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Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Barack Obama's Oval Office Speech - The Fiction Cracks

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef0134846e6fe8970c-350wi

You can't spend what you ain't got/ You can't lose what you ain't never had
- Muddy Waters

President Barack Hussein Obama finally deigned to address the nation regarding the Gulf Oil spill last night, and it was a memorable occasion. Not for anything he said,of course, but because it's going to be seen in the future as the point where even many of his True Believers finally realized that the emperor really is naked. And it wasn't a pretty sight.

After 56 days, what we got last night was 18 minutes of platitudes, only about 10 minutes of which actually dealt with the oil spill at all. The rest of it was essentially about how we're going to spend a trillion dollars we don't have to try to power our society on windmills and unicorn farts.

The oil spill part of the speech could perhaps have passed muster maybe on Day 3 of the spill. Almost two months into it, with local officials at their wit's end and seventeen federal agencies tripping over each other to comply with Federal diktats that are often contradictory and counterproductive, it was an insult to our intelligence.

Obama seems to have known that too. The first part of his speech was robotic and strained, although,like all bad actors his out of control hands revealed his nervousness and discomfort.

The short version of what we heard from President Ass Kicker last night was:


'we are engaged in a Great War On Oil Slick comparable to WWII and putting a man on the moon, and dammit, I'm going to make BP pay for this.I'll unleash the lawyers. Meanwhile, to show that I'm actually doing something, I came down to the beach, ate a bunch of seafood, appointed another czar and shut down all offshore oil drilling.



The spill was really Bush's fault, and anyway, what we really need to do is pass the largest tax increase in our history with cap and trade and get off oil entirely, because we're running out of places to drill.Thankyooverahmuch ladies and gentlemen, G'night!'

The truth of the matter is that Obama has done little or nothing to date about the spill because he was willing to delegate it to others, and they were unwilling to be decisive without a nod from Obama. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal asked for federal approval within days after the spill to do the extra dredging to build sand berms and barrier Islands to keep the oil off the coast and only got an approval a week ago when he finally got fed up, went loudly public and said he was going to build the barrier islands and berms whether they were approved or not.

The President had nothing to say in his speech last night about why the US refused to accept skimmers and expert assistance from the Dutch, or help from the Norwegians or from 13 other countries who offered aid in cleaning up the Gulf. Or why literally miles of oil booms are sitting in a Maine warehouse despite the fact that the administration was told about the supply almost a month ago.

This kind of inaction is nothing new for him, by the way. He behaved exactly the same way when it came to disasters in Kentucky and Nashville, except he didn't even give them the courtesy of a speech.

And by shutting down off shore drilling at a time when the country's in a deep recession, the president has likely idled 46,200 high paying jobs, and long term job losses could reach 120,000 by 2014.Not to mention the lost oil production and the accompanying hit on the economy.

Obama's handling of the Gulf Spill makes George W. Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina look positively masterful..and I never thought I’d say that

In the last part of his speech, President Obama piled it on even deeper, talking about how we're running out of places to drill for oil and citing China as an example of a country that is investing in 'green energy'.

The truth? We're far from running out of places to drill. This report from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service estimates that the US has over 167 billion barrels of recoverable oil, a 75 year supply. And that doesn’t include our huge shale oil deposits or the huge amount of oil we could process cleanly and synthetically from the gasification of our coal reserves, technology that already exists.

And China? The 'green energy' the Chinese are investing in is nuclear power. Along with every source of oil they can get their hands on, including long term leases in Iraq, the fields Halliburton was able to save after Saddam set the wells on fire after we invaded.

The Chinese are smart enough to realize that nuclear energy is the only renewable energy that can run a booming economy as effectively and efficiently as fossil fuels. And while Obama has issued a lot of verbiage about nuclear power, he hasn't ordered even one new nuclear power plant to be built and has kept the approval process arcane and difficult to cater to his far Left environmentalist supporters - many who either already are or look to be making millions in government dollars for pushing things like biomass or wind energy.

As an interesting contrast, here's Governor Sarah Palin's take on this. Does anyone have any doubts that if she were in the White House even as vice president, this would have been handled very differently?

Aside from the obvious platitudes and prevarications, what we saw last night was the end of the Obama myth, and even a lot of his faithful soldiers on the Left recognized it, if you look at the various reactions to the speech. Even Mr. Thrill-up-my-leg, AKA Chris Matthews noticed how naked the emperor was last night.


