We are all but props in the Land of Oprecious

Politico:

President Barack Obama battled with Senate Republicans in a tense closed-door meeting Tuesday, facing tough criticism from his GOP adversaries — including John McCain — on issues ranging from health care to border security.

Senators and other sources inside the meeting described the gathering as “testy” and “direct” — and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) accused Obama of acting two-faced by asking for GOP support on regulatory reform only to push forward with a bill supported mainly by Democrats. Others felt that the meeting may have made already tense relations between the two parties even worse.

Talk about deja vu.

Remember McCain’s letter to the freshman senator from Illinois over lobbying reform? If you don’t, here’s a snippet:

As I noted, I initially believed you shared that goal. But I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party’s effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn’t always a priority for every one of us. Good luck to you, Senator.

Fastforward to the present-day meeting between Obama and the GOP. Politico’s reporting gets even more comical:

In one of the most heated exchanges of the lunch, Corker accused Obama of acting “duplicitous” in his calls for bipartisanship, saying that he was trying to cut a deal on regulatory reform only to see the rug pulled out from underneath him. At one point, Corker said Obama was using lunch with Republicans as a “prop.”

Everybody Loves Oprecious

Poor witto GOP. They always carp so much about others playing the victim, it is hard to feel sorry for them. On the other hand, Oprecious is the titular star of his own comedy-drama, and we are all just his lowly props. I wouldn’t blame anyone for tearing up that script.

Of course O made sure to use us meanies on the left as props in Tuesday’s meeting, too. WaPo:

Brownback said Obama explained several times that he is “under pressure from his left” on major issues, including climate change. Obama asked Republicans to be willing to take some of the same kind of criticism from their right flank in working toward bipartisan accords, other senators said.

How persuasive of him. The “kind of criticism” he’s taking from the left is from the rank-and-file. And, he proves everyday that it is well-deserved. Once again he’s going behind our bitter clingy backs, this time essentially making the case that both major parties in our two-party system should once and for all just abandon the grassroots completely, drop any pretense of populism, and join in one big disgusting DINO-RINO orgy. And, clearly the GOP should be willing to fight with conservative-leaning independents and send them running back to Obama on election day. Gee, with sophisticated legislative arguments like that, how can anyone fail to appreciate the wonderfulness of Oprecious bipartisanshit.

More from WaPo:

“He needs to take a Valium before he comes in and talks to Republicans,” Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.) told reporters. “He’s pretty thin-skinned.”

Guess who made the same observation in his 2006 memo to Obama:

In the days leading up to Obama’s decision to run, Axelrod prepared a private strategy memo — dated Nov. 28, 2006 — that has never been published before.

[…]

Axelrod also warned that Obama’s confessions of youthful drug use, described in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” would be used against him. “This is more than an unpleasant inconvenience,” he wrote. “It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism. At the risk of triggering the very reaction that concerns me, I don’t know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you. You don’t relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty. When the largely irrelevant Alan Keyes attacked you, you flinched,” he said of Obama’s 2004 Senate opponent.

People refusing to worship at the altar of O seems to be the only circumstance that provokes any real sense of emotion from Obama. Every other emotional display he has to pencil into his schedule and telegraph well in advance so that his sheep know what to read into his empty rhetoric.

Jake Tapper:

“Now, some of you heard I went to the [Senate] Republican Caucus today,” President Obama told a receptive crowd at a fundraiser for Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel last night.

“It was a warm and cuddly meeting,” he joked. “The last time I appeared, it was before the House Republican Caucus, and we agreed to let the press in on that one. This one not so much.”

The crowd laughed.

What a riot. C-Span must think it’s a real hoot that the president used their name as a prop to pitch his vaunted transparency in the ’08 campaign.

The meeting was cordial, attendees tell ABC News, though there were some tense moments.

One Republican Senator told ABC News that he thought this meeting did the president more harm than good, because the testy exchanges the president had with Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, revealed someone who took these disagreements personally. I’ve never heard anyone use the word “I” so much, the senator said.

So much for Obama’s bottom-up movement and his being the candidate of “you” and “we.” The moment everybody stops orbiting around all that is Oprecious, he busts out with the first person singular.

Nero fiddles while Rome burns

Waves wash oil onto beach near south pass of Mississippi River

Is it me, or does this seem like just about the most amazing tone-deafness by President Obama so far? While fish, birds, animals, and people fight to survive the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama chose to fly to San Francisco to attend three political fund-raisers, one at the home of Gordon Getty, an oil heir.

President Obama, facing criticism that his administration has failed to respond aggressively to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, assured supporters in San Francisco on Tuesday that “the situation in the gulf is heartbreaking, and we’re doing everything we can.”

“Nobody is more upset than me, because ultimately,” he said, “when this happens on your watch, you are thinking, how does this get solved?”

Is this a joke? Am I still dreaming–trapped in a nightmare that won’t end?

Obama spoke to a VIP reception of about 200 people and later to a sold-out crowd of about 800 at a reception at the Fairmont Hotel, two of his three appearances Tuesday to bulk up the campaign coffers of Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who will face strong Republican competition this fall in her bid for a fourth term. [….]

After the Fairmont event, which was expected to raise at least $1.7 million from supporters who paid $250 to $2,000 for tickets, Obama was whisked to an exclusive VIP dinner at the Broadway mansion of wealthy oil heir Gordon Getty and his wife, Ann.

Inside the lavish home of the philanthropist son of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, some 80 donors wrote checks for $35,200 per couple to meet the president and have their photo taken with him. Boxer’s campaign raised $600,000 from the two events, while the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee took in $1.1 million, organizers said.

And tomorrow, the emperor is off to Chicago for a relaxing weekend, while the rest of us agonize over a global ecological catastrophe that is destroying one of the most beautiful and productive parts of our country. Is he holding a fund-raiser in Louisiana on Friday too, I wonder?

But no one is more upset than he is.