There is an imposter in the White House. We want to know what happened to President Obama. Has some vast right wing cabal grabbed him from his bed and replaced him with a look-alike?
In something that seems right out of a science fiction movie, President Obama is going forward on his pledge to fund – wait for it – new nuclear power plants!
Holy Batman, Batman!
Something we at O-t-c can applaud about President Obama?
We are big believers in government spending to improve infrastructure (true improvements – not make-work boondoggles). We also believe it is government’s role to go after very long range goals that cannot be handled effectively by corporations that need to show profits for their shareholders quarter after quarter. And we believe that government has a role in underwriting potentially hazardous enterprises, where private insurance would find the risk untenable, and would thus not insure a project.
As long as it it done correctly, as long as there is competitive bidding on pieces of the project by truly competent corporations, and as long as the oversight is managed per science and not political correctness, the funding of nuclear power plants can be an extremely welcome development.
It is not often we have looked forward to offerings by this President. We applaud this move.
- Off-the-cliff.com
P.S. – So far.
We watched a little bit of the meeting between the President and the Republican House members today. We suppose it could be a start of sorts, but there is much to be done BY PRESIDENT OBAMA before we would accept it as any kind of “meeting of the minds.”
Let’s start with a word fraught with danger: compromise.
In the minds of liberals, compromise almost always means that conservatives move closer to their points of view. The idea of liberals moving toward conservative positions is considered a non-starter, and dead on arrival. This is poppycock pure and simple. It is no compromise at all, and we urge Republicans to tell liberals flat out that there will be no meeting of the minds if this is their definition of compromise.
So, for example, the health care deformation efforts that Nancy “The Off-the-Rails LOCOmotive” Pelosi tried to strong-arm through the House last year involved no compromise that we saw. Indeed, all opponents were cast by her as astroturf and Nazis. If there is any one person who poisoned the well last year, it was the Witch of California (with all due apologies to other witches – if apologies are due). This dingbat of a woman should be nowhere near the legislative process, let alone running it.
Mr. President, if you would have CONSERVATIVES talking civilly with you; looking for ways to compromise on legislation that for whatever reason you consider important, we urge you start calling on your own supporters to tone down the rhetoric. It would go a long way if you said something like this in your next speech to the American public.
“As you know, I have wanted to change the tone in Washington. I inherited very intense partisanship from the last admini — wait – no, I’m not going to go there again. This is on my watch now. OK – let me start over. I want – right now – I want to change the tone in Washington. I can’t control anyone else, so I will begin with myself. I will no longer demonize the prior administration which I acknowledge had to deal with some very tough challenges – challenges that I didn’t realize were as difficult as they were until I took office. So let me begin by apologizing to George W. Bush and his administration. You were patriots, doing the best you could. And while I disagree with some of the things you did, I will no longer second guess you, just as I would not appreciate the next administration second guessing me.
“But let me go beyond this. I cannot control anyone but myself. But I can call on everyone who supports me to start right now – today – to tone it down. Stop calling Republicans and Conservatives astro-turf or Nazis. They are neither. They are sincere; we happen to believe they are wrong. It is our job to persuade them to our point of view if we can, and to be civil regardless. If we can lead by example, maybe the Republicans and conservatives will respond in kind. God knows that there are many conservatives out there who have said as much. Maybe we can begin setting a new tone by leading by example. So, Speaker Pelosi, Vice President Biden and Senator Reid, please do what you can to tone down your language and the language of those who work for you. We are no longer at war with FoxNews. We are no longer at war with Corporate America’s boardrooms. You are all Americans, same as me, and I will no longer demonize you. I call on those who support me now to do likewise. Think Gandhi and Martin Luther King, who practiced civility under intense provocations. Can we do less? I call on our side of the debate to live more nobly and by our examples, perhaps the Republicans and conservatives will see that we are sincere in our desire to change things for the better.”
Will you do this, Mr. President?
