June 14th, 2010: Pigs fly, and HIS NewYorkTimes FINALLY chides Obamaon the oil spill

June 14th, 2010
Pigs fly, and HIS NewYorkTimes FINALLY chides Obama on the oil spill

"Yesterday I noticed what passes for a hard-hitting editorial in the
NY Times. Despite the usual boilerplate Obama excuses (”…he took
office under an extraordinary burden of problems created by President
George W. Bush’s ineptness and blind ideology. He has faced a stone
wall of Republican opposition…” blah blah blah), the Times editors
criticize Obama for his treatment of the current crisis.

The piece ends this way:

It certainly should not have taken days for Mr. Obama to get publicly
involved in the oil spill, or even longer for his administration to
start putting the heat on BP…

It took too long for Mr. Obama to say that the Coast Guard and not BP
was in charge of operations in the gulf and it’s still not clear that
is true.

He should not have hesitated to suspend the expanded oil drilling
program and he should have moved a lot faster to begin political and
criminal investigations of the spill. If BP was withholding
information, failing to cooperate or not providing the ships needed to
process the oil now flowing to the surface, he should have told the
American people and the world.

These are matters of competence and leadership. This is a time for Mr.
Obama to decisively show both.

But the Times editors are forgetting one important thing: a person
cannot decisively show qualities he/she lacks. The presidency, or any
executive office, is not an acting competition. We are not in the West
Wing and Obama is not Martin Sheen.

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."

Posted by neo-neocon at 2:30 pm. Filed under: Press, Obama
36 Comments • Trackback • Permalink •
June 14th, 2010




About Me:

Previously a lifelong Democrat, born in New York and living in New
England, surrounded by liberals on all sides, I’ve found myself slowly
but surely leaving the fold and becoming that dread thing: a neocon.
My friends and family don’t want to hear about my inexplicable
conversion, so I started this blog to tell the tale of my political
change and provide a forum for others. I have a background as a
therapist, and my politics make me a pariah in that profession, too.
Little did I know that I moved in such politically homogeneous
circles.