Told You So...

So, I caught the replay of Emperor Barack's no-doubt-about-it-certainly-non-political Economy speech, and yes, it pretty much was what I expected. Although he fails at so much, at least our President has become wildly successful at becoming entirely too predictable.


And boring.

And long-winded. After all, it took him 34 minutes to basically say "gimme more of the same, and you're a racist, bigot, Luddite if you disagree".  Although, truth to tell, it's perhaps a sign that he's discovered brevity; two years ago, that speech would have lasted an hour and 28 minutes. I'll bet he still had at least three Teleprompters operating at full tilt to get that all out, too. Once you take the half-hour of obligatory "It's George Bush's Fault"  out of the speech, time just tends to fly, doesn't it?

Of course, true to form, the speech wasn't followed up or embellished with, you know, actual details. Those are coming next week...when there will be another joint session of Congress to harangue, one assumes. Which leads one to ask a very pertinent question:

There was, in some circles where stupid and gullible people abound (like at (P)MSNBC), a great deal of anticipation built into this speech. After all, it's been a month since the fights over the Debt Ceiling, and a month since President Odouchebag went off on vacation, promising to come back with a Economic Plan that would put us all back to work and pay our debts down.

What the fuck did he do all summer?

Because if that speech full of recycled, tried-and-failed policy pronouncements, and the half-now-half-later delivery is his idea of a viable economic recovery plan, then I have to wonder just what drugs they're taking at the White House. That wasn't a plan at all. Hell, it's not even an outline of a plan. Mitt Romney put out something closer to an actual plan earlier in the week -- at least he's trying.

But Mitt Romney isn't the one who needs to make an effort at the moment. He's not the guy sitting in the Big Boy's Chair in the Oval Office. Barack Odingbat is sitting there, and if there's anything we've learned about our Resident of the United States, it's that he doesn't do effort. He does (other people's) speeches. He does (other people's) ideas. He whines a lot, and makes a lot of excuses. He doesn't do heavy lifting, at all. Work, you know, is for the Peasants.

So why give the speech at all? He's got nothing to say, he's out of ideas, and there was no message that we haven't already gotten before to convey. Why waste the people's and Congress' time like that?

Because you have to at least be seen doing something, don't you? That speech wasn't about job bills, or tax reform, or even the American Economy in general; it was about giving Barack Obama one more opportunity to put on his President of the United States costume, with Congress as a backdrop, so that he could look Presidential. It's hard to do that, however, when you a) don't have a plan, b) try to sell your old, already-tried policies as new ones...only in two parts, and c) don't have a fucking clue.

That speech was given so that Obama could be photographed for a posterity in which his defenders (there will be relatively few of those in the future), when pressed by historians to explain just what it was that their Man accomplished in his (single) term, will at least be able to point to all the images of Barack Obama in his costume, posed before dramatic backdrops, and spin a Periclean Paean about what was, in the end, an empty suit wrapped around a decidedly-inferior intellect, belonging to a guy who's never done an honest day's work in his life, and figured that being elected President of the United States wasn't exactly the time to start.

Those future few defenders of Obama will have to do that -- lie with the aid of still images -- because the rest of it (the recordings, the films, the videotape, the written word) will tell an entirely different story of Barack Obama, Failure First Class. I figure the Barack Obama Presidential Library (to be housed within a former ramshackle, rat-infested ACORN-built-and-funded Slum on Chicago's South Side) will consist entirely of images and copies of the speeches he gave engraved on sheets of bronze, with a few exhibits which will try to equate Obama with Martin Luther King (yeah, right!). Not a video in sight, not a single reproduced OpEd, probably not even his own (ghost-written-and-mostly-bullshit) 'autobiographies'.

It won't be a Library in the sense that we understand the term; it'll be a collage of the flotsam and jetsom of Obamamania, hastily tossed together, presented without context, without a single piece of paper, not a solitary item, that will ever be able to contradict the soon-to-be-constructed, complete bullshit legend.

It's so much easier to lie with images than it is with just about any other form of media; images are mute and subject to interpretation on a scale that, say, audio or video recordings, aren't. The reconstruction of Barack Obama as Misunderstood Savior of the Universe, victim of the Great Conservative Conspiracy to Keep a Brother Down, Noble-but-Defeated-Keeper-of-the-Flame, will begin in earnest on January 21st, 2013. To that end, those engaged in the hopeless process of polishing this turd will have to depend on the still image to sell their fiction because images are difficult to refute. Images without context are impossible to refute.

This is why Obama made us all wait for a month to make a speech and unveil a (bullshit) plan on such an important issue, and then left us all wondering if that wasn't a fucking joke. That speech was all about getting the pefect picture, it was about pretending that Barack Obama is The Great Man of History. It was about creating drama, about manufacturing gravitas, about getting the details just right.

It probably took the White House Press Office a month to figure out all the angles, hence the otherwise unconscionable delay: what color suit and tie, where to place the cameras, which photog/news organization gets to take the 'historic' shot, how it will be released to the Press, what sort of statement will accompany it's release, and so on and so forth.

And then they get to do it all over again next week. It's all about Public Relations, it's all about Image. It's all the Obamabots have left; the possibility that they can at least give the impression that their man was somebody, maybe even of middling importance.

It's become crystal clear in the last three years that they're making it up as they go along over there at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; they're writing a fairy tale. The most annoying thing about it all is that they either believe that no one notices, or they really just don't care if anyone does. They're determined to ensure that no matter what the truth is, Barack Obama is presented in that ready-for-Mount-Rushmore light (which is far more than he deserves) beginning on the very day his sorry ass gets booted out of power.The really scary part is that they obviously take themselves really fucking seriously while they do it.

That wasn't a speech; that was a photo-op for the benefit of a posterity which will be largely ignorant of his real incompetence -- they'll be mostly ignorant, so it'll be easy. No one reads, anymore, hence the need for lots of pictures and images  -- and spoon-fed a myth manufactured out of thin air.

The saddest part of it all is that we, here in the Present, will have to suffer under this regime for another 18 months.

History says that the Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned. In our own time, Emperor Barack just goes on vacation and has his picture taken. A lot. And plays the part of Chief Executive so long as his handlers can contrive to make him look Presidential. All things considered, if all Nero ever accomplished was to break into a kickin', Charlie-Daniels-style solo just as the entire city collapsed in a heap of burning ash and flesh, he would still have been about 20 times more useful in a time of crisis than Barack Obama has been, still done 50 times as much work, and displayed at least 100 times more creativity and inspiration.