Monday, May 02, 2011

"Y'all chill. I got this." (nth in a series)


Image found here.

Case in point regarding this: If one's political news had been supplied by online media, especially in the past couple of weeks, you'd think all the White House has been worrying about was Donald Trump (and/or the severity of his skewering of Trump at the Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday) . . . or, for that matter, worrying about the press's coverage of all this.

Well.

Approve of our president or not, I would hope that the one charge against him that we can finally put to rest is that the man is unserious. It's insulting at best to think that. Disagreement with him does not necessarily equal incompetence on his part, and certainly not his illegitimacy as the leader of this nation. And given that the operation against bin Laden was going on during that same correspondents' dinner, this passage from the President's speech has an especially potent kick to it:

[I]n an episode of Celebrity Apprentice -- (laughter) -- at the steakhouse, the men's cooking team cooking did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn't blame Lil' Jon or Meatloaf. (Laughter.) You fired Gary Busey. (Laughter.) And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night.


(Italics mine.)

Today is a good day, though, no matter one's politics. It was an extraordinary operation conducted with what appears to be the passive-aggressive assistance of the nation within whose boundaries it took place. A whole lot of folks, not all of them presently in office, deserve a whole lot of credit for persevering and pulling this off. Sorry, though, h8ters: Given our internet's dog-mapping ways, Obama's going to get, probably, more credit than he deserves . . . which in this instance, frankly, is about time.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The problem with the conspiracy minded is that no conspiracy can ever be disproved. Everything is a part of the conspiracy and meshes together in the minds of the paranoia inflicted.

As for the birth certificate, get 10,000 people together and you'll find a sizable percentage who will believe anything. I just wish this had been released earlier and I'm not sure what the President gained by waiting. If anything, it showed him reacting to Donald Trump, of all people. Better in my view for him to have ignored Trump and not taken him seriously.

Cheers.

John B. said...

Randall,

I think the President tried to ignore Trump--it's the media who didn't/wouldn't, to the point of not reporting on, like, the news in favor of yet more up-the-hill-down-the-hill stories about the circumstances of Obama's birth. On one of the Sunday politics shows, David Axelrod told a story about Obama's meeting with Michael Bloomberg to talk about the deficit earlier that week. In the Q&A that followed, most questions were about the deficit and plans to address it, and/but someone asked the president to respond to Trump's accusations. Guess what question got the most play on the news that night? Hence Obama's remarks to the press corps on the 27th--they're clearly aimed at the media for giving air to the story in the first place, rather than reporting on the genuinely newsworthy.

As for the hardcore conspiracy- theorists in our midst, you are correct: they are like a demonstration model for the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.