- Off-the-cliff.com
An open letter to President Obama…
Mr. President,
We watched you give yet another speech tonight. Of course, this time, it was completely appropriate as it was the State of the Union speech. We haven’t had time to really examine it (transcripts and recordings), but we have some initial impressions.
#1 – You talk a good game; but it only works if people don’t remember 2009. We, at O-t-c, do remember 2009, and we’re hanged if we’re going to let anyone else forget.
#2 – Your calls for bipartisanship ring hollower than a termite infested tree stump. Where were your calls for bipartisanship in 2009? Where was your effort to tell Nancy Pelosi and her demons to tone down the incivility and to bring Republicans and Independents to the table? We watched all year long for such efforts, Mr. President. They never ever happened.
#3 – For the first time in memory, you actually praised America and almost – almost – acknowledged our exceptionalism. Of course, you didn’t use that word. Why is that, Mr. President?
#4 – You said that you deserved some of the setbacks you received. But you didn’t itemize any of them? What setbacks did you deserve, Mr. President. We can think of many, but it would be good to hear it from you directly. What don’t you blame on the previous administration – besides your inability to articulate with sufficient clarity and persuasiveness how abominations like Pelosi’s and Reid’s health care atrocities would actually be good for us.
#5 – The surprise of the night: you actually went against your base and called for opening up nuclear power plants. A few of us had our jaws drop on that one. Ditto with the idea of opening up Federal lands for oil drilling. Of course, talk is cheap. We’ll be watching to see if you deliver.
#6 – Your spending freeze seems like a fraud to us. You said you’ll freeze spending in 2011. That gives you all of 2010 to hike the spending beyond any conceivable limit and then freeze it there.
#7 – During 2009 you said that there were hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud and waste to be removed from the health care system. Well – how about going after it, Mr. President. Show us the money! Why do we have to wait for health care deformity before you start enforcing the laws against fraud and doing the work of a good manager and reigning in the wasteful spending?
#8 – There were a few self-deprecating moments in the speech. You almost seemed human. We recommend you do more of that.
#9 – There’s a difference between going after something that’s right and dictating what that something should be. It is your fault that We the People don’t trust the health care deformation efforts. Your fault. You tried to ram it through – without giving anyone time to see what was in it – more than a thousand pages – before the August recess. Remember that? How was that transparent, Mr. President? On what basis were we supposed to trust the process, or you, or Pelosi – especially with you marginalizing and demonizing everyone who opposed you.
You don’t get off the hook, Mr. President, just because you give a mildly friendly speech. You have a lot of work to rebuild trust with we Independents. And if you want any of your legislative agenda to go through, without losing your party in November, you’d better start communicating straight with us and taking what we want into account. (Same for the Republicans.) We are tired of our choices being Tweedledee and Tweedledum. We want pragmatists who share our values. If you can’t manage that, Mr. President, then we recommend that you “get out of the way,” to coin a phrase.
Addendum: One more thought: We think that Nancy Pelosi, again, showed why we so despise her. As narcissistic as the President is, and we believe that he is exactly the person Carlie Simon was singing about with her song, “Your so vain, you probably think this song is about you…” But Pelosi? She makes Obama look like the most comfortable in his own skin; the least self-aggrandizing person in the world. There she was, preening every time the President said that the House had passed a bill. We felt like we were watching a toddler being told that she did a good job using the toilet. “What a good girl you are!” Made us very queasy. Madam Speaker – you really need to get over yourself. You aren’t anything special other than to fellow stupids. Oh – and Biden – the guy was nodding his head more than the bobble-headed versions of himself. It was like his neck was on a loose spring. Come on – you can’t be agreeing with every single word the President says in realtime. You at least should wait till he completes a thought, shouldn’t you? Geez.
- Off-the-cliff.com
America
Failing
Day 370
Is Robert Gibbs competing with Nancy Pelosi – for the Stupid of the Year Award? Yes, Obama’s pet yorkie (below) was on Chris Wallace’s show, Fox News Sunday.
Wallace asked Gibbs about the swinemale Christmas Day Would-be Bomber; namely whether the intelligence community lost opportunities for valuable information from this guy because he was Mirandized within hours of being taken into custody – rather than being put into military custody.
