With deep apologies to Ronald Reagan, who never imagined the apocalyptically low levels to which American governance could fall, these words might come to replace his original nine most terrifying in the English language: I am Barack Obama, and I’m here to help.
Unfortunately, for those who live along the Gulf of Mexico (let alone those in intelligence agencies battling terrorists, or war fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq) it is time to gird up and accept the fact that Obama does not know how to help us.
That’s because Obama does not know how to do anything. Nor does his government, nor his cabinet nor his czars. Virtually no one in Obama’s sphere has ever done anything. Indeed, no modern executive branch has ever had less experience in private industry while exhibiting more hostility to it. Suddenly, Obama’s sparse resume, consisting of nothing really but three bullet items- black, leftist, speechmaker- doesn’t seem quite adequate to fulfill the role of chief executive. Any sane political observer knew Obama was no George Washington. But it turns out that he is not even Jimmy Carter.
Seeming to take his governing lessons from imperial Rome, Obama golfed while Louisiana suffocated. He knew of no other way to behave. There was nothing in his narrow radical life experience to help guide him. He never had to wrestle with a hard technical problem or manage through a product reliability issue or service delivery glitch that might bankrupt his small business. Saul Alinsky had no chapters dedicated to those subjects. For him, presidential gravitas is securing adequate supplies of Kobe beef and attending Paul McCartney concerts. And proof of his presidential timber lies in squeezing in those extra eighteen holes in heat few other commanders-in-chief would dare to brave.
But in case we haven’t heard about it before, Obama reminded us yet again that he has a Nobel-prize winning physicist heading his department of energy. Unfortunately, Steven Chu knows as much about deep-sea drilling as Obama does. It is unlikely, given Chu’s ethereal lab experiences, that he could even write down the chemical formulas of the typical components of crude oil. Chu is a great choice to lead a panel of experts to trap cesium atoms, but your future is imperiled if you expect him to come up with ideas to trap 60,000 barrels of mile-deep hydrocarbons spewing from the Gulf floor every day.
Obama determined that he had to address the country from the oval office to convince us that he has awoken from his slumber. To compensate Gulf residents for his sixty days of inert posing and inaction, Obama will force BP to disgorge its dividend and fund an escrow account to ultimately serve as a democrat party piggy bank, even larger than any George Soros could dream of providing.
As BP limps along with its survival uncertain and bankruptcy ever looming, not only Gulf residents but American investors, pension funds and job seekers will continue to suffer more catastrophic body blows. Who exactly, you wonder, has been the more reckless actor throughout the last two months, BP or Obama? Whose incompetence has been shown to be more colossal?
When Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal lashes out in frustration as he watches his state’s historical culture disintegrate, he is just as likely to target the president and his lackadaisical government as he is BP. It was Washington that refused (in writing) to accept international offers of technical help from the Norwegians, Dutch, Danes, and many other sources. It was the federal government that was unwilling to construct protective sand barriers. It was Obama who ordered a moratorium on new drilling in the Gulf, depriving Gulf-coast residents of new cash infusions when they need them most.
Having travelled for just eighteen months into the land of hope and change, even Obama’s most pathetically uncritical media enablers- Matthews, Olbermann and Dowd- have begun to see through the Obama presidential impersonation. With the veil finally removed, they see a world listing, immeasurably less stable than when Obama arrived, with war possible on the Korean peninsula, Iran on the verge of nuclear stardom, Israel dangerously isolated, trillion-dollar deficits forever and stubbornly high 10% unemployment. Then came an environmental disaster overseen by a clueless, golf and basketball-obsessed commander-in-chief. They watched him inhaling his snow cone on the tar-threatened beaches, embodying not hope or change but a national embarrassment.
And to their shock and chagrin, the vessel carrying their utopian political vision is utterly void. Barack Obama is not the greatest president in American history; he is not even great. He has instead become a subject of derision and thus a very frightening man to have at the helm during the most perilous times in eighty years.
