Aphorisms


There's nothing so bad, that adding government can't make it worse. -- The Immigrant

Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. -- Ronald Reagan

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Read the next two together:

Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'Emergency'." -- Herbert Hoover

This is too good a crisis to waste. -- Rahm Emanuel

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Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. -- Fredric Bastiat, French Economist (30 June 1801 – 24 December 1850)

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to another. -- François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a. Voltaire, (21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778)

The problem with socialism is that, sooner or later, you run out of other people's money. -- Margaret Thatcher

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. -- Winston Churchill

Friday, September 17, 2021

 #83: Newsflash: Why Obama Fails so Often!

November 16, 2010

We thought we knew, but we didn’t! Now. Now, thank goodness, we know!

Since Obama took office, a large number of his initiatives have failed dramatically, ranging from his efforts to get the economy moving again to his flirting with the evil triplets, Iran, Korea, and Venezuela. Up until now, he has excused himself with the “Bush created a much bigger problem than we anticipated” mantra and his scribbling acolytes have toed the line on that.

Given the electorate’s short attention span and memory, that line has been growing increasingly thin lately; most of the voters no longer remember exactly who G.W. Bush actually was. Obama and his backers needed a new explanation, other than the true one, namely, that this clown was elected by a population in love with an idea, the idea of a brilliant and beautiful black-and-white hybrid who would redeem the country from its history with slavery.

As I’ve argued before, frustrated and frightened people tend to abandon reason and experience at precisely the point when they should be using them most. This was actually a Humean doctrine that Obama himself appealed to in explaining why people have not warmed to his policies. Unfortunately, he was confusing a case in which experience was present with one in which it wasn’t. Just as Hume suggested that the belief in miracles takes place at precisely the point at which experience fails us, voters elected an utterly unprepared neophyte strictly on the basis of his skin color and at precisely the time when the country really needed a firm and experienced hand on the tiller. This was indeed an instance of hope over brains, but rejecting his policies was not.

No matter that he wouldn’t release the details of his academic performance, no matter that he avoided voting on anything controversial, no matter that he was inserted into his senatorial spot by the Chicago dem machine, no matter that he only spoke from teleprompter, no matter his aggressive anti-American associations, no matter anything: he would be the redeemer.

But now, two years down the road, he doesn’t seem like so much of a redeemer. The population is quite ready for him to leave; in fact, it can’t wait for him to leave. The country can’t wait to turn his administration into a memory that fades as quickly and inexorably as a bad dream during a busy morning. Obama? Obama? What is that? Some imported North African colonic irrigation? Oh, wait, wasn’t he president of Uganda or something?

But there are two more years to go and the Blame-Bush mantra is getting oh-so tired, so the scribblers have to come up with a new idea, a new excuse for the Redeemer’s lurching from one failure to the next.

The scribblers have found their new narrative:

THE JOB IS TOO BIG FOR ANYONE!

Yes, it’s not that Obama is too small for the job, oh, no! And it’s not that the job is too BIG for Obama. Oh, no! The truth is that NO one could do this job, and, therefore, it can’t be done even by someone with the (almost) superhuman endowments of Barack Hussein Obama!

Everyone knows these universally accepted facts, namely that Obama is: 1) a really charming guy, 2) ridiculously smart, 3) a phenomenal “communicator” (“orator”, etc.), 4) concerned only with the welfare of the American people, and so forth.

But even with these extraordinary attributes, the JOB IS JUST TOO BIG. In a recent Newsweek piece, Daniel Stone authored a piece entitled “Is Presidency Too Big a Job for Obama?” His answer, bolstered by responses from several eminent presidential historians is, quelle surprise! Probably yes. What a shock! And from a publication whose even-handedness is legend. How remarkable that we had to wait for the office to be occupied by a self-in-love untrained and inexperienced naïf working from an inherited simplistic understanding of discredited European theories, before coming to the conclusion that the JOB IS JUST TOO BIG.

It was also too big, they say, for G.W. Bush. But was it too big for Truman? For Eisenhower?

I’ll grant them that it was too big for Jimmy Carter and for Kennedy, but that was because those two were too small for the office.

Maybe that’s it.

Maybe the job isn’t really too big. Maybe the man is just too small. Way too small.

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