The Sky Is Blue, Water Is Wet, Obama Is a Jackass

Rush Limbaugh will probably get blistered by the mainstream media this week for calling Barack Obama a jackass.

He also called the president an "ignoramus" and "economically illiterate."

The subject was Obama's refusal to extend Bush era tax cuts to the top 2% of wage earners. Some of his own economic advisors have said recently that this group has "taken their ball and gone home." In other words, since it will not profit them to invest and create jobs, they won't. To Limbaugh and economic conservatives, this is common sense that Obama either does not or will not understand.

Limbaugh has a knack for shaping the debate with occasional, well placed jabs. He is seeking to create a debate on the president's economic competence while trying to bait Obama (yet again) into attacking him while ignoring the real political opposition. Every time Obama attacks Limbaugh or Fox News, he confirms the perception that he has little interest in the liberties enumerated in the Constitution. He plays into the hands of conservatives by attacking the media and making himself look thin skinned and exasperated. Of course, that is because he IS thin skinned and easily exasperated.

Obama's Rolling Stone interview, where he chastises voters for following their self-interest and not him, was actually classical jackass behavior. Limbaugh is probably parroting what many former Obama voters have said since the interview was released.

Obama will react as Limbaugh expects, by attacking the conservatives and libertarians in the media and harming further the Democratic efforts to even remain relevant in Congress after this November. After next January, watch Congress push Obama into near irrelevance himself, a la Andrew Johnson.

Question is, will he blame George W. Bush for it all?

V Is For Vendetta and I Is For Incompetence

Obama has never liked Fox News. Obama's court of supporters never have either. Naturally it serves as a media center rallying the opposition, according to studies more partisan than CNN, but much less so than MSNBC.



Obama has personally tried to undermine his media opposition, what there is of it, from the start of his presidency. Rush Limbaugh got the first taste of Obamavective and his ratings skyrocketed. People who had not listened in years started tuning in again. Then he turned his guns on Fox News who now routinely dominate their competition among 24 hour news organizations.



The president tries to make it a battle of personalities and wills, something that he usually won in the past as a senator and candidate. He has yet to realize that the presidency is something else. It is a position of dignity, partisan, yet expected to be above the petty frays of the day. Obama has so little political experience that he is not aware, or does not care, that the Democratic National Committee's job is to smear Fox News. It is the pit bull of a Democratic administration, attacking opponents and taking the hits.



Even left wingers shake their heads in dismay every time they see the White House or the president himself go after legitimate news organizations. The liberal media actually rouse themselves to fact check Obama's inaccurate assaults on Fox, criticizing his inability to distinguish between opinion artists and hard news reporting (Fox was actually the first to reveal an October surprise story against President Bush in 2004.) Liberals dislike Fox, but respect the freedom of the press. President Bush had few friends in the press, but never hit back against much more personal criticism levied against him by even hard news reporters.



Obama has revealed himself, as John Nichols of The Nation, put it (thank you Don Surber for the link) as "whiner-in-chief." He expects media love, as in the preposterous Time article that rated his presidency an A-, but has no clue how to take criticism or dislike in a presidential fashion.



Perhaps because he had no business being president in the first place. The Democrats nominated snake oil for the presidency and we all suffer for it now.

The Inappropriate Sense of Humor of Barack Obama

So Barack Obama, as we saw last week, considers dredging up traumatic memories of 9/11 and scaring New Yorkers half to death to be fodder for a joke. The CNN commentator did not even stray from neutrality as she gleefully introduced the poor attempt at humor. He joked about his children taking Air Force One for a joyride.

The real story here is not the fact that Obama made a stupid and crass joke at the Correspondent's Dinner. No one responded or reacted to this.

The amazing thing is the contrast between Obama's humor and his predecessor. President Bush generally, in such situations, had the self-confidence to ridicule himself. The best example was when he brought out the impersonator and spoke alongside him. President Bush understood that he was funny, but also did not push it past the point where he would injure his dignity as president. Obama is not yet aware that his presidential persona is a huge target for ridicule.

There's nothing wrong with a president lightening up and joking around in the right forum. They still need to be respectful when considering joking about the worst attack on this nation within most of our lifetimes.

Interestingly, Obama was caught laughing at a statement about Rush Limbaugh being killed. Now in an unguarded moment, something similar could happen to any of us. However, compare the lack of comment to the heaps of abuse thrown at CBS golf analyst David Faherty. Faherty toured the Middle East and recounted his assessment of US troops' opinions of liberal politicians. "Despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, there's a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death." In his apology, he explained that he was simply trying to explain how US soldiers feel about their current commander-in-chief. CBS and the PGA Tour blasted his statements, which, like the Rush Limbaugh murder joke, were inappropriate.

Will anyone condemn or distance themselves from Obama and his friend yukking it up over their fantasized death of Limbaugh? Probably not.

Eating Our Own

In addition to being a conservative, I'm a member of the West Virginia Republican Party. In fact, I currently serve as one of the party's Vice Chairmen, a regional political director for the upcoming State GOP Convention, and as Chair of the state party's Audit Committee. I've been actively involved with the state party since early 2001, and from that vantage point I have seen Republican party politics in West Virginia up close.

One of, if not the overriding, reason members of our party do not constitute a majority of elective officers in this state is that we eat our own. Republican primary elections are notorious for their divisiveness, and I always--always--go into a primary election cycle with the feeling of a pit in my stomach. This cycle is no different.

Why can't Republicans in West Virginia conduct a primary election campaign free of the kind of ugliness that divides the party for the general election? Why do some Republican campaigns seem intent on driving their party brethren onto the sidelines for the general election? The fact is, we are too small a group, in too small a state, to survive the kind of infighting that has marked us in the past.

Is there no such thing as good faith disagreement any longer? Are our intra-party opponents in a primary campaign to be dismissed simply as "drinking the kool-aid" if they support one candidate over another? Are we to trash another candidate based upon what church he attends? Or another based on whether he's divorced?

I'll be clear; this isn't just an internal Republican problem--there are too many instances of bad faith in politics; the current manufactured controversy over Rush Limbaugh is a prime example of bad faith opposition.

But keeping it in the Republican house, I think we've been so marginalized over the years--so politically abused and mistreated--that we've become conditioned to think that a victory in the primary is the best we can hope for. Like a line from the film "Braveheart" -- perhaps we are so used to eating the scraps from the table that we've forgotten we have a right to something better.

As the primary heats up, as we move toward the convention and the grassroots organizations begin to fill out and compete for delegate votes, I hope that every Republican involved with a campaign will think about the fact that the winner--whomever he is--will need every, single, last person affiliated with any of the Republican primary contenders if he expects to win in November, 2008. We're facing enough of an uphill climb as it is without driving away future supporters for after the primary.

I would hope that we would have learned better by now.