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I’m no genius, but President Obama’s speech was shallow rhetoric, self aggrandizing bunk, and replete with the indicia of an incapable leader. It came across as a joke, but under the circumstances, it’s not funny. Let’s go through the rhetoric and analyze. Don’t get depressed. The first step in solving a problem is admitting you have a problem. We have a problem, it’s Obama. He’s helping us admit it. Here’s my analysis:
First comment of concern by our President and analysis:
Obama: “That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge – a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s Secretary of Energy.”
Reetzality: No you did not assemble a team just after the rig sank. And I don’t care about Nobel prizes. I care about results. After all, our President got one of those Nobel Prizes.
Second comment of concern by our Presidetn and analysis:
Obama: “First, the cleanup. From the very beginning of this crisis, the federal government has been in charge of the largest environmental cleanup effort in our nation’s history – an effort led by Admiral Thad Allen, who has almost forty years of experience responding to disasters.”
Reetzality: Thad Allen was appointed on May 1, 2010, ten days after the oil spill. Today he stated that he reports to the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, not to the president. The federal government has not been in charge of the largest environmental clean up since the very beginning, in fact, it is possible they are not in charge of it now.
Obama: “Tomorrow, I will meet with the chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company’s recklessness. And this fund will not be controlled by BP. In order to ensure that all legitimate claims are paid out in a fair and timely manner, the account must and will be administered by an independent, third party.”
Reetzality: Tomorrow? Eight weeks later he’s meeting with the chairman of BP? This is being Johnny on the spot to fix the problem? Not in my book. And where is authority to order a corporation to “set aside” funds? What about due process? What about liability? I know, it looks and most likely is BP’s fault, but we don’t know for sure yet. To announce that he’s ordering them to “set aside” without stating the mechanism which is going to do this reveals his ignorance of the constitution or his reliance on his perceived stupidity of Americans. But he gets right past those tedious constitutional issues and goes right into management, an independent third party, of the fund that we, nor he, has any clue how he’s going to order to be set aside.
Obama: “The oil spill represents just the latest blow to a place that has already suffered multiple economic disasters and decades of environmental degradation that has led to disappearing wetlands and habitats. And the region still hasn’t recovered from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.”
Reetzality: There’s the blame Bush game. There’s the, “The Gulf is trashed but it’s not my fault entirely. Bush has to take some blame because he screwed up Katrina and Rita.”
Obama: “Already, I have issued a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. I know this creates difficulty for the people who work on these rigs, but for the sake of their safety, and for the sake of the entire region, we need to know the facts before we allow deepwater drilling to continue.”
Reetzality: Why six months? Why not a decade? Why not two months? Creates difficulty? Six months was an arbitrary time limit plucked out of the air. It has no basis in any analysis as to how long it would actually take. If you were in a meeting and somebody said, “six months,” you’d ask, “why six months? What’s your basis for needing six months?” For God’s sake, he’s the federal government, does it really take six months to “know the facts?” Maybe it does for the federal government. Me personally, I’d get you the facts in a week for a million dollars with a $200,000.00 operating budget, and I’m nothing special. I do agree that the loss of a job is a difficulty, maybe even a financial crisis for a family person supporting his or her family.
Obama: “. . . the Minerals Management Service. Over the last decade, this agency has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility – a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves. At this agency, industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight. Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations.”
Reetzality: “Over the last decade . . . “ More of the blame game. As to industry insiders, our man, President Obama hired Elizabeth Birnbaum who formerly worked for BP. She resigned, effective May 31st, 2010. Yes, maybe insiders were put in charge, but our President hired the insiders.
Obama: “After all, oil is a finite resource. We consume more than 20% of the world’s oil, but have less than 2% of the world’s oil reserves. And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean – because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.”
Reetzality: That’s not true. Regardless of the percentages, we have oil. How about drilling in ANWAR where we would have plugged the hole already. How about the East and West coast? How about the Dakotas? We’re running out of places to drill because the government is preventing us from drilling.
Obama: “Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be here in America.”
Reetzality: You’ve got to be kidding. Our President has just called us, implicit in the above comment, retarded. Does anybody recall the air pollution concerns of the last Olympics? Does anybody, I mean anybody, believe that China, China for Heaven’s sake, is going green? They’re not. Shame on you Mr. President.
Obama: “This is not some distant vision for America. The transition away from fossil fuels will take some time, but over the last year and a half, we have already taken unprecedented action to jumpstart the clean energy industry. As we speak, old factories are reopening to produce wind turbines, people are going back to work installing energy-efficient windows, and small businesses are making solar panels. Consumers are buying more efficient cars and trucks, and families are making their homes more energy-efficient. Scientists and researchers are discovering clean energy technologies that will someday lead to entire new industries.”
Reetzality: This is classic liberal argument number one! Change the subject. The issue is the oil spill and plugging the hole and what does our President do? He changes the subject and speaks of Green. Not now Mr. President, you have a leak to plug. Go Green in your nearing retirement. See Al Gore.
Obama: “When I was a candidate for this office, I laid out a set of principles that would move our country towards energy independence. Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill – a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.”
Reetzality: What are those “principles that would move our country towards energy independence?” This is classic, “let no crisis go to waste” speak. Bad President, bad.
Obama: “The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet. You see, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon.”
Reetzality: First, the challenge is too big for you Mr. President. After all, how did you fare in that lemonade stand? Oops, you never ran a lemonade stand, or anything bigger. And the nerve of you to invoke World War II and the man on the moon. Those were real American challenges and if the truth be told, which I always do, (I’m not smart enough to lie) your rhetoric tonight would have us speaking German or, in the case of a man on the moon, have us still attempting. To the extent you are correct in your reaching analogy, you don’t have the hutzpah to be the guy in charge.
O.K. Now for the Reetzality recap. The president has lied about his efforts, his priority, and his diligence in dealing with the Gulf Oil spill. He has used the Gulf Oil Spill to leverage his bigger agenda, government growth and control. He is not equipped to deal with this crisis. He has absolutely no experience or history that would avail him of the ammunition to deal with this problem. He is flailing. Certainly, his words sound good but the merits of them, the meaning of his words, are troubling for their vacancy of significance. Even more problematic