Yeah. Right. Thanks for clearing that up.
I know I’d been wondering for some time if he knew the
difference. I’m still not sure.
In case you missed it, that’s a quote from Obama the other
day. I couldn’t make this stuff up. NBC.com even headlined their front page with
“’I am not a dictator’ says Obama.”
It reminded me of Nixon’s famous “I am not a crook. “ And Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that
woman …”
You just know when they made those statements they knew they
were trying to skate by on some technicality or goofball rationalization.
In Obama’s case, maybe he simply “misspoke,” as they say
these days. Because I honestly believe that
way down deep he wishes he had complete dictatorial powers. “President” is not grand enough to encompass
what our Nobel Prize-winning Chief Executive’s ego wants to do. Perhaps “Your Excellency” or “Your Highness”
would sound better to him than a plain old “Mr. President.”
Or maybe we could have some extended title like “Master of
the Universe, Sovereign of the Free World, Protector of the Planet Earth,
Supreme General and Admiral of the Armed and Unarmed Forces, and Most Important
Person of the United States of America.”
Yeah, that might work.
I know I sometimes seem to be constantly bashing Obama. In truth, he fascinates me in a strange sort
of way. It’s like getting sucked into
watching someone running a shell game; you think it’s inevitable he’s going to
lose at some time but he never does. Not
unless he wants to so he can jack up the bet.
Honestly, Obama is like that. In a perverse way, you have to admire how Obama
is so gifted at shifting blame, avoiding responsibility and never dealing with
any real problems. Still, people who
should know better praise his leadership on “tough” issues, when he’s yet to
deal with any.
Monarchs often use what’s called the “royal we” when they
are talking about themselves. Obama
doesn’t use that convention, even though he apparently believes “ L’Etat c’est
moi.” He prefers to talk about himself,
his favorite subject; he never tires of saying I, me, my, and mine.
However, he does like using the phrase “most people” when
he’s really just talking about himself and his administration.
So, he’ll say something like “most people know I came to the
table with a very fair and balanced approach to solving this problem, a
solution most people approve of wholeheartedly.” And “most people know this is
the right thing to do.” What he’s really
saying is that his solution – in his opinion, which is the only one that
matters – is the only solution. Because
it’s his solution. So there.
What’s amazing is nobody ever asks him what he’s basing his “most
people” claims on; does he have some secret stash of data that tells him alone
what the public thinks, believes or agrees or disagrees with? Is he talking
about a true majority of the population, a mere plurality, or what? He can’t be basing it on polling data because
the real “most people” in the polls think the government has a spending problem
and that it needs to cut spending. He
doesn’t.
Up to this point he’s been like a gypsy playing poker with
blind people. Everybody at the table –
especially the media – trusted him and believed whatever he said. So of course he’s always won.
That’s beginning to change.
There are whispers in the media – not just from the Fox side – that maybe,
just maybe, he hasn’t been playing on the up and up all the time. In fact, he’s been caught in some whoppers recently.
Like when he said sequester was the Republicans’ idea; Bob
Woodward pointed out it was Obama’s idea from the get go. Then
there have been all of Obama’s hyperbolic statements about the potential effects
of sequester. The economy was going to
tank. Thousands of teachers,
firefighters and police would lose their jobs.
TSA workers would be cut, causing long delays at airports. Parents with kids in Head Start would have to
find alternate day care. Border security
and defense would be compromised. There
was even some reference to cut backs in milk for babies.
A guy from the Education Department claimed some teachers in
West Virginia were already getting pink slips because of the impending sequester. When the media found out that wasn’t true, it
got reported rather widely, which was unusual for a press so deep in the tank
for Obama for much of his reign.
Now there’s widespread belief that Obama’s doom and gloom
projections might, just might, have been a tad overblown. Maybe it was a case of crying wolf once too
often, for the public tuned out early on and has never come back; in one recent
poll three out of four Americans said they weren’t that worried about the
sequester. His request for $680 billion
in new taxes by “closing loopholes” for the wealthy also fell on deaf
ears.
His multi-state campaign to put pressure on Republicans was
a PR failure. Nobody budged. Media types weren’t even that jacked up, either;
some started producing even more stories questioning his assumptions and end of
the world scenarios.
Obama must be baffled.
He’s always won before.
Maybe he’s finally discovered he doesn’t have the
dictatorial powers, or the ability to mold public opinion, he thought he
had.
Perhaps that’s why he let slip that quote about not being a
dictator.
His next big hurdle is only a few weeks away, when a bill
needs to be passed to continue funding the government. Then he faces another debt ceiling fight in
May.
He trotted out all the scary stuff he had for the sequester
debate. What’s left? I don’t know how you top what he’s put out
there already. And that wasn’t
enough. So what’s next? I
shudder to think.
One thing to keep in mind:
he doesn’t take losing well. And
sometimes – like someone running a shell game – he might let you win just to
raise the stakes on the next play. Or,
as some have suggested, he might use sequester to make the most painful cuts he
can to prove his point and further discredit Congressional Republicans in
advance of the bigger issues of funding the government and the debt
ceiling.
I don’t put it past him.
He plays a long game.
But if he fails again – and the public shrugs off his next
round of horror stories and turns on him, which is also possible, his dreams of
absolute power will be at an end.
Stephen King once wrote about what he called the “big bug
movies.” He said the flaw in their
horror factor was that they scared you
until you saw the 10-foot spider or whatever.
After that moment, it wasn’t nearly as frightening any more. To
keep people on the edge of their seats you were forced to keep stepping up the
size of the spider, and sooner or later people got bored and lost interest.
Obama should have thought about that before he pulled out
all the stops on something that’s little more than a rounding error in our
Federal spending.
If he wants to be a dictator, he’s going to have to get
better at it.
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