Mark Steyn: Learning the rules of an unengaged president

Mark Steyn: Learning the rules of an unengaged president

Avertible Catastrophe by Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post

Obama's Greek Tragedy

Victor Davis Hanson's Obama's Greek Tragedy makes a number of good points about the drastic disparity between Obama's hope and change campaign platitudes while merely continuing the policies of his predecessor, George W, who Obama excoriated during the presidential campaign.

The reality of Barack Obama is that he was an inexperienced community organizer with an undistinguished record as a Senate newcomer. A perfect storm of popular anger at eight years of George Bush, a lackluster John McCain campaign, Obama's landmark candidacy as an African-American, a disingenuous campaign promising centrist and bipartisan governance, and the financial meltdown in 2008 got the relatively untried and unknown Obama elected.

Most mortals in Obama's position would have treaded lightly. They would have kept promises, steered a moderate course and listened more than lectured until they won over the public with concrete achievement.

But headstrong tragic figures do not do that. They neither welcome in critics nor would listen to them if they did. They impute their unforeseen temporary success to their own brilliance -- and expect it to continue forever. So would-be gods set themselves up for a fall far harder than what happens to the rest of us.

That's about where we are now, with our president playing a character right out of Greek tragedy, who, true to form, is railing about the unfairness of it all.

Obama's thuggery is useless in fighting spill | Washington Examiner

This piece does a nice job summarizing the fact that Obama's thuggery is useless in fighting spill | Washington Examiner.

In particular I liked these two paragraphs:

And what about the decision not to waive the Jones Act, which bars foreign-flag vessels from coming to the aid of the Gulf cleanup? The Bush administration promptly waived it after Katrina in 2005. The Obama administration hasn't and claims unconvincingly that, gee, there aren't really any foreign vessels that could help.

The more plausible explanation is that this is a sop to the maritime unions, part of the union movement that gave Obama and other Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle. It's the Chicago way: Dance with the girl that brung ya.

Obama’s Gulf War III

This link provides an interesting perspective on Obama's handling of the BP oil spill.

Obama’s Gulf War III

Obama campaigned on competence and cool. But his technocrats, whether Van Jones, Dr. Chu, Larry Summers, or Eric Holder, are at best academic misfits and at worse simply unfit for executive responsibilities. Harvard Law Review may be of value for suing BP later and demonizing it in the press, and community organizing may be valuable in shaking down BP to clean up, but had only the president run an ACE Hardware store, or at least worked the night shift at Starbucks, he could have had some experience in delegating authority and demanding results from employees, while keeping in mind the bigger picture of economic survival. Right now we are being governed by a GS something, who has no idea where money comes from, but lots of ideas how to blow it. This crisis brings that out.

Pigs fly, and the Times chides Obama on the oil spill by neoneocon

Once again neoneocon nails a subject on the head. This time it's Obama's "response" to the BP oil spill, the gentle chiding given by The New York Times and a key oversight in their editorial.

Earth to NY Times: Obama is not a competent leader. He can pretend to be one during a campaign, and the press can assert that he is one when he has so little record to refute their claims. But that is not reality, it’s a co-constructed narrative that can easily fall to pieces when it faces events in the world.

The Times editors, who still appear to believe that Obama could show these things if he would only choose to do so, fail to understand the principle. But as wordsmiths who’ve most likely never had to show results in their lives (including an increase in circulation; theirs has been in freefall), but who believe something to be so merely by asserting it and/or bluffing, they must be very puzzled indeed.

Once a government pet, BP now a capitalist tool | Washington Examiner

Once a government pet, BP now a capitalist tool | Washington Examiner

While BP has resisted some government interventions, it has lobbied for tax hikes, greenhouse gas restraints, the stimulus bill, the Wall Street bailout, and subsidies for oil pipelines, solar panels, natural gas and biofuels.

Now that BP’s oil rig has caused the biggest environmental disaster in American history, the Left is pulling the same bogus trick it did with Enron and AIG: Whenever a company earns universal ire, declare it the poster boy for the free market.