“I don’t know all the facts…” but opposing my Health Care non-plan is stupid…
Well, I was all tied up in traffic this morning, and now that I have time to write about the Obama show last night, I see that all the good lines are taken. Damn, I hate that. Among the prognosticators, Smitty at The Other McCain came closest:
No, I’m not going to watch your ratchet-head emit another series of empty clichés at the presser. Fear, guilt, and straw man arguments do not an impressive leader make.
He had it all right, except for the ratchet-head part, which was strangely missing. It seemed that The One must be down to only a single TelePrompter….he was pretty much looking straight ahead the whole time, looking more like the Geico Gecko in a power tie than his usual ratchet-head self (not really fair to the gecko, who I like and trust more than Obama).
As I said, all the best lines have been taken. Politico called the address “so poll-tested and focus-grouped, it was bleached of life.” Over at Power Line, they’re now calling it “the notional health care plan.” At first I thought it was a typo for “national,” but then Scott used it again. Good one. Obama’s “plan” is nothing but a nascent swirl of ideas that he has no business asking us to support at this point.
The speech was simply another display of Obama’s ability to blather on about nothing, while sounding important. There were really only two things that stood out, and both really pointed to the malevolence of this little man that our countrymen chose to lead this great nation. The first was the gratuitous slap at physicians, who in Obama-world do things like this to our children, in order to make a fast, illicit buck:
Right now, doctors a lot of times are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that’s out there. So if they’re looking and you come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, “You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.”
Unbelievable. I would love to know what his personal physician….you know, the one following him around at all times…..thought of that one.
The other was the police thing, of course. I thought the question itself was a jarring non sequitur, and actually thought it was another one of those set-up questions so he could change the subject and leave, but in the end, it turned out to be the most revealing thing he said during the entire hour. Not just because of the contempt he showed for law enforcement generally, or for his knee-jerk belief in rampant American racism….no, it was the fact that he would admit to not knowing the facts, and yet pronounce forcefully that “the Cambridge Police acted stupidly….” That act, that statement, is a metaphor for his whole presidency: “I know very little, and yet I know it all.”
It is also worth noting, as Michelle Malkin does, that Obama’s Justice Department seems to be obstructing an investigation into how these lovely post-racial gentlemen got the federal voter intimidation charges against them dropped. “You about to be ruled by da black man, cracker” is what they told white voters attempting to enter a polling place. Must have been what Obama’s pal Professor Gates meant when he told the police officer “you don’t know who you’re messing with.”
Woodwork:
Boy, this one really cuts to the quick, driver:
“That act, that statement, is a metaphor for his whole presidency: “I know very little, and yet I know it all.””
The cry of the prophet infused with divine revelation with an eye on utopia; not the civil servant working with facts with an eye on the people’s business.
The boy’s got some beastly and Illcommunication.
And I agree with you, for most moderate Americans this race-remark will be of great interest and significance. Even more so after the race based decision in Sotomayor and Ricci. I expect soon we will hear the cacophonous baritone of the Right Reverend Wright weigh in on this and then the ‘circle of trust’ will be complete …and then broken.
As my friends say in the construction business we weighing in on something that can neither be fixed nor gilded ‘You can’t polish a terd” they say, and there is no way to make this rear-guard race-shtick look fresh and forward looking. He stepped in it, it is stuck to his shoes, and it stinks.
24 July 2009, 9:01 amStickerShock:
Slap at physicians: I have never seen a physician do something as invasive as tonsil removal as a way to make a buck. Even when docs owned the labs to which labwork was sent, the tests were generally needed (whether for medical reasons or as defensive medicine — a tort reform issue that docs can’t be blamed for.) What I have seen many, many times is docs billing for hospital visits they never made. Instead, they copy some tidbit from the nurse’s notes and write up a visit so they can bill the insurance carrier. If Obama would just avoid the hyperbole, and focus on a real abuse of the system, perhaps some cost containment in health care could be achieved. I guess the Saul Alinsky manual leans toward shock & drama.
24 July 2009, 10:56 amld:
I’m the most cynical of the cynics…so I must be in the right place. Excellent post driver.
To me, Obama’s comments during his weekly primetime show was much more than a revelation of bias previously hidden…it was a massive miscalculation of the Obama ‘team’. You know…the team who sees opportunity lurking in every dark corner of despair?
Obama owes much of his success, and arguably his election, to the willingness of many moderate and independent voters to wallow in their ‘white guilt’, to turn off rational critical thinking, to ignore his disturbing associations and even more disturbing lack of experience, and to finally succumb to all things emotional when they walked into that voting booth. The willingness of these people to ‘pay up’ for the old debts of racist generations past, and the ease with which they were manipulated into forming a union with the far left liberal contingency that naturally belongs to Obama, is one large reason for his victory. And he knows it. He’s the great unifier after all.
In the last few weeks, Obama has faced a new kind of unity, one he cannot tolerate because it has been a force AGAINST him and the latest item on his socialist agenda, plans for health care….not a force FOR him to which he has become so spoiled. So I believe the question about Gates’ arrest was arranged…Obama knew it was coming. It was ‘the opportunity’. Obama thought his comments on race would stir up emotions, reactivate the guilt and recreate that old unity that worked in his favor. He was, simply, trying to break the momentum forming against his agenda. Unfortunately, he miscalculated in a big way. Or maybe I should say fortunately. The sooner his true manipulative nature is revealed to all, the sooner he will be Former President Obama.
24 July 2009, 9:05 pm