The president gave the sort of scare speech he not long ago warned against, and blasted the income-tax rates he not long ago agreed were necessary — in a context in which he has just presented a budget with a $1.6 trillion deficit of the sort he now says is unsustainable, and has warned about recklessly voting against raising the debt ceiling in a fashion that he himself had once done, in a larger landscape in which he had once damned attacking Middle East countries in optional wars, Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention, intercepts, wiretaps, Predators, and leaving troops in Iraq, and then embraced or expanded all that and more (this list is infinite and includes everything from drilling to campaign financing to earmarks).
These weird about-faces raise interesting questions that transcend the current politics of the deficit:
a) Has Obama in his past careers never been called to account and so reached a point where simply being Obama means that we are not supposed to apply standards of accuracy, memory, and consistency to him in the way we do to all others?
b) Or does an absent-minded Obama carelessly make up things up ad hoc as he goes along, forgetting what he said earlier, but secure that his hope-and-change delivery of the moment will so mesmerize the audience that no one will remember or care if at times he ends up saying exactly the opposite of what he had said earlier?
c) Or is he so blatantly partisan a politician that he has no principles at all and knowingly says things that are aimed at appealing to 51 percent of the public at any given moment, and therefore will always change with public opinion?
d) Or is he so cynical that he understands campaign rhetoric has nothing to do with actual governance, and so he is allowed to say something that he knows in advance that he is not bound to follow?
e) Or is he so bored with the trying job that he feels no responsibility to offer reliable, consistent governance, and so rashly throws things out and then hastens back to the more enjoyable PR aspects of the office?
All of the above.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYes.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou must know we're going to vote "all of the above."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseFrom the SNL send-up of the 3am phone call ad:
"This job is HARD! I had NO IDEA!!!"
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(quotation starts at 3:25)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe answer is that our dominant national media flush past inconsistencies down the memory hole. Our self-congratulatory national press are hopelessly corrupt, unprincipled propaganda artists.
Like young madrasa scholars, they endlessly rock back and forth, repeating in unison their mind-numbing tropes (“Barack Hussein Obama Soetoro Soebarkah is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.”)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think the answer to Mr. Hanson's questions will be self-evident if one simply (re)reads Alinsky's book, _Rules for Radicals_.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDr. Hanson asks good questions. I think the answer is all of the above, depending on the circumstance. Obama is a nothing. A zero. A man that shouldn't be within a thousand miles of the presidency.
Anyone that looks for any consistency or coherence in Obama is on a fool's errand. I think the fact that anyone still takes him seriously just indicates a sense of denial that the country has made a disastrous mistake in electing this con artist to lead the nation. It is too painful the think otherwise.
Obama must be defeated in 2012. If he manages to shuck and jive himself into a second term, we're going to lose our nation. And you know what? We'll deserve it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat past careers? I'd hardly call what Obama has done prior to entering politics a career, and that's a big part of the problem with this president.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseObama is a Marxist, alright.
Of the Groucho variety.
"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTrick question. The answer is "All of the Above."
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusec). The answer is c).
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYes. He is all the above.
While dear leader has been described around the e-world as a narcissist, I would challenge that diagnosis. I would classify him nearer to a sociopath. While we have had many political hacks since this Country first started. Most would be hard-pressed to find one in the vein of our current POTUS. It has been proven over and over that he will lie about anything to get to where he wants to go. There is no real regard for those around him. He has exploited his family for gain. Dumps "friends" of many years in the name of political expediency. Tells the American public he hears them loud and clear from the results of the last election and prances on his merry way toward the economic and military destruction of this Country. If he is not defeated in 2012, I truly fear for the prospects of this once great Country.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think the answer is (a). The man has never been held accountable.
He is a dishwasher who promised to wash the pots and pans, then moved up to waiter. He took the customers orders and then became a bartender. Just when he was deciding between vodka or gin, he took the chef job. He put some veal in the saute pan, sliced some mushrooms, and then became the manager.
