This is Not What a Leader Does

The four-year-long amateur hour at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue continues. We thought we had elected suave, surefooted Stefan, but in fact, it was plain old Steve Urkel. The guy whose life is a never-ending wedgie. Even prominent leftists have started complaining about the incompetence and inexperience of Obama and his staff, and the same liberal members of Congress who claimed his experience didn’t matter are now snubbing him right and left because his juvenile mistakes have wrecked his political capital.

He is living up to the sobriquet “Carter II” by involving himself in minutiae. Carter used to insist on deciding who got to use the White House tennis court; he made up the schedule while he should have been thinking about the country’s problems. Obama has flown to Denmark, at huge expense, to try to bring the Olympics to Chicago. Can you imagine George Bush insisting on handling something this unimportant? Oh, well. Once a bagman, always a bagman. When you build a career by flunkying for machine bosses, it’s probably not easy to stop running errands.

Where is the outrage over Obama’s third vacation? Every time George Bush left the White House grounds, the liberals at CNN, CBS, and the other mainstream outlets screeched about his penchant for vacations. He never took a vacation; he just moved his office from time to time. Hopefully, that is generally true of Obama as well. In any case, it didn’t matter to the Bush-era press.

Obama blew a king’s ransom on a trip to New York. He holed up in Martha’s Vineyard. Now he’s flying to Denmark for a trip which is clearly primarily recreational. And it’s only the beginning of October, in his first year as President! And the press doesn’t care, any more than they still care about mounting military deaths in Iraq, which they portrayed as a major crisis before the election.

It’s almost as if there were a TOTALLY HYPOCRITICAL DOUBLE STANDAND.

Almost.

It would be a tragedy if Obama seemed to succeed. Appearing to succeed while doing the wrong thing is worse than failure. It assures that you will continue doing the wrong thing in the future. So when I see Obama do something dumb and sure to fail, it encourages me. I want to see the US prosper because we behave responsibly and please God, not because we robbed our children’s piggy banks to pay for a heavily leveraged plateau in our slide toward weakness and defeat.

It’s remarkable that Obama and his blunderkind advisors thought the Olympics trip was a good idea. Several cities are vying for the games, so the odds that Obama will lose are high. If he had stayed home, no one would have imputed the loss to him, but now it will be an Obama failure. On top of that, the trip confirms his image as a lightweight. You would not send Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln to beg for an Olympiad, any more than you would send them to pick up the Secretary of State’s dry cleaning. But Obama? It fits.

I’m guessing that none of Obama’s confidants, nerdy though they are, were members of their high school chess clubs. They are incapable of strategic thinking. That’s just swell, given that America is fighting two wars right now. I suppose it explains his decision to abandon missile protection for our loyal allies in Eastern Europe, at a time when Russia is resurging as an enemy and Iran is developing long-range nuclear weapons.

What Obama gaffe DOESN’T it explain? He alienates a new sector of his base every week. Doctors. Cop unions. Car unions. Jews. When health care craps out, he’ll alienate blacks. Prior to the election, the big media outlets actively suppressed negative coverage (even more than they do now), so Obama never learned to think ahead. When you live in a bubble, you need no immune system. Now that criticism is increasing, he has no one to protect him from his own fecklessness.

I don’t recall the press and the entertainment industry (same thing, really) doing much to help Carter, once he started circling the drain. SNL made his embarrassing health problems weekly fodder. Stories about the sad state of the country filled the airwaves.

While he was running, the press treated him like–wait for it–a messiah. I recall that clearly. They adored him. Then he became an embarrassment. Did the networks stand up for him? If so, I have no memory of it. Once Obama’s incompetence is established beyond dispute, he’ll fare no better. Sooner or later, we’ll see video of him smoking cigarettes. The liberal press will discover Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko. They’ll finally take notice of the other kooks he has hired. They’ll realize he’s unfair to Israel. These are my predictions.

Is he smoking cigarettes in our White House? He must be. He’s still addicted, and you don’t make the President stand outside when he has a nicotine fit. There must be ashtrays in the White House again! Either that, or he flicks the ashes on the floor. When did we last have ashtrays and cigarette butts in the White House? Was it under Ford? Nixon?

I always pray for him and his wife and the Bidens to humble themselves, acknowledge God (the real one, not the Jew-baiting Jeremiah Wright straw god), and start leading us in something resembling righteousness. I also wish he’d quit carrying that Hindu idol around and get rid of the big gold-plated one the Indians sent him. But an ego like Obama’s is tough to penetrate. And he does not admit fault. A leader takes responsibility for the things his underlings do. Obama throws them under the bus immediately. He does the same thing with his associates, like Wright and Blagojevich and Ayers and…well, I don’t want to make a long list. When Obama’s regime crumbles, one of the worst things about it will be listening to the whining and excuses.

He’s the Michael Jackson President. He surrounded himself with people who tell him he can do no wrong, and he believes them. Therefore his life is decadent, and he has no judgment. He does things no shrewd or mature person would do, and unless he changes, he will fail.

He’s in for a fall. And then we’re stuck with him for three more years. As anyone who lived under Carter during his humiliating tenure can tell you, a permanently hamstrung President is hard to live with. Pelosi and Reid will rule the free world, and our enemies will walk all over us.