Resigned To The Fact : The Sinking Ship Obama

En Garde In The Bunker

En Garde In The Bunker

Of late, I and many of the people I talk to, have become resigned to the fact that America currently has the government it deserves. Abandoning its moral plumb-line and having lost its spiritual compass, American national and local debates are, generally speaking, a social and moral travesty. As I have opined on many other occasions, our government is dominated by liars, cheats, tramps and thieves, and public division is in as dangerous a state today as it was in the late 1850s.

To cut to the chase, the problem isn’t Shinseki at VA or Sibelius at HHS, or Holder at Fast & Furious, or Hillary Clinton and “at this point what difference does it make,” nor in any of the other bureaucratic nightmares like the NSA, IRS, BLM, TSA and their surrogates, since they’ll simply appoint other statist masterminds using top-down flawed solutions that still won’t effectively manage, anticipate, or respond to a diverse and quickly changing environment. The solution, dear friends, is turning it all over to the free market to compete and experiment. Bad service and products are punished in the free market while rewarded in government bureaucracies. Small government manages, while big government harshly rules with irrational regulation. So yes, we become resigned to the fact that the sinking ship Obama, is in fact, sinking of its own bloated weight.

The scandal is not the VA nor any of the other bureaucrat leviathans mentioned above; the scandal is government’s failure to recognize that big government bureaucracies do not work. Free market solutions get punished when providing terrible services, while government masterminds and their bureaucracies get rewarded as a matter of course. Go to the post office or even state-run DMVs and what do you see? Lines winding around the block and you’re standing in line for 30 minutes or more; go to FEDEX or UPS and you’re in and out in five minutes.

In his presser, Obama blamed the old computers for the VA disaster. The computers for goodness’ sake!

So we have a president and Commander-in-Chief who doesn’t even know that the poor computers are idiotic boxes that are doing what the programmers and human operators tell them to do. But hey, a community organizer is not a computer programmer, right? – but his “investigation” turned up a heretofore unnoticed problem: the computers weren’t working right because they were old or something! Wow, no wonder people had to get put on secret lists; if only there had been some other way to track appointments, like, I dunno, resigned to the fact of an appointments book or something.

It’s a good thing we had Barry on the job. That reporter who already investigated this seemed to think there was some kind of wrongdoing, and a cover-up, but now we know they were resigned to the fact that they just couldn’t afford the latest software.

During the closing days of WWII in Europe, Hitler hunkered down in Berlin’s “Fuhrer-bunker,” ordering his generals to move armies that no longer existed, and in this case, Obama’s behavior bears an eerie resemblance.

Obama is resigned to the fact that he is his own worst enemy. I mean look at what he has going for him: a completely sycophantic mainstream media, Hollywood, academia, the huge federal bureaucracy, and 40% of the nation fawning all over his every move. Yet in spite of ALL that, he fails at everything he attempts, and it isn’t like the GOP establishment leadership has really done much to oppose his agenda after all! It is showing up more and more, that Obama is just an incompetent, inept, radical Left-wing community organizer who somehow finagled a law degree (“had a law degree,” I should say, since he and his wife “voluntarily retired their law degrees and are not authorized to practice law.”)

Consider his statement in the presser: “caused by outmoded hardware that makes it too cumbersome to review patient information.” You have to gaze in awe at that part of his excuse, and let it settle in for a while. The VA was just in the news 10 days ago for spending – get this – half a billion dollars on drapes, furniture and other accessories for their various and assorted facilities; somebody obviously forgot that those outdated, outmoded computer reservation systems needed a swift and sure updating. MMMmmmmm, yeah, well …

So, the buck stops with Shinseki and Carney, NOT the president and commander-in-chief. He didn’t fire them, he hung onto them until they resigned to the fact of their own incompetence. Now if only Obama had a similar character of purpose to be ashamed enough of his own presidency to resign, we’d all be in good shape; but as we all know, in his mind he can do no wrong, being resigned to the fact of the elite narcissist that he is.

So, on to John Hayward and his assessment from Human Events …

John Hayward, Human Events

John Hayward, Human Events

President Obama gave a bizarre press conference to announce the resignation of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki on Friday morning.  I notice the major networks are keen on snipping this performance at the two-minute mark… with good reason.  The President went on for twenty more minutes, and if most Americans hear what he had to say, this White House is in very deep trouble.  It was a performance so soulless, so political, so dishonest, and so disconnected from reality that it seemed almost deranged.

So far, so good, although the very fact that Obama’s trying to pass the whole thing off as an unfortunate natural catastrophe, not deliberate malfeasance and shocking incompetence from himself and Secretary Shinseki, is both predictable and annoying.  He goes much too far in praising Shinseki, which is part of the Obama strategy to portray the whole affair as an incomprehensible crisis nobody could possibly have dealt with.  The only reason Shinseki resigned is that the Democrat Party looked at its internal polls, had a collective heart attack, and told Obama his usual “fire no one, wave it off as a phony scandal” strategy was unacceptable, what with a tough election coming in November.  Obama was dragged kicking and screaming into this press conference today; he should not be permitted to spin this as anything other than the purely political drama it was.  If President Obama was any sort of leader, or even a reasonably engaged manager, the scandal never would have happened at all, and if it did, Shinseki’s resignation or sacking would have come much sooner.

But it’s the President’s ensuing remarks that get really weird and outrageous.  It’s not hard to see what he was trying to do: prepare the Sunday-show battleground with official talking points for all the little Democrat robots to parrot in unison.  They’ve trying to unite behind the insulting and ridiculous position that the only real problem with the VA was insufficient funding – throw more tax money at the problem and everything will be fine!

Obama took this political narrative to the absurd extent of claiming that the secret waiting lists were some sort of computer glitch, caused by outmoded hardware that makes it too cumbersome to review patient information.  Newsflash: this scandal is about the widespread and deliberate falsification of records, not a couple of old Windows boxes crashing.  Also, we saw what Barack Obama can do with a billion dollars’ worth of new computer and software during the ObamaCare launch last October, and it wasn’t pretty.  The patience of American voters for the supposedly brilliant and ultra-modern Obama blaming all his problems on the IT department is wearing very thin.

Continues…

And the full 22-minute presser from C-Span