutely fucking incomprehensibly awesome he really is.

Let's get this out of the way: I like Barack Obama, The Man, not Barack Obama the Jumpshot-in-Chief. I think he is genuinely smart in that Ivory Tower, bookish sort of way which makes for interesting cocktail party conversation, but which usually doesn't work when applied to practical problems. I'd like to spend an afternoon with him over a couple of beers and a ballgame, or maybe an evening of poker, cigars and dirty jokes. Hell, he can fuck my sister, I admire him so much.

It takes a great man to be this utterly clueless and still get elected to the highest office in the land. I'd like to know his secrets to success.

But, there's something about Obama that just doesn't compute, and as we used to say in my old systems programming days, if it doesn't add up, then you've fucked up. There's something missing, a key variable, a lack of data, some error that must account for the gap between the Hope and Result.

So, I've done my own evaluation of Barack Obama -- debugging, as it were, the Man's code -- and since I'm not a psychiatrist, haven't read any of his three, five, seven, whatever, biographies, don't parse his speeches looking for flashes rhetorical brilliance, I don't faint at the mere sight of him, or read any of his policy papers, I figure this makes me just as qualified to evaluate the President from a distance and with no direct input as three so-called psychiatric experts who apparently are incapable of speaking in coherent sentences.

I don't believe that Barack Obama ever expected to win the election in 2008.

I believe this, without proof or first-hand evidence -- but that didn't stop Millbank's Experts, did it? -- that B.O. was just as convinced as every other Flapping Rectum in the summer of 2008 that Hillary Clinton had the democratic nomination all but stolen, and that his job in that case was to remind the Clinton Wing of the democratic party that the Moonbat Left was still there and had stuff to say (It may have been stupid stuff, but it still needed to be said), and they would not be silent while a candidate they saw as fundamentally the same as McCain took her premature victory lap and coasted into a uncontested November win.

Obama was probably content to play Clinton's Ralph Nader, and then try again another day.

But then the Economy hitthe skids. The Stock Market crashed. The Housing Market was imploding. The country was still embroiled in two wars that appeared to be becoming social laboratories and Straw Men for Left and Right to argue over rather than actually WIN. People began to worry, they began to panic, and when they examined their choices come November 2008, they found two people who were indistinguishable in their 'maintain the status quo' politicking, and some dude who gave good speech and managed to make 'more of the same' even more unappealing.

So, they voted for Barry. Whether this was the desperation of Hope, or the desire for Change, matters not: if Obama had one thing in his favor it was that he wasn't an aging Cold Warrior who couldn't stay on the same side of the political street for three minutes, or an opportunistic hellion in a Black Crusty Pantsuit who was going to have her Presidency run -- and probably ruined -- by her horndog husband. Obama was seen as alien to the viper pit of Washington politics that had caused the multiple messes we were in. That was enough for a good many folks.

So there he was, actually winning. The problem was, I think, that since he hadn't expected to win, he had no plan for what do next.

This became evident almost immediately with the Stimulus Plan. it wasn't an economic plan as much as it was a wish-list of ridiculous projects and pet peeves compiled by Congressional Democrats. The only thing "shovel ready" about that plan was The Plan Itself. It's not surprising that it failed because it wasn't really intended to do anything beyond ensuring that certain democratic (small 'd' intentional) party allies and constituencies were fully funded before the money well-and-truly ran out.

The next clue was ObamaCare. In the midst of an economic crisis, Obama puts forth a brand-spankin' new entitlement program, and then leaves the details to Congress again. He then spends 15 months -- the first third of his Presidency, in effect -- trying to sell a plan that he can't explain, can't describe the need for, and can't justify at a time when people are losing their jobs left and right. A year after it's been passed he still can't explain it, and the more we learn of it as the days unwind, the less we like it. Nancy Pelosi wasn't just being coy when she said "We have to pass it to find out what's in it"; none of the people who allegedly put it together even KNEW what they had wrought, and what they did know of it was sure to be political suicide (see 2010 midterms). That's why the thing was cobbled together in secrecy, funded up-front, and passed almost in the dead of night with the hope that it would eventually just be too complex -- and embeded -- to kill at a later date.

