Spooky

Spooky

No pun intended.

“There is a sense of unraveling that transcends the normal ideological disagreements that have roiled this nation to varying degrees throughout our history. Both sides of the ideological divide have endured presidents with whom they disagree, sometimes vehemently. Yet I’m getting the sense that millions of Americans of every stripe are now aware that we are in uncharted waters. We are being led by a man who is at once so very full of himself, even as virtually everything that goes wrong is either something he is unaware of, or someone else’s fault. It is remarkable that in the entire five years after this president promised to fundamentally transform the United States of America, not a single reporter has asked the ultimate question: Transform it into what, Mr. President? We have three more years to learn the answer. For millions of Americans, it doesn’t get any creepier than that.”

columnist Arnold Ahlerttumblr_mwfdpxeakd1sd49b4o1_500

found here.

For the last half-century, Obama has simply had to be. Just being Obama was enough to waft him onwards and upwards: He was the Harvard Law Review president who never published a word, the community organizer who never organized a thing, the state legislator who voted present. And then one day came the day when it wasn’t enough simply to be. For the first time in his life, he had to do. And it turns out he can’t. He’s not Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. And Healthcare.gov is about what you’d expect if you nationalized a sixth of the economy and gave it to the Assistant Deputy Commissar of the Department of Paperwork and the Under-Regulator-General of the Bureau of Compliance.

We have government by people who read Thomas L. Friedman and use words like “interconnectedness” and give commencement addresses where they rave about how our world is changing so fast — and assume that just being glibly au courant is a substitute for being able to do, make, build. There are lessons here beyond the abysmal failure of one misconceived government program, lessons about what our esteemed (if not terminally self-esteemed) elites value as “smart,” and about the perils of rule by a poseur technocracy. As for Obama, he’s not Jay-Z, nor even Justin Bieber: He can’t sing, or dance, or create a government bureaucracy that functions any more efficiently than a Soviet supermarket. He broke the lifelong rule that had served him so well — “Don’t just do something. Stand there” — and for the first time in his life did something, terribly. It will bear his name forever.

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