En Garde In The Bunker
Full disclosure – Since I had an early-morning wake-up for a 5AM start, I used the droning voice and the yo-yo clap-claps and the DemoMarxist jumping up and down faux cheers to drop off to an instant deep sleep, to which I at least can offer thanks to the teleprompter speech-boy and the deliverer of same (and the automatic shut-off mechanism on the live feed).
Here’s the morning after pill roundup from various and sundry, chosen entirely at random without rancor or further commentary …
First up Ben Stein from the American Spectator, who opines:
My favorite part of the speech, though, was about how he wants to make a kinder, gentler politics in America. He sticks it to the Republicans any chance he gets, attacks the police, mocks law enforcement, and then he gets all hissy when anyone criticizes him. And what’s with him comparing anti-Semitism and discrimination against transgenders? I love transgenders. They are super cool. But when was there a Holocaust against them? The two victim groups have little in common. And what’s with Obama and the Gay Marriage thing? He says the fight is all over. If that’s true, why is he bringing it up? If that’s true, why is the Supreme Court hearing a case about it? I love gay people. Almost everyone I know is gay. But why is Mr. Obama so obsessed with them if their fight is won? And why is he bragging about the U.S. pulling out of Afghanistan? Usually losing a war is not a cause for celebration. Everywhere we look, the terrorists are on the ascendant and civilization is in retreat. So, what is Obama crowing about? Is he really as blind as he acts or is he just stating a preference about the outcome? Why is he unable to use the phrase “Islamist terror”? Does he think the Islamic State likes him if he uses weasel words?
He is just so incredibly sorry as a leader. Bragging about LGBT triumphs as all of Europe trembles at Islamic terror and the whole Middle East except for Israel and Egypt (which he dislikes) falls into chaos. What is wrong with him? He has lost sight of what’s real and what is important. He looks extremely tired. Maybe he isn’t well.
Still, I sure would not want to be him, and have to answer to his constituency. Hard to please, aren’t they, Mister President? To think that civilization rests on a reed such as Barack Obama: terrifying.
Check the whole piece right here…
Next up there’s this from The DiploMad 2.0, h/t Gerard Vanderleun and American Digest…
For a very long time I have found watching our pretend President unbearable: the upturned nose; the arrogant stance and poking of the finger in the air; the empty words and unkept promises; the refusal to deal with real issues and the introduction of nonsensical ones; his complete lack of knowledge of American history; and, of course, the lies and the lies and–did I mention the lies?–the lies. Can’t do it. Won’t do it. I don’t want to hear about “free” community college; embracing the “dreams” of undocumented, i.e., illegal, aliens; and the need for the “rich” to pay more to address social and economic inequality, etc. Meanwhile, of course, our country, our allies, and our very civilization is under increasing attack from the purveyors of an ancient totalitarian ideology which we must respect, must welcome into our homes and are not even allowed to name–Psst! Just among us, it’s Islam. Makes you wonder if there is a disconnect between the elites and the people. Maybe, huh?
The longer version right here…
Daniel Greenfield, in FrontPageMagazine…
Daniel Greenfield…
Finally there are the genuinely evil lies, such as Obama condemning anti-Semitism and explaining how his commitment to gay rights makes us safer right before he discusses his determination to release some of the world’s most dangerous Islamic terrorists from Guantanamo Bay.
And yet all of Obama’s lies are in their own way evil. We expect politicians to lie, but an Obama speech is more than a few lies. It’s an absence of truth.
Obama not only lies about the economy or the war, he lies about his policies, he lies about his motives, he lies about what he did and what he said, and he goes on lying about what he intends to do. He lies boldly and he lies by omission. He lies gleefully. Even when he calls for bipartisanship and decency, he perverts those impulses by lying about his refusal to compromise or show any decency to Americans.
What Obama has delivered is not an address, but a black hole of lies in which each lie clusters next to a dozen more until it is impossible to see the light.
Complete piece right here…
Next up a Frank Luntz mixed focus group expressing it like it is right after the dog and pony show …
And finally, just one from a coterie of foreign opinion, this one from Janet Daley in the UK Telegraph …
Janet Daley was born in America, and taught philosophy before beginning her political life on the Left (before moving to Britain, and the Right, in 1965) – all factors that inform her incisive writing on policy and politicians.
A good proportion of the US electorate must have hoped that in electing Barack Obama as president, they would be getting the visionary intellect and magnetism of a John Kennedy. Instead, they ended up with the vision of Jimmy Carter and the personal charm of Richard Nixon. Mr Obama’s State of the Union address was about as relentlessly bellicose and self-regarding as it was possible for a president whose politics had received two successive popular rejections to be.
Combined with the defiance of a man whose views have been repudiated in a way that leaves him powerless against a Republican-dominated Congress, there was an absolute refusal to grant that his own obstinacy might be in any way responsible for rendering the remainder of his time in office largely pointless. This implacable insistence on his own inevitable rightness, and the determination to claim credit for any conceivable success that the country (and its people) might have achieved, combined with a conviction that all those who opposed his judgment (on anything) were involved in a hateful conspiracy – where had I heard all this before? The lack of self-doubt, the paranoia about ambition-driven enemies, and the belief that history would exonerate him from all error seemed somehow so familiar …
Of course! This was vintage Gordon Brown, even down to the detail of policy: the simple-minded credo of wealth redistribution which Obama obviously thought was made possible by economic recovery. (He actually seemed to believe that the tenuous return of growth meant that national wealth could now be divided equally by taxation, ignoring the stultifying effect that higher taxes would have on that emerging growth.) In the end, he made his usual self-righteous pitch for bipartisan politics – which was, in effect, a demand that his opponents (and the voters who had swept them into Congressional power) simply admit that he was right all along.
What a waste of national goodwill this presidency has been. With a spirit of generosity and a real determination to unite the country, an Obama White House might have accomplished so much. Instead, it has shown itself to be disastrously out of its depth on foreign policy and intransigently out of touch on domestic issues. And contrary to his own clear belief, I do not think history will decide otherwise.
Sources … American Spectator; American Digest; FrontPageMagazine; Megyn Kelly; UK Telegraph; and personal archives…
