For political reasons, Obama and allies act as if the oil spill is mainly about failure to plug the leak. Media pick up this meme, refresh it, and muddle things in cynical fashion. It is not failure to plug the spill which drives us really crazy. What drives us really crazy is failure to handle the clean-up in anything which approaches competent and responsible fashion. At this point, even mediocrity would be welcome, yet mediocrity is nowhere to be found. Things are much much much worse than mediocrity. Mediocrity is a seemingly impossible dream.
Pres. Obama said "we will not rest" until this problem is solved. Yeah, right.
Unlike Pres. Obama, Governor Jindal is not resting until the problem is solved. Unlike Pres. Obama, Governor Jindal is on top of and has an easy command of the facts; is not afraid to tell the facts, and in the process of telling the facts is not afraid to criticize the feckless U.S. Government in multiple areas.
This audio of Governor Jindal is well worth a few minutes.
Pres. Obama said "we will not rest" until this problem is solved. Yeah, right.
Unlike Pres. Obama, Governor Jindal is not resting until the problem is solved. Unlike Pres. Obama, Governor Jindal is on top of and has an easy command of the facts; is not afraid to tell the facts, and in the process of telling the facts is not afraid to criticize the feckless U.S. Government in multiple areas.
This audio of Governor Jindal is well worth a few minutes.
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To ask [about Candidate Obama's qualifications and history] was deemed churlish. UnAmerican. Bigoted.[T]he President was presumed a capable executive because he ran a campaign. The proof was entirely circular, but through some peculiar myopia no real questions were asked. To demand the sealed transcripts, to ask about the absence of articles for the Harvard Law review, to raise the non-existent legislative record was deemed churlish. UnAmerican. Bigoted. The fact that he had come so far was proof that he was qualified to come so far. And there the matter rested.[...]Barack Obama’s incompetence, if indeed he is incompetent, results directly from a flawed political and media process that allowed such a candidate to go forward. It’s a failure of quality control. It’s an indictment of the gatekeepers and of the media in particular.
Now, MSM are protecting Pres. Obama via pretending public anger at the White House is largely about inability to plug the leak. This meme is a lie. MSM's proactive promotion of this lie amounts to a media scandal which is hiding in plain sight. MSM protected Candidate Obama, and are now protecting Pres. Obama. MSM are calling down a reckoning upon their own heads.
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Related:
Terry Anderson in WSJ on close-in oil drilling:
[M]ore onshore [oil] development would certainly be safer. In early June there was a blowout in western Pennsylvania. Did you see it on the nightly news? No, because it was capped in 16 hours. The Texas Railroad Commission, the state agency that regulates oil and gas production there, recorded 102 blowouts of oil and gas wells since the start of 2006, resulting in 10 fires, 12 injuries, and two deaths. None of those made the nightly news either. The largest oil spill on Alaska's North Slope in 2006 was from a pipeline leak. It dumped only 6,357 barrels and had no disastrous impacts.
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A lot could be said about the following clip, in several areas and in several respects, and both positive, negative, and humorous. Mainly, Bill Clinton is more relaxed and more interesting than when in office.
Watching Pres. Clinton, one realizes most executives would be more effective than Barack Obama. Even Bill Clinton, when measured against Barack Obama, is a comparative selfless patriot and a massively more effective executive. If most U.S. Presidents had been as helpless and ineffective as Pres. Obama, then Pres. Clinton would already be on Mount Rushmore.
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If most U.S. Presidents had been as helpless and ineffective as Pres. Obama, then Pres. Clinton would already be on Mount Rushmore.
Talk about "An Inconvenient Truth"!
Oh, wait, that's already been used. :(
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Heh.
If most U.S. Presidents had been as helpless and ineffective as Pres. Obama, then Pres. Clinton would already be on Mount Rushmore ~~~~ and he would be carved into the mountain beside Nikita Krushchev, b/c the USSR would now be our master, comrade. Clinton and Krushchev were both like southern Bubbas, so they would be together on the "Two Bubbas" side of the monument.
