Wednesday, April 13, 2011

"Obama Sinks to the Occasion" by Fred Barnes


President Obama always lets you down. Just when you think he’s ready to deliver a lofty speech chocked with specifics on handling the spending and debt emergency, he offers up a hyper-partisan attack on the leading Republican proposal, gives practically no details of his own plan, and then sanctimoniously puts himself on the side of preserving “the American dream for future generations.”......

Let me list the lowlights of the president’s speech this afternoon at George Washington University:
To read the rest click on the title for a link.

Hint:

1. It's George Bush's fault !,

2. It was "Class Warfare" and,

3. It was very vague.

4. It put Vice President Biden to sleep ! Fred Barnes didn't say that but the video that has gone viral on the Internet shows it !

Mike Huckabee came to Biden's defense and said: "He was praying that nobody will find out just how disingenuous they are about actually cutting the expenses and hoping and praying that the American people don’t catch on to the games that they’re trying to hoist upon us,”


Update:

Clive Crook is a senior editor of The Atlantic, a columnist for National Journal, and a commentator for the Financial Times writes this about the speech:

.....My instant unguarded reaction, in fact, was to find it not just weak but pitiful. I honestly wondered why he bothered.......

Far from seeking compromise on tax policy, the whole speech was yet again organised around an attack on the evil Bush tax cuts, and a promise to reverse them in part. We would not be in this mess, he said, but for the Bush tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit. I wondered, as he said that, is he therefore going to call for the drug benefit to be halted and all the Bush tax cuts to be reversed? Stupid question. Of course not. Just the tax cuts for the rich, leaving the much larger part of the Bush tax policy in place. Even now, he is deploring the Bush tax cuts as the cause of all the country's problems while actually proposing to leave most of them alone......

The speech was more notable for its militant--though ineffectual--hostility to Republican proposals than for any fresh thinking of its own. It was a waste of breath


Now Charles Krauthamer has his say:

"I rarely heard a speech by a president so shallow, so hyper-partisan and so intellectually dishonest, ...