Over and over President Zero bungles things that are to me, supposed to be slam dunks. I have blogged about this before but it is now getting to the point where it is driving me crazy.
Yesterday on the way home from work, Bloomberg radio broke in on this hastily arranged presser:
Lets just step outside of the fact that I am sure that Putin and the other principals of the situation are laughing (or cringing, as the case may be), knowing that our administration literally has no clue what to do right now.
My main point is that if you are arranging a presser on a matter of importance, I imagine you may want to understand who the major players are in the scenario. At the 2.21 mark, Obama boots the name of the Ukrainian prime minister. As I was sitting in my car I wondered aloud if he was reading off of a teleprompter, or was going off the cuff. I am glad I found the video above, but it doesn’t really answer my question completely.
After looking at it a few times, I am not sure if he was unable to pronounce the name, or if it wasn’t on the cue cards he was reading off of. Either way, he looks like a dunce, and once again, America looks to be a laughingstock to the rest of the world.
With my sooper seekrit ciphering abilities, I was able to find the name and figure out how to pronounce it.
Whether or not Obama’s handlers didn’t have the name on the card or he was unable to pronounce it (at least make a stab at it, Barack!) isn’t really that important in the big picture. What is more important to me is the following.
Are Obama’s handlers this dumb, or is he just blowing them off, or a combination of both? These things like state dinners, quick pressers, and the like that Obama constantly bungles should be no-brainers, and the work should be 100% correct each and every time. No excuses.
Damn that TelePrompTer typist !
I’ve wondered since that first PR debacle with the former British PM. He and his family came bearing rather carefully selected gifts … and the Obamas returned the favor with a box of DVDs that weren’t even in the right format, and a cheesy box of toy helicopters that looked as if they came from the White House gift shop. I had always thought there was a protocol office which took care of things like this … and if the Obamas just didn’t bother listening to them and winged it at the last minute. Or if it was a calculated sort of thing…
1. Obama is incompetent.
2. His staff are incompetent.
3. He doesn’t care anyway.
4. It’s Bush’s fault!
I wondered about the protocol blunders. Maybe someone will write a book like Unlimited Access about the Obama White House.
This woman sounds like she should know better. She quit last year and got lots of praise. She was a Clinton supporter so maybe she was ignored by Obama early one. It’s hard to explain.
Fascinated by politics, she showed up in Little Rock and started lugging briefing books and literature around the state with Hillary. “No one wanted to work for the spouse of the candidate – everyone wanted to work with the candidate. (Working for Hillary) was the best decision I ever made,” she says.
In 1993 she tagged along to the White House as special assistant to the First Lady. In 1997, at 32, Marshall was appointed social secretary, the youngest on record..
Her background seems to be social, not policy. The imposter scandal didn’t seem to hurt her. Who knows ? This White House fails on so many levels.
Aw, cheer up. You could have had McCain.
” You could have had McCain.”
At least he could pronounce Corps. Probably knew what language was spoken in Austria and Afghanistan. Maybe even how many states there are.
By the way, what the devil is this?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2570996/At-27-dead-109-injured-gang-knife-wielding-men-attack-train-station-China.html
}}} Either way, he looks like a dunce,
He has another look with Libtard Distortion Lenses off? Never seen it. I demand proof!
There is no way McCain makes this many of these types of mistakes if he were prez.
}}} By the way, what the devil is this?
A story that will never make the news in the USA.
However, given that doctors in the UK are attempting to ban kitchen knives, I suspect it will get substantial play there…
}}} This White House fails on so many levels.
Isn’t the question really, “Are there any levels on which it succeeds which are good memes to promote?”
“By the way, what the devil is this?”
Female attackers sounds like Chechens.
About a thousand of them were in Syria last year. Could be that some have been subcontracted to East Turkmenistan.
All these experts, and Ivy grads, and big shots of every stripe and flavor—I’ve been watching them foul things up over and over and over, for more than a half-century, since I started to become aware of the larger world.
All the failures during the space race, the military misadventures all over the world, from the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam to the latest fiascos in the Mideast, the big social programs that studies showed would fail before they were even enacted, and then proceeded to fail miserably for decades as they were refunded again and again.
The failed Presidencies, the endless warring amongst the endless departments and agencies and branches, the growing corruption at all levels.
The stunning venality of those who deemed themselves the leaders of our society, the emptiness of their cultural pretensions, the barrenness and bankruptcy of their shopworn ideologies and proposed policies.
I long ago abandoned indignation or astonishment at the bottomless stupidity and endless banality of their supposed accomplishments. All that is left is a tired cynicism, underneath which flickers the dim flame of a shrinking hope that even these utterly incompetent fools might stumble across a good idea once in a while and not screw it up.
But, in this instance, and so many others, it becomes clearer and clearer—they don’t know what they’re doing, and they never did.
An excellent jeremiad, sir. Hats off!
Veryretired – extend that for the intellectuals in Western Civilization for the whole 20th C. They were the foundation of both Nazi and communist support, and they guessed wrong on most major events in the century.
Trial and error by us dumb folk would have been better. (Not good, but better.)
The Constitution in general, and the Bill of Rights in particular, were written the way they were because the founders of the Republic knew enough about the world around them, and the history of that world, for them to realize that the critical element in any national government was keeping the aristocracies that naturally formed in any society from trampling over the rest of the citizenry.
All those articles delineating the limits of state power were not just dreamt up for a class project, or because the boys at the convention were bored one afternoon. They were carefully formulated, carefully written, and carefully linked together for the express purpose of making it difficult to expand the capability of the government to regiment and control the lives of the ordinary citizen.
Was it all perfect and flawless? Of course not—it was a human endeavor, the work of flawed and imperfect beings who recognized their own imperfections would be found in any group of potential rulers, and attempted to forestall their successors ability to establish the kind of authoritarian, and even despotic, regimes that littered the bloody history of our species, and were found in every corner of the world they lived in.
The concept of the rights of man as inalienable, as sacred beyond title or station or wealth, as solely contained and inherent in the individual person, was the only truly revolutionary social and political idea that had ever arisen in human history.
It was, and is, an idea that challenges and overturns almost everything that had been accepted as normal in human affairs.
It is no wonder that it has been under continuous and ferocious attack since the day it was promulgated, and needed to be defended repeatedly with the blood and treasure of the citizens of the nations that honored it.
The opponents we now face are no where near as accomplished in their dangerousness as some of those we have confronted, and defeated, in the past. The present situation is more like having rats in the basement, or termites in the walls, i.e., an infestation of pests, as opposed to the vipers we once needed to crush under our heel.
This is oddly comforting, and wearying, in equal measure. In many ways, it is the arrogant incompetence of our current elites that is the most galling and infuriating.
We have allowed the American equivalent of the “upper class twits of the year” to gain control of many of the essential power couplings that enable our society to function, and the continuous crises and miscalculations and missed opportunities we have experienced are the inevitable results.
We are now, and have been for quite some time, suffering the reign of corrupt incompetents disguised as a credentialed elite worthy of our respect and cooperation.
They are not worthy of either, and it is long past time to rescind the pretense of mutual respect, and to end any non-coerced cooperation with any and all state functions which, under the pretense of serving the public good, merely reward and reinvigorate the incompetence and power lust of the ruling elites.
We must consider the power of the powerless, and the effectiveness of non-cooperation.
They don’t know what they’re doing, and the sooner they are removed from the positions of unearned power they have created, and those positions abolished, the better the future of our community will become.
Like he said.
Mike