Khrushchev even spoke with Southern accent!
Southern-Russian, i.e. - Ukrainian accent, that is.
And he loved, loved American Corn!
You are an interesting person: filled with knowledge which is bursting to get out!
Krushchev did a thing which many southern American men do, and which is common among Texas men, yet which Clinton - due to his narcissism - did not do: play a simpleton in order to get an edge in a negotiation.
This is very common in Texas, b/c a Texas accent is frequently perceived as a sign of ignorance - which, it is not a sign of ignorance. It is simply a regional accent. In a business deal, this perception allows Texas men to pretend to be simple-minded, thus causing the other party in the business deal to drop their guard and to underestimate the shrewdness of the Texan.
Krushchev did the same, maybe most famously when he banged his shoe on the table at the United Nations. Ever since I read of Krushchev's playacting, I have liked Krushchev better than before!
Clinton never really used this, b/c Clinton is such a narcissist that he cannot stand the thought that any person in a room would fail to believe him to be brilliant.
I think you find complexity and strategic thinking where just a common peasant slyness existed - Khrushchev was no sophisticate. It's hard to believe for Americans, used to a certain decorum from their politicians, but Russian public personas/celebrities are allowed a lot more in terms of uncontrolled impulsiveness.
Also, for a long time the politically correct and publicly accepted ideal was not an educated, Harvard/lawyer/intelligent guy with impeccable manners, but its opposite, determined by Marxist ideology: a crude, "from the soil" country bumpkin, delivering his folk wisdom in a frank and rather "salty" manner. Any apparatchik who had plans for a career had to cultivate self0image along these lines, or never be promoted. So those with natural roots played the role better - Khrushchev and then Brezhnev were from that category.
That doesn't mean he was in fact a stupid man, no. He was a calculating guy, and not harmless, either - don't forget he rose to power during Stalin years, was among his personal loyalist circle and was made 1st Party Secretary of Ukraine in 1938, after half of decade of purges and Holodomor. I think his public tantrums were partially staged, partially sincere - because after a certain point a guy gets used to absolute power: whatever he permits himself will be met with praise. So why not order bulldozers to clear the New Art exhibition or perform a scene in the UN...
It's common knowledge, nothing special about me knowing these things; the papers were filled with this stuff in the 80s.
This is an interesting point about Soviet communist culture promoting "from the soil" frank and salty assertiveness. I didn't know that, but it immediately does make sense that such would fit into the political culture.
Not "assertiveness" but proletarian and peasant origins. That is part of the doctrine. Aggression of the [formerly] lower classes comes with the territory. Everybody else, with a flaw in their family tree (an ancestor who own a business, however tiny, or was on a church staff, or god forbid, member of aristocracy) were pronounced lishentsi and their prospects, in any activity, was eliminated.
Delineation sunk in. :)
It's human, yet still surprising, to think of citizens being shunned/denied/punished b/c their ancestors owned a shop.
In the U.S., we have less dramatic yet still distant cousin phenomenons: the pc shunning of white men; the ridiculous attempted shaming of white people for racial sins in which the white persons' ancestors might or might not have participated; the barring of deserved university entry to Asian Americans (perversely, due to Asian Americans' better educational performance as a group).
Do you suspect that some of American society's pc shunning can be traced on a direct line from lishenets to mid 20th century U.S. Communists to modern day advocates of political correctness? I suspect it, especially as the communists of the "Frankfurt School" were the very persons who dreamed up political correctness as a method of attacking Western societies - and especially American society - at the roots.
Certainly. Concept of lishenets is the principle of Affirmative Action developed to its logical conclusion and aimed at elimination of all but preferred group. As Soviet street idiom says - they are "turned off the oxygen": no education, no voting, no government work (and in society where ALL work is government work, it means no work at all)...
And it's more universal - it envelopes not only distinction along racial/ethnic lines but class and religious.
Not middle 20 cent, though - Lenin issied a Decry about lishentsy in 1918.
The term is still surfaces in casual conversation in Russia - thre are still people who survived its implementation.
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