Why Obama Comes Up Short

Here's something I didn't realize. But it fits the pattern. It explains why Obama frittered away a good chunk of his first year in office with nothing done on the economy. From a Maureen Dowd op-ed in the NY Times:

As Richard Wolffe notes in his new book, “Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House,” the president drove Rahm Emanuel crazy by spending his first months in office toiling on the details of Start when the chief of staff was trying to get him to focus on the economy and his domestic agenda.

Nuclear arms control, Wolffe writes, was one of Obama’s first interests as a student at Columbia University. And his head is still in those wonky clouds.

This is sheer incompetence. Obama gets to polish up his undergraduate thesis at the expense of 14 million unemployed Americans! The guy was elected to lead and to fix the economy but he frittered his time away playing "world strategist".

Meanwhile the Republicans are already acting "imperial" and making it very clear that rules and laws are for "the little people" and not for them:

And on Friday, as Americans were rebelling against groping airport pat-downs, the soon-to-be speaker of the House, who was supposed to travel like real Americans, put himself above the madding crowd.

The Times’s Jeff Zeleny was on the scene and reported that John Boehner did not wait in line or go through security: he “was escorted around the metal detectors and body scanners, and taken directly to the gate.”

This is outrageous. The Republicans have created a two-class society:

• The hoi polloi who are cattle-prodded into line-ups and groped with the fervor of a sex pervert feeling up a victim.


• The "entitled" Republicans who can avoid pat downs, inspections, line-ups, regulations, fees, taxes, etc.