When I heard the president in the last debate, I thought I was in Cloud Cuckoo Land: he seemed to be running for office as a fresh challenger — with the same future tenses and subjunctive moods of “I will” and “I would” as he long ago used against Bobby Rush, Alan Keyes, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain, when he was the perennial potential office-holder. In other words, the president sounded as if he does not have a record to run on, only a speculative one about which to offer hypotheses. Note how Obama slept through four years and only comes alive in a campaign where he loves his own speeches, likes to accuse and belittle, and feeds off the frenzy of crowds — in comparison to all that, intelligence briefings and debate prep are a “drag.”
So what he said in these two debates was all a sort of lie, as if Mitt Romney has been president for four years or George Bush is now in his third term. The Greeks called such a busybody, non-stop talker a “polypragmôn,” someone who jumps from here to there, always talking, persuading, speechifying, but never really accomplishing anything. The more Obama promised, the more I thought I had amnesia: did he not have two years of a Democratic Senate and House, and in the beginning with a supermajority that was filibuster-proof?
I had a lot of Obamas in class. They sat in the front of the room, posed long eloquent questions, mellifluously interrupted the lectures with clever refinements and qualifications, often self-referenced all that they had read and done — and then pow!: you grade their first test and there is simply nothing there: a D or F. It was quite stunning: how could a student be so confident in his rhetoric and so dismal in his performance? […]
Each time you encounter such a Starbuck the Rainmaker or The Music Man, the experience still is discomforting, given the vast abyss between the eloquent grandstanding rhetoric and actual achievement — and the deliberate way in which you, the instructor, were to be conned. And if such students are athletic, dapper, charismatic, and sharply dressed (and for some reason they so often are), the disconnect becomes ever more arresting. Sometimes the debacle even worsens when they come to office hours after the first bad grade, “shocked” that the professor might underappreciate their rhetorical gymnastics. Similar is the gulf between Obama’s teleprompted verbiage and his actual performance of governing since 2009.
Obama’s jaw-dropping “horses and bayonets” line was scripted last night, just as the oft-heard boilerplate and all-too-familiar attitude that his challenger’s very existence is offensive and undeserving of any consideration.
We can’t pivot towards Asia with George Jetson Flying Cars and everything will not be better if we get The Rich(tm) to pay “a little bit more.”
We elected in 2008 a Petulant-Teen-in-Chief who doesn’t care if what he says is a blatant lie, he’s just out to wear you down into submission.
Ya think?
unlike the student obama has candy crowley on his dick looking out for him
Romney’s demeanor was pretty consistent throughout the debates.. Whereas Obama’s demeanor was “all over the map.”
Checkers versus chess?
Obama hasn’t run against even a marginally serious opponent (sorry, Ambassador Keyes and your supporters, but it’s true) since his first election victory. He got Peter Principled into the highest office in the land and now he’s going to go into the history books as the guy who made Jimmy Carter look not so bad.
VDH nails it!
During the “horses and bayonets” line, I imagine John Kerry, Vietnam Veteran and Presidential Debate Coach Extraordinaire was saying, “No, you fool! It’s pronounced BUY-aw-NAY!!!”
Hot new product idea: pie-flavored tea. Bottled.
” Obama’s jaw-dropping “horses and bayonets” line was scripted last night ”
Yeah but who was it scripted by and who was it scripted for? It was such a lame and terrible jab that it made an audible clunk. I have no doubt that it made Chris Matthews and Debbie Wasserman Shultz titter but it sounded like juvenile snark that missed the point to most everyone else. And it was literally wrong. Horses and bayonets are still around and in use. Worse, the point it was trying to make doesn’t apply to Obama’s defense funding record. Obama canceled building more F-22’s delayed the F-35, and wants a smaller navy instead of a bigger one. He wants to strip missile defense and to cut our nuclear arsenal unilaterally between 2000 and 300 warheads. In short, he IS gutting the military and not advancing it or improving it.
He’s an imbecile and his supposedly impressive debate performance was an obvious sham at BEST and a grandiose hallucination at worst.
BTW I voted today. I got a sticker and everything. The new districts are kind of weird. We had no republicans running for state rep. Just democrats and libertarians. Voted for Romney/Ryan and Ted Cruze.
Sure, Romeny’s absolutely going to fuck me, but unlike Obama, at least he knows how to fuck someone instead of ordering a bunch of Czars to do it for him like Obama did. It will be nice having an actual US budget again.
Along with ships, horses and bayonets Obama and his progressive cohort — so sincerely concerned with education are they [see: Wilson, Thomas Woodrow] — would have everyone abandon Pisthetaerus and Euelpides as ancient, obsolescent beings, akin to the humours of now defunct medical arts, useless to our shining modern age, utterly lacking any measure of wisdom to impart to this, our contemporary scientific, knowing age, an age well characterized by the person of Barack Obama — so much does it know.
These are two fellas who, to the contrary of Obama, I believe we’d all do well to make an acquaintance, since they found and populate the first utopia in the surviving literature: they show the way.
– At some point the weary electorate is going to just shrug their shoulders, reattach the bullwhip to their belt loop and do an Indianna Jones on Obama’s bayonet.
“To what use cannot hands be put? “
[…] awarded to Darleen Click, one of the Boudicas of the Right, for her succinct summation of Barry Hussein Marshall-Davis Obama’s main tactic in this election: We elected in 2008 a […]
[…] awarded to Darleen Click, one of the Boudicas of the Right, for her succinct summation of Barry Hussein Marshall-Davis Obama’s main tactic in this election: We elected in 2008 a […]