Obama Agonistes - Today's Speech And The 'Not Me' Campaign

If some of you have 54 minutes of your life you don't particularly need for far more useful purposes, you're perfectly welcome to dig up videos of President Obama's speech today.

For those of you with more important priorities or weaker stomachs, I endure these things so you don't have to, and I can summarize it all up for you here quite nicely:

'Bush did it. It's all his fault '.

'It's all the fault of the tax cuts'.

'It's all the fault of Wall Street and those evil banks and mortgage companies'

'It's all the fault of those evil, obstructionist Republicans.'

'Mitt Romney is Gordon Gekko.'

'The Republicans want little children to starve as they boot them off head start. They want people to die of Cancer and AIDS and to take away everybody's healthcare. They want seniors eating dogfood. They want dirty air and dirty water so that big corporations can pollute at will. They want to fire all the teachers and stop people from getting money to go to college. They want to do all this so they can pay for their millionaire's tax cuts.'

'Uh, I really did cut the spending and add a bunch of jobs, but I didn't screw anything up - hey it was like that when I got here. Ain't my fault.'

'And anyway, if you like how things are going, I really need more time to finish what I started, so vote for me and vote those evil Republicans out. And uh, I apporved this message.'

That's basically it. This was the speech that was billed as an Obama masterpiece as the one that was going to turn everything around. And it was 54 minutes of turgid, out of touch horse manure. When even partisan fans like Jonathan Alter and the people at MSNBC were panning it, you know it was awful.

President Obama has reverted to his old trick of mechanically moving his head from side to side to take in those stereo teleprompters.Every so often, he'd remember and stop, but then he'd forget himself and start doing it again. He seemed vaguely uncomfortable delivering this masterpiece, as though it was something he had to do but was anxious to finish so he could go on to more important things.

Ten minutes into it,my mind started drifting and I began fantasizing about - well, never mind.

President Obama's quest for re-election has evolved into the 'Not Me campaign'. Some people will believe it, but not all that many are going to excuse it. They're going to remember that this president was elected to fix things. He hasn't.

No new net jobs have been created no matter how you slice and dice the numbers, spending is up 27% this year adjusted for inflation from the last year of Bush's presidency and unemployment, according to the government's artificial rate remains over 8%, even with the tricks of massively deflating size of the labor force and not counting people who have stopped looking for work.The economy is growing at an anemic 1.4%.

President Obama really, really wants us all to forget that it was Senator Obama and his Democrat colleagues who voted for the 'Bush policies' he keeps blaming everything on including TARP, when they assumed the majority in both houses of Congress after January, 2007.

The president made a turgid analogy, comparing himself to someone who got stuck with the bill after sitting at a restaurant table after the guy already sitting there ran up a huge tab for a steak dinner. In reality, President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the rest of the usual suspects placed their orders on the bill as well..and since they were the majority in Congress, they okayed it and added a ton of their own little entrees and appetizers before the waiter took it into the kitchen and the food was served.

Not only that,but once he took over the White House, he and his party had a veto proof majority and could do pretty much whatever they wanted. They didn't order just a fancy meal, they ordered a lavish banquet, complete with the best wines on the list and a free hand with the most expensive hors d'oeuvres and the dessert cart.At least that's what the Congressional Budget Office's figure's show.

What President Obama is really telling us with the Not Me campaign is that he is incapable of fixing anything and essentially incompetent.

He claims he wants a mandate so he can really do what he was elected to for, but what happened during the first two years, when he had a free hand?

He's right about one thing. The country has a choice. We can reign in this nonsense, send this president and his enablers packing and save our Republic, or we can end up like Greece.

The choice really is that stark, and this miserable speech underlines that, if it does nothing else.