Join Date: December 30 2008
Posts: 372
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A failed presidency
The following is an interesting article and I wonder how long Dr. Hunt can
remain at NIH once the powers that be get wind of this article.
Dr. Hunt is a social and cultural anthropologist. He has had nearly 30 years
experience in planning, conducting, and managing research in the field of youth
studies, and drug and alcohol research. Currently Dr. Hunt is a Senior Research
Scientist at the Institute for Scientific Analysis and the Principal Investigator on
three National Institutes on Health projects. He is also a writer for American
Thinker.
Subject: Another Failed Presidency
An article from American Thinker by Geoffrey P. Hunt
Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency
since Woodrow Wilson. In the modern era, we've seen several failed
presidencies--led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ. Failed presidents have one strong
common trait-- they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ
wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his
own party. Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a
statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to China 20.
But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big. Failing fast. And failing
everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in
forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy
Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her finger on it: He is failing because
he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them.
Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control
of his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of American Thinker
produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because
fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is
conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.
But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president
riding in on a wave of unprecedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his
tenure and become a lame duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free fall.
In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point advantage.
This truly is unbelievable. What's going on?
No narrative. Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a narrative about
himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or
written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect
with us. He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us.
All successful presidents have a narrative about the American character that
intersects with their own where they display a command of history and reveal an
authenticity at the core of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing
way with the majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose
narratives not only touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter
than we are. Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose
politics don't align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman,
Ike, and Reagan.
But not this president. It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing
about economics, and is historically illiterate and woefully small minded for the
size of the task--all contributory of course. It's that he's not one of us. And
whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout
made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn't command our
respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right
and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not
existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't
correspond with our experience.
In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this
man, he's dissed just about every one of us--financiers, energy producers, banks,
insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators,
post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job. Expect Obama
to lament at his last press conference in 2012: "For those of you I offended, I
apologize. For those of you who were not offended, you just didn't give me
enough time; if only I'd had a second term, I could have offended you too."
Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a
useful remedy for such a desperate state--staggered terms for both houses of the
legislature and the executive. An equally abominable Congress can get voted
out next year. With a new Congress, there's always hope of legislative gridlock
until we vote for president again two short years after that. Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them. The coyotes howl
but the wagon train keeps rolling along.
Margaret Thatcher: "The trouble with Socialism is, sooner or later you run
out of other people's money."
"When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both." - James
Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus "A Liberal is a person who will give away everything he doesn't own." - Unknown
Do not involve yourself in the affairs of dragons, remember you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
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Lets see one in five Americans own guns, and only four million belong to the NRA? Something is wrong there.
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The government wants to borrow money then give it to the people who screwed it up, and my grand kids have to pay it back? In the mean time my taxes are going up, and my income is going down? Sounds about right!
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