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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: KLP who wrote (371072)7/1/2010 2:54:26 AM
From: Nadine Carroll7 Recommendations  Respond to of 794033
 
"Seminar leader" would not be my description of choice

Noemie Emery: Too brilliant to fail
By: Noemie Emery
Examiner Columnist
June 30, 2010

An irresistible force is meeting an immovable object on the field of perception, and causing an odd sort of storm. The irresistible force is the growing idea that Obama has failed as a leader on a number of items: "Engagement" has failed; our allies are angry; the oil keeps gushing, his ideas are job killers; the recession goes on.

His party lost three big elections under his guidance and seems poised for a drubbing. The harder he pushes the country's laws leftward, the more its politics bend to the right.

David Brooks says, without fixing blame, that Obama has blown the most promising hand ever given a president. In the Hill, A.B. Stoddard is even more caustic: "Seventeen months into office, Obama is increasingly isolated -- from his party, from American voters, and from the world." People are losing their faith in his leadership, he is "so toxic in battlegrounds" that he cannot campaign for his candidates. "The country is more polarized than ever and Washington is even more a target for voter anger than it was under President Bush."

The immovable object is the conviction on the part of some who are also his critics that he is the smartest man who has ever held office, and is therefore too brilliant to fail. Citing his "shimmering intellect," Richard Cohen is at a loss to explain why he hasn't done anything with it.

"Obama, for all his brilliance, has no real, felt understanding of management structures," says Tina Brown, describing the failure to handle the oil disaster, without explaining what, beyond talking, Obama has been brilliant at. He can talk up a storm (though of late this has faltered), but so far his shimmering intellect has led him to think that aggressors can be tamed by making concessions; that he should expand the welfare state just as it is proving unworkable (and very unpopular with the American people); and into replicating to an exact degree every mistake made by George W. Bush in handling Katrina in 2005.

Jonathan Alter blames this on Bush, while Cohen calls Obama a "sphinx," and blames his unsettled childhood. No one advances the more likely conclusion: That Obama seems so much like their idea of brilliance that they assume it of him without too much evidence; or that their perception of brilliance -- often no more than a verbal facility -- isn't much use in the world.

Nor are degrees from the very best places. Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln had next to no formal schooling, a failed haberdasher from flyover country saved West Europe from Josef Stalin, and one of the two most important presidents of the 20th century was an "amiable dunce" from Eureka College and Hollywood.

There have been many good presidents, and their backgrounds are varied. But none has been a blogger, a pundit, an editor of the New Yorker, or a writer for Vanity Fair.

When and how then does this president's intellect shimmer? At meetings.

He does seem a genius at chairing a forum, as at the "nuclear summit" in April, where the Washington Post claimed that he shone as a teacher, "calling on leaders to speak, embellish, oppose, and offer alternatives," coaxing consensus and forging agreements among 45 countries at hand.

The problem was that the value of these things was limited, as the attending countries weren't menacing anyone, while Iran and Korea, who were not in attendance, went on happily building their bombs.

He isn't a sphinx, he's a seminar leader who's out of his element. And more and more out of his depth.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: washingtonexaminer.com



To: KLP who wrote (371072)7/1/2010 11:59:43 AM
From: mph10 Recommendations  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 794033
 
If you say things like that, Holder will have you arrested while he is ordering staff to lose the evidence on Black Panther voter intimidation and cutting loose those thugs.

The only free speech the Obama administration wishes to allow is speech they approve. That's why an unqualified ideologue like Kagan was nominated. It's why Obama wants to control the net. It's why voter intimidation was allowed.

It's why the fight for freedom of speech is at the fore every single day. The Dems use inflammatory language like dirty bombs. Republicans and conservatives need to learn to engage and wipe out those tactics.

Freedom isn't free. YOU GOTTA PAY THE PRICE, YOU GOTTA SACRIFICE FOR YOUR LIBERTY. [couldn't find the lyrics to that song from the 60's, but did find the one below.)

youtube.com



To: KLP who wrote (371072)7/1/2010 8:57:51 PM
From: FJB10 Recommendations  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 794033
 
Maybe you are more like Laura Ingraham. I just saw her destroy two dems with logic and ideas. How does Bill O'Reilly have a show over Laura?