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5 comments:

  1. Kudos to you for actually being able to watch that pukefest. I got my fill of Little Lord Fraudleroy during teh election.

    I was suitably unimpressed with king Shrub showing up days after Katrina with his usual knuckle dragging and shoulder shrugging, but this fiasco takes the cake. And it is of course no surprise that all of this is to push his massive cap and trade-a-palooza. Hopefully we can hold that bill off until after the midterms.

    This is what happens when a country of uninformed, easily duped idiots elects a sociopath on an unending quest to find a daddy. There is precious little separating this nutbag from Seung-Hui Cho.

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  2. louielouie4:42 PM

    i often wonder if ff has anything else better to do besides produce well written and informative essays such as this.
    just curious.
    and while ff did not offer an invitation in this essay, i do disagree with him on one statement he made in the essay.
    i agree with everything ff said, as far as opinion goes, in this essay.
    what should and should have happened.
    and the unicorn fart comment almost knocked me off kilter, but this time i recovered adequately.
    the comment that i disagree with is this:
    On the upside, it s important to remember that America has experienced worse times and survived.
    i'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that ff does this, as the last sentence of the essay, as some sort of grammatical or literary technique, that i know nothing of, so that the reader is left with the sense of hope.
    or this could be due to some lesson his father taught him, professionally speaking, or maybe it's just in ff genetic code.
    i have more of a stick-in-the-mud racist bigot characteristic to my genetic code.
    so this is why i disagree with the referenced statement.
    this country has gone through depressions and a war between the states. we have had incompetent and corrupt men in the white house. we have had dumm masses in the white house. the name bush comes to mind.
    however, when have we ever had a person in the white house that has so much influence on our everyday lives?
    when in the past have we been this close to the nanny state?
    when in the past has some one who honestly hates america been in the white house?
    when in the past have we had a president who believes in his heart of hearts, that america is no different from any other nation on earth?
    when have we ever had a president whose agenda is to dismantle everything that has come to be known as the american way of life?
    i disagree with ff statement because it's not that we have had worse circumstances to deal with.
    i disagree with ff statement because as far as hussein is concerned, from his perspective, these are good times and they are going to get better. if he has anything to do with it.
    and, if i may continue, ff offers that america has survived in the past.
    true.
    but if we come through this, and the american people aren't as dumb as a sack of hair, what america will survive? or if may re-phrase the question, what kind of america will survive? what will be of america? will it be the kind of america that the little stop-n-go clerk who calls hisself the president of iran is looking forward to? in that scenario, one could argue for disarmament of iran, because what need does iran have for the bomb, with hussein in the white house?
    we may have been through worse times.
    we have never had a worse person.

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  3. Duly noted, Louie.

    Some books to read, to get a sense of what I'm talking about:

    Washington: The Indispensable Man by James Thomas Flexner

    The First Salute ,by Barbara Tuchman, also about the birth of America.

    Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel (and the book on the same subject by Amity Schlaes is also excellent.

    But Not In Shame By John Toland about the opening months of WWII, when we were caught unprepared and there was literally almost nothing between the West Coast and the Japanese forces.

    I concur that Barack Hussein Obama is the worst president we've ever had,but the president doesn't make or break the country. The people do.

    Winston Churchill said it best:"The American people always do the right thing - eventually."

    And so we will.

    On the day the majority of the American people cease to honor the values that make America special and unique, when they cease being willing to defend our liberties with their blood and bodies, when the values Obama holds dear become the norm and people like Sarah Palin, Allen West, Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint among others are no longer to be found in public life, it will be a dark day for humanity and a time to truly worry.

    But that day is not today, and that time has not come yet. I believe that as firmly as I believe the sun will rise tomorrow in the eastern skies.

    Regards,
    Rob

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  4. louielouie12:02 PM

    speaking purely for myself, i look forward to the day, and pray for it, that you prove me wrong.
    and while you don't come across as the gloating type, i will accept any and all, warranted and/or un-warranted directed at me, without reservation.
    i want desperately to be proven wrong.

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  5. Hi Louie,
    It's not so much about being right.

    My views, such as they are come from my study of history and from my faith in G-d.

    Based on what I've observed, He doesn't make mistakes.

    And even if I do turn out to be wrong, I have no intention of collapsing and letting the enemy win without a struggle. In the last gasp, I plan to go down fighting, y'know?

    Keep the Faith,
    Rob

    ReplyDelete