WaPo continues to go out of its way to make the country wistful for the journalistic integrity of, say, Globe Magazine or Weekly World News.
Perhaps the real reason that American newspapers are unable to make any money is because of the huge Chap-Stick expenditures necessitated by their constant kissing of President Obama’s ass.
President George W. Bush once boasted, “I’m not a textbook player, I’m a gut player.” The new tenant of the Oval Office takes a strikingly different approach. President Obama is almost defiantly deliberative, methodical and measured, even when critics accuse him of dithering. When describing his executive style, he goes into Spock mode, saying, “You’ve got to make decisions based on information and not emotions.”
When, oh when, will anything this president does be able to stand on its own without a juvenile game of compare and contrast with his predecessor? Yes, every president inherits things from the president before him. The difference? The rest of them brought a pair to the job, shut their whiny little mouths and did their jobs. Obama has spent so much time whining about George W. Bush that his little press monkeys have taken the cue and do it for him when he’s not around.
Of course, if this president was all that they keep telling us he is they wouldn’t have to hemorrhage so much ink to cover for him on an almost daily basis.
Obama’s much-lauded thoughtfulness, however, is confined to the troop decision in Afghanistan. On virtually everything else he so knee-jerk it’s a wonder he hasn’t torn an ACL.
Yes, it’s a good idea for a president to be deliberate when sending troops into harm’s way. The time for lengthy deliberation, though, is before any troops are committed to battle. Once we actually have Americans under fire and the commanders in the field are asking for a little help there’s nothing wrong with hurrying up the process a bit. It’s not as if the administration is working in an information vacuum and wondering what’s going on over there, after all.
You want to know why he’s taking so long to make up his mind?
Pure politics.
Barack Obama was an anti-war candidate. Truthfully, he was an anti-reality candidate. His entire campaign was pretty much built around political fairy tales that any sane person knew weren’t going to be possible here on this planet.
The one lucid part of this WaPo article sums it up fairly well:
Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton, says Obama has suffered from unrealistic expectations among those who put him in office. “They kind of were sold Utopia, and they bought it, and it didn’t happen,”
So now President Obama is faced with real president stuff and he can’t just gloss over it with some pithy rhetoric. When he commits more troops his whacko Daily Kos base is going to crap itself in anguish. Team Lightbringer has had to take this long because they need to find a way to almost do what they should but package it in such a way that the hippies won’t all melt from the mental distress.
That’s what’s going on here. This has nothing to do with thoughtfulness. One only has to look at the other items on President Obama’s agenda to realize that he is the antithesis of thoughtful.
This is the president who, for the most part, sells everything with a panic button. From the stimulus to the cap and trade to health care reform, if it doesn’t happen now “WE’RE ALL GOING TO FREAKIN’ PERISH, PEOPLE!”
Deliberation? Debate? That’s SO 20th century!
A thoughtful president wouldn’t admit that he didn’t have all the facts about a story (Cambridge police incident) then, in the next breath, beginning condemning people involved in it. Hey, at least George Bush used his gut. President Obama rarely lets instinct or intellect guide him. It’s more of a “Let’s open my mouth and see what comes out…” approach to things.
So, before all of the Kool-Aid drunk Obamabots recast Rodin’s “Thinker” with Barack Obama’s face, let’s help them out of their intellectual comas and present them with the facts.
Yeah, you’re right, that’s not going to work at all. My bad.
