Touchy, Touchy

I'm sorry, what was the question again?

I’m resurfacing a bit after the Big Basement Cleanup.  Still waiting for the claims adjuster to take a look around and tell me the damage.  AND, since the countertop was installed yesterday, I get to hook up my faucet, garbage disposal and dishwasher.  I know what you’re thinking.  The DIYer who installs her own dishwasher has a fool for a plumber.  But I have no choice.  It’s either this or cha-ching!

I noticed that the left blogosphere is still reverberating over the Momentous Job Package Announcement Scheduling Crisis from a couple of days ago.  Markos is starting to sound hysterical and tenderly refers to us as an “idiot fringe”* ,  ThereIsNoSpoon is analytical, as usual, and I’ve even had a twitter follower drop me over a couple comments I made when technically I agreed with him.  Oh, well, I’ve been losing friends since 2008.  I’m getting used to it.

But it looks like the unravelling of the Obama presidency is happening so rapidly that his former supporters have not had time to adjust.  For the record, I don’t think the scheduling thing was that big a deal.  It happens all of the time at work.  You check their outlook calendar and send an appointment, the recipient ignores it and you have to send another.  By this time, the date has been booked and you have to negotiate another.  No biggy.

What *is* a big deal is the way the media is handling this.  This is what I think is throwing the Obama contingent.  Up to pretty recently, the media wasn’t nit-picking.  It’s the harping on the minutiae that brings down a politician.  The constant fault finding, the mountains out of molehills, the inability to let it go.  God forbid there’s a scandal waiting in the wings.  It might be a reappearance of Tony Rezko or an agreement between the administration and some hated industry or maybe the media will finally get around to covering the 2008 Democratic primary and convention.  But, whatever, the media has turned on Obama and not just the conservative nutcases on Fox.

The Obama contingent could tolerate the Clintonistas as long as the media was still sort of on Obama’s side.  As long as he wasn’t getting the Hillary or Al Gore treatment from the NYTimes, he had a fighting chance.  Without that little bit of protection, every move he makes will be amplified.  When the media starts making your guy look like a loser, he’s in trouble. You know how it goes. You can’t pick out the color of your clothing without calculating the impact it will have on the Sensitive New Age voter.   You say that someone has been telling a fairy tale and suddenly you’re accused of being a racist.  Or you say something about Bobby Kennedy not clinching the nomination until late in the primary season and everybody goes nuts accusing you of threatening to off your opponent.   Crazy s%^& like that.  Every move, every syllable, every action is scrutinized for malevolence and dark meaning.  It’s all packaged up to make the politician look as bad, weak, imcompetent, spoiled, shallow and stupid as possible.  And if that’s what’s happening, then we very well may be looking at President Perry in 2012.  Am I right, guys?

It is disturbing, isn’t it?  The guy just looks vulnerable, doesn’t he?  He can’t catch his breath.  Yes, now he’s going to have to run a real campaign and he won’t have the media picking him up ever so gently and carrying him over the finish line.  You can blame the “horse race” tactics and insider journalism that Jay Rosen has been railing against lately.  Maybe the NYTimes wants a genuine fight to the finish.  The rest of us want jobs but red meat competition is what we’re going to get.

Or maybe the editorial boards have realized they installed the wrong guy.  You have to wonder what was going through the mind of the journalist who just a few days ago asked the press secretary if he thought Hillary was going to primary Obama.  *I* didn’t ask it.  After all, I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that it is crazy, insane, and a fantasy.  And I’m sure that the left blogosphere was able to happily ignore me until this last round of bad optics.  But now that it looks like he’s vulnerable, I’m suddenly more irritating than I was before?

Does the concept of Hillary joining the race make the Obama contingent uncomfortable?  Or are they going to hold the nomination hostage and scream “Mine! Mine! Mine!” until we put them in time out? Are they starting to think that they need an alternative and Hillary *does* look like the most likely candidate after all?  Have they figured out that a primary would be good for the party by forcing it to reconnect with it’s more liberal and New Deal base?  Can they swallow the bitter bile of their over-the-top vehemence towards her in 2008 and learn to live with her limitations in exchange for a more skillful and principled Democrat?  Nahhhhh.

I can’t get inside the head of an Obama supporter and I’m happy about that because if I could, I suspect it would be a very scary place where the AntiChrist looks something like Michelle Bachmann.  They’ll never change until they feel personally betrayed and disillusioned by Obama.  Right now, they seem to be really angry and are lashing out at the people they kicked three years ago.  If it makes them feel better, so be it.  We’re used to the abuse.  But it won’t fix the problem and it’s not going to make us give Obama our votes.  He’s still in the White House, the Democrats are charging towards a cliff with us chained to him and the media is going to assist in any way it can.

Feeling better?

* Ah, Markos, sounding just like a party loyalist, always ready to insult the regular voters and ignore their, you know, votes.  Because, after all, we can’t let the “idiot fringe” have a primary.  Obama might lose and someone like Hillary might win and that would be a really, really bad thing because, because… it is written!  So, there, you stupid primary fantasists.  Yep, according to Markos, Obama *must* be re-elected to four more years as a lame duck president because, presumably, Obama is the absolute best candidate the Democrats have.  It simply does not get any better than Obama and, by golly, even if there *was* someone more appealing that voters wanted more, the party is not going to let you have him or her because Obama simply is the creme de la creme of the Democratic party and he is entitled to your vote so get in line.  Yes, that is a winning campaign message.