Gibbs gave some of the most obtuse answers we’ve seen in a long time – almost Pelosi-ish. For instance, Wallace asked this: “The reports are — no, the reports are that he was interrogated for 50 minutes. He was then drugged. They — because he had, obviously, you know, some injuries. They — when they came back, he was read his Miranda rights and he clammed up.”
After some back-and-forth between Wallace and Gibbs (read the transcript, linked above), Gibbs said, “Valuable intelligence was gotten based on those interrogations. And I think the Department of Justice and the — made the right decision, as did those FBI agents. FBI interrogators believe they got valuable intelligence and were able to get all that they could out of him.”
Unbelievable. We have conducted job interviews for low level clerks that took longer than this. No language barriers. No efforts to hide the ball. Just looking for some background information so we could determine if the person was a fit for the companies we’ve worked at. And we’re supposed to believe that FBI agents could talk to a swinemale would-be bomber out of Nigeria/Yemen could be debriefed in under an hour? Boy, Mr. Gibbs, them must be some magic beans you have given FBI agents who can’t do any “harsh interrogation” without violating your Messiah’s sensibilities.
We’d bet a month’s salary that the FBI agents involved are not happy. We’d go farther: we believe that Mr. Gibbs is either completely out of the loop as to what the truth is or he is lying through his thin little teeth. Either Obama is absolutely in the know, and is thus responsible for dereliction of duty relative to terrorism (we believe this is the most likely scenario), or he’s been ill-served and kept out of the loop for plausible deniability purposes.
If there is another attack on our soil that is foiled by citizens and not by professional, or if an the terrorists win one and American citizens and/or residents are injured and killed, we will want Obama’s resignation. He has unilaterally disarmed us. He has unilaterally told professionals what they can and cannot do, regardless of their professional opinions. We believe that this has resulted in an unbelievable opening for the terrorists to perpetrate acts we’d rather not imagine – on American soil.
If that happens, Mr. President, we demand that you resign and that you be tried as a war criminal against the American people.
We watched with mixed emotions, your speech (yet another speech!) at your town hall meeting last week. We saw you strident, perhaps angry. We saw you defiant. What we didn’t see was that you had learned anything from We the People.
The mixed emotions come because it kind of tugged at us when you said (paraphrasing) that some of the attacks on you stung. That’s perhaps the most human thing we’ve heard you say – ever. It’s using English in a way that Americans around the country understand and get. It’s not professorial. It’s not highbrow, looking over the glasses to talk down to us. It’s just connecting man to man or man to woman.
However, in the next moment, we remembered.
We remembered when you tried to walk it back from your condemnation of the Cambridge Police Department, when you said that you had “miscalibrated” your language. Who talks like that?
But more – we remember that you did condemn the Cambridge Police Department after saying that you didn’t have all the facts. Fast forward to when you tried to stump for Martha Coakley, and you said that you didn’t really know Scott Brown’s record as you then tried to condemn it.
You are very fast to demonize fellow Americans, Mr. President. We can’t think of a single time that George W. Bush did that, despite provocation that makes your hot seat look like an air conditioned cockpit. You are very quick to lash out at us, Mr. President – at anyone who stands in your way. This is why we call you a bully. And you do it with people who are ill equipped to fight back against the force of the Federal Government in general and the Office of the President in particular. This is why we call you a coward.
We strongly suggest that if you want to turn things around on your watch, Mr. President, that you stop with the demonization; stop with the villainizing of entire swaths of Americans. Show the same kind of respect and courtesy that you and your Wicked Witch of the West demand every so often from the rest of us. Start treating people who disagree with you with respect, Mr. President, and just maybe you’ll find it reciprocated.
If you can’t manage that, we happily imagine you feeling irritated, annoyed, ticked off, etc. We wish for you the same consternation that you cause us. We would rather that we could respect an American President, but as in all things, respect is something earned, and you, Sir, have not earned it; not yet; though you still can.
- Off-the-cliff.com