The next indication that Barack Obama wasn't prepared for this job was the enormous amount of time he spent complaining about having to do it. I was especially shocked to listen to President-Elect Obama take daily questions from the Press on this or that subject, and alternately expound a load of fertilizer where he thought it would do him good, and then gently remind the Press that he wasn't President yet when a question was inconvenient. Later, the criticism becomes too great and mean-spirited, everything was George Bush's fault, it's racism and he inherited every problem and they couldn't all be fixed overnight(this is true, but it's not as if he didn't know about the pile of horse dung that is Washington and American Politics; but he did, after all, lobby for the job and should have known), and this led to the next clue:

The amount of time Barack Obama has spent in the last two years NOT being President of the United States.He's on vacation every few weeks. He's delegated a shitload of authority and responsibility to 'czars' and 'Blue Ribbon Panels', he's taking "Date Nights" with the Missus, taking the kids to Hawaii, playing as much golf as possible. When catastrophe strikes, and the Gulf Coast is poisoned by a massive oil spill, Obama goes on vacation, but promises to file a lawsuit when he comes back. He starts a war by committee, so that England and France can fight Khadaffi to the last American on behalf of their oil supplies, and then tries to back away from ownership of it. This as American forces are already fighting on behalf of the  Europeans in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our foreign policy leadership has been turned over to the U.N., the Arab League, and the European Union.

But the Biggest Clue about about how clueless Barack Obama is in the selection of his advisers; he went back into the Clinton Administration to find a good number of them. Nothing says 'Change' like a return of the legions of Clinton Zombies who had served so well that Al Gore couldn't even win his OWN STATE in a time of peace and prosperity, and was reduced to trying to sue his way into the White House.

Leon Pannetta, Rahn Emannuel, Eric Holder, and if that's not frightening enough, there's a cavalcade of democratic party stars rumored to be waiting in the wings, whispering this or that piece of sage advice, or angling for jobs: Jimmy Carter, Jamie Gorelick, Donna Brazille, Joe "The Raging Dumbass" Biden. Some change.

Whatever economic plan Obama and his team managed to write on the back of a cocktail napkin and presented as a serious solution to our economic woes sounds as if it came right out of a Soviet Three Year Plan, one that college students are obliged to read about in their textbooks: massive government 'investment' in Green Energy -- an industry which has, to date, not delivered a single result to ever match it's claims -- a return of FDR's Public Works Programs, Nationalization of the Banks and selected (union-dominated) Industries on a scale, and in such brazen fashion, that it would have made the Nazis blush with envy.

Change? We're trying the same things that have been tried in various countries since the 1930's; they didn't work then, they sure as hell won't work now. We're being lectured to on Capitalism by the Chinese and Russians, for Christ's sake! I'm sure everyone in the White House has read Das Kapital, but has anyone there read The Wealth of Nations?

Don't even get me started on how it is that Candidate Obama and President Obama are polar opposites on Gitmo Detainees, The Surge, Raising Debt Ceilings, Bush Tax Cuts (he's now changed positions on these, by my count, three times), talking about ending two wars, but then starting a third, etc, etc. I guess it's easy to criticize when you're ignorant of reality than it is when you're in full possession of the facts -- or at least when you're trying to get someones job, only to find out it's not all it's cracked up to be. In the end, it looks as if you're making it up as you go along, flying by the seat of your pants, confused, uncertain, disinterested.


This guy always seems to be two or three steps behind the curve on everything. Everything comes as a surprise, every issue or crisis is one that is unforeseen, and is preceded or followed with the adjective 'unexpectedly!'. He doesn't know what to do about Egypt. He doesn't know what to do about Libya. He doesn't realize that governments don't run economies, businesses do. He doesn't know what to do about much of anything, and when he tries to explain what action he does/doesn't take, no one buys it. We see right through it all.

Too smart for his own good? A complex thinker? Not by half. Barack Obama would have made a good insurance salesman. There's no shame in that; the world needs insurance salesmen. But a deep thinker? a Complex personality? A mathematician's ability to juggle variables in his head? On what fucking planet?

What Barack Obama is -- to use a poker analogy --  is a guy who's had his bluff called when he's short-stacked, and has but one option left: to go All In; he talked the talk, so the American people gave him an opportunity to walk the walk, and then it became apparent that Obama WAS, indeed, nothing but talk, and even then, he was given the benefit of the doubt seeing as how he was walking into a gigantic mess; maybe,some hoped, he would grow into the job?

No such luck. If anything, Barack Obama has shrunk while in the job, which is a pity almost beyond words. It was a task that he was not prepared for. Attempts to spin Obama's deer-in-the-headlights performance by resort to the well-worn political columnist's trick of "he's too smart for most people to understand", "he's too complex", "it's bad communications", "he's a deep thinker" are outright distortions of the truth, and that a newspaper columnist should have the audacity to promote such distortions as serious reportage/editorial is an absolute outrage.
Before firing Dana Millbank, his bosses should kick his ass for being a dipshit.

Dana Millbank's job is to present the facts; not trot out the shop-worn "He's too smart for us" bullshit in an attempt to explain away or paper over what is, already, a failed Presidency. We've been there and done that with other political figures; Hillary Clinton and Jimmy Carter, for example, and it wasn't true then, either. What makes anyone think the third time's a charm?