More stuff:

On Virtually Speaking Susie on Tuesday, Susie suggested that the reason the Democrats are backing Obama in 2012 is because they need the African-American vote.  I don’t know if that’s true or not but the Democrats are having problems with women this go around.  And women are a much bigger contingent of the party than African Americans are.  So, I’m predicting that they have a more complex problem on their hands in 2012 than they would like to admit and the only reason they continue with Obama at this point is because they don’t want the Republicans to see them sweat.  Hillary as VP will not help the Democrats.  As long as Obama’s guys are still running the party, she would be deep sixed as VP and every woman in the country will know it.  Biden who?

So, Wall Street is having a bad day because of the jobs report.  Normally, Wall Street LOVES it when there are layoffs.  But at some point, those fund managers must be wondering who’s going to be depositing the funds they are supposed to be managing or buy the stuff made by the companies they invested in.

Weird Irene Side Effects:  I lost my apple modem in the Great Basement Deluge so I went to the local mall to buy another one at the apple store.  But when I got there, half of the mall had no power.  No, literally half.  One side of the mall was going about its business, every store lit up.  The other exact half on the other side of the main promenade was completely dark.  Same building, different halves.  It would be having power in only the right side of your house but not the left and no switch flipping at the fuse box would fix it.

So, we have to wait until tonight to get a new modem, if we can only get to the mall.  It seems like only one side of the road to it is working as well.  Funny lookin’.

Tuesday: Obama is running for president again in 2012!!!

Let's not and say we did.

In case you didn’t know, because his campaign is trying to keep it low key and file early before anyone else notices, Obama is running for president in 2012.  That gives me a second opportunity to not vote for him.  I can hardly wait.

But where’s the fanfare?  The snooty “nose in the air” stylized graphic portraits of “Yes, we can” Man?  Why so hush-hush about the whole fol-de-rol?  The LATimes has a theory.  You’re going to love this:

Like other incumbents, Obama wants to avoid being viewed as a candidate for as long as possible to limit the scent of politics in his presidential maneuverings. He did not appear in the two-minute video that accompanied his emailed announcement, and he held no public events Monday. He did make an unannounced conference call to supporters in which he described himself as “a little older and a little wiser” than in 2008.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Obama was “not focused on elections” and that there would be “plenty of time well down the road for politics.”

OMG, isn’t that a hoot??  He doesn’t want to look like he’s playing politics.  And he’s “a little older and wiser”.  That would be an improvement over 2008 when he was inexperienced and over his head, not to mention shoved down our throats by a bunch of finance guys who wanted a weak president who would be their Yes Man.  But, frankly, my dear, I don’t believe it.  Obama doesn’t really like politics.  He’s in love with the *idea* of politics.  But real “down in the mud”, get in your face, LBJ style politics?  That’s icky and makes him feel like he needs a shower.

LBJ puts the squeeze on Congress

I think that’s clear now to most Obots.  Paul Krugman never was a Kool-Aid drinker but he’s been giving the guy a chance (more than he deserves, IMHO, after he cheated his way into the nomination).  Even Paul seems exasperated these days.

But then there are the Grape flavored addled ones, like Kevin Drum, doing his best Britney Spears imitation of her unquestioning belief in George Bush.  Arthur Silber has the low down on Kevin’s devotion and trust in Obama.  Here’s Kevin leaving Libya in the hands of God Obama:

So what should I think about this? If it had been my call, I wouldn’t have gone into Libya. But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I’d literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he’s smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust his judgment, and I still do.

No, Kevin, you didn’t vote for Obama because you trusted his judgement.  You voted for him because his campaign made you think you were smarter, cooler and more connected to the political zeitgeist than you actually are.  To be honest, I have never been impressed by Kevin Drum so it could be the case that Obama is smarter, better informed, better to…oh, don’t make me repeat the nauseating drivel.  Obama is none of those things.  He is just what I said he was: a corporate ladder climber, a schmoozer, a guy who wants the corner office just so he can have the corner office.  The responsibilities that come with that office are secondary concerns.  Or tertiary.  Or quantenary.  Right after winning the MacArthur Genius grant, an Academy Award and Woman of the Year.  Voters are such whiners.  They need to learn personal responsibility.  Michelle, where is that bowl of homemade, sugar free, organic, macrobiotic granola you’ve been growing in the front lawn as an example of what working mothers everywhere should be cultivating for their children in their copious free time?

Anyway, I’m getting off track.  Let the campaign season commence!  Obama and his droogs are no doubt commandeering the social media outlets as. we. speak. to convince us that whatever it is we thought we wanted from him that he failed to deliver was some unreasonable expectation on our part and that we are too demanding or something.  His guys (and they HAVE to be mostly guys) will spend the next 18 months trying to get us to vote for him and I will spend the next 18 months digging in my heels and demanding that he actually do something I like.  Like get a real jobs program, rewrite his lame healthcare insurance bill, figure out a way to stop the crazy Republicans in their tracks.  Yeah, right, dream on.

I’m voting Green or Socialist or Ladies Auxilliary or Player to be Named Later.  Obama can save his breath.  I haven’t listened to him since that clueless State of the Union address back in January.  Yada-yada-yada.