I’m sure you’ll understand: I have a little internet (ahem) “housekeeping” I must attend to today.
So while I’m busy scrubbing, wiping and cleaning up my inner-tubes, I have a reading assignment for you - Victor Davis Hanson’s latest dissertation: Obama Being Obama.
It’s sort of like Being Biden;
only funnier.
Professor Hanson makes the case that we shouldn’t be upset over the recent Scandalanche® surrounding his presidency, as it was we, not he, who changed the rules.
Once Barack Obama was elected to the Illinois legislature, his career as a statesman was mostly an afterthought — either voting “present” on controversial legislation (cf. Hillary’s 2008 complaint) or simply showing up to sign off on a straight left-wing agenda. Even his supporters can cite no lasting legislative achievement other than his controversial votes to allow babies born alive from botched abortions to be liquidated. As a political unknown, he got elected and defined his tenure as a legislator into a perpetual effort to find higher office.
Ditto the U.S. Senate, (snip) there was no signature legislation, no principled opposition, not much of anything, except a vote against Justice Alito and some similarly failed efforts at other filibusters to deny nominees an up-or-down vote. He spent most of his brief sojourn attacking George W. Bush for the very protocols that he as president would later embrace. The only thing important was getting elected in the first place as a left-wing senator, and Obama accomplished that in brilliant, if not Machiavellian, fashion — with the help of the leaked divorced records of both his primary and general opponents.
He makes a pretty good case for us not having the right to expect any more now than we demanded of Big Guy in the past - which is pretty much nothing:
The saga of Obama is marked by the uncanny ability to soar through the academic and government cursus honorum without ever being held too accountable for what followed. Obama’s selection as editor of the Harvard Law Review broke new ground. But to this day, no one cares much that his record was mediocre with no scholarly work to show for his tenure.
For that matter, ditto also his law career at the University of Chicago: an impressive appointment, but no scholarly book as promised, not even an article, and no distinguished record of teaching. Not much of anything. The point of the Nobel Prize was winning it — not doing anything that might have earned it. Just as there was no foreign policy achievement that preceded the prize, so there was naturally none following it. Why expect anything different now?
And then the Prof lobs in the ultimate insult, calling the Man-Who-Would-Be-Lincoln out as a real-life Chauncey Gardiner:
aka “Chance” by friends and handlers
What got Obama to the presidency was being a man without a past or present, Chauncey Gardiner of Being There — without a college record, a medical record, a scholarly record, or much of a legislative record, the “smartest” president in history without having to say or do anything smart, who “busted hump” his entire life without any proof that he ever did any such thing, who proclaimed himself a greater president than all but three, but left nothing great in his wake, now or in the past. Obama had forgotten that winning non-persona for a time, and so after 2009 fooled himself into thinking out loud that at times he would play a real Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Kennedy, or Reagan.
Wow! That’s harsh. “Chauncey” is not going to appreciate it.
Obama is perturbed that we question any of this malfeasance. I think he is right to be angry. In his case, we made up the Obama rules that symbolism (not performance) and amnesty (not accountability) count. So why break our covenant with him, and now start asking for concrete and honest accomplishment when the teleprompter was always enough?
I see his point. So…we’re okay with the Scandalanche® then? Good. I thought so.
Oh, and speaking of “chance” – good news! Little girls no longer have to take the chance of being punished with a pregnancy, or even with being grounded if mom and dad find out they’re bonking. Now they can get their “second chance” pre-abortions at the drugstore without parental permission or even a driver’s license – in case they’re not old enough to have one yet.
Of course they will still not be allowed to buy Sudafed, beer (good reason to date older guys), or vote. Well, maybe they can vote. I’ll have to check the new DOJ rules.
Don’t forget: read the whole thing!
Linked By: Larwyn’s Linx on Doug Ross@Journal, and BlogsLucianneLoves, and Free Republic, Thanks!
Cross-Posted on Patriot Action Network
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