When all the customers started to complain about the lack of service, he blamed the staff!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseObama's "above the fray" aloofness that his media acolytes interpret as cool, dignified, supersmarts is in fact a timid reluctance to have his image battered by confrontations with reality. It is not that Obama is calculatingly cynical or hyper-partisan;; rather it is that his lack of experience makes him wary of acting like a grown up. He fancies himself "an idea man" who thinks in grand sweeping terms, and hopefully leaves the pesky details to underlings. Of course his grand sweeping thoughts are incompatible with reality, and his flip-flops are really just grudging expediencies that he hopes will paper over his inexperience, his naivete, and his inability to distinguish rhetoric from reality. His self-contradictions are "check is the mail," "no that dress doesn't make you look fat" ruses that he thinks will placate the rubes until he returns to Olympus to dazzle an incompetent press with gaseous platitudes.
The substance of Obama is that he is smart, but not nearly as smart as he thinks he is; he is outwardly arrogant, but in fact insecure (which is why he is always yammering about "I have directed..." "I have ordered..." "I,I...me,me...") because the vast majority of important matters occurs outside his comfort zone. He is articulate, but shallow, and he has given in to ambitions for which character is inconvenient.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDefinitely (f): All of the above.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe Emperor wears an empty suit.
's late, I retire.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseUnfortunately the answer is f.) All of the above.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think Obama has been desperately trying to disguise who he really is, as Stanley Kurtz convincingly makes a case for. The Ryan budget seems to already be paying dividends. By confidently presenting conservative solutions, we force the President to come out of the shadows and reveal himself. His statements are contradictory because you have the real Obama contradicting what the phony Obama, who was contrived to appeal to the electorate, earlier said.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThank you Mr. Hanson. It is really quite sad. Truly regretful.
However, your list of concerning questions, could be used to describe any countless number of elected Democratic Partisan Politicians, such as Pelosi, Reid, Waters, Schumer, Boxer, Kerry, Waxman, etc.
For example, "...he feels no responsibility to offer reliable, consistent governance, and so rashly throws things out and then hastens back to the more enjoyable PR aspects of the office?"
It reminds me of the 1990's, when Bill Clinton and his Administration decided to lie about the genocide in Rwanda, instead of offering something, or anything to address the issue. (Later, the comical Mr. Clinton would tell us, he was "obsessed" with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden).
Whether it be the enormous problems with Social Security, Medicare, Fannie, Freddie, Immigration, Terrorism, etc., it seems the entire Democratic Party prefers to play a game with ugly Partisan nonsense and obscene deceit.
Recently, we watched Hillary Rodham Clinton fail to offer any reasonable excuse for Smart Power's confusing folly in the Middle East, by telling an enormous lie about the oppressive Dictatorship in Syria. The endless fraud provide by Mrs. Clinton, from her "dodging sniper fire" to calling Assad a "reformer", could easily apply to your entire list of questions. This is the same Democratic Partisan who dismissed her husband's perjury, as merely a "vast rightwing conspiracy" just weeks after saying this:
"Should they ask for his resignation?" Hillary Clinton: "Well, I think that, if all that were proven true, I think that would be a very serious offense." NBC´s Matt Lauer , interviewing Hillary Clinton, Jan. 27, 1998
Today, we have watched Mr. Salazar lie about Oil production, Ms. Napolitano lie about "man-made disasters", Ms. Sebelius lie about the costs of Obamacare...
My point is simply, this is not just a dangerous problem with the hapless individual named Obama, it is a terrible epidemic provided by the modern Democratic Party as a whole.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTo correctly answer your question, it is none of the above.
What Obama says whatever is popular at the moment, regardless of the position or contradiction.
What does is 100% consistent regardless of popularity or harmful consequence, increase spending, increase taxes, increase borrowing. How else can you collapse the US, thus world economy in order to remake it as a one world open society that has been the plan all along?
His mouth will never match his actions by design, he will always say what the majority wants to hear, then he will act against the fiscal interest of America and the world in order to topple it, so it can be rebuilt from scratch in a more flat and even distribution as he perceives America and Europe as unfairly dominating the rest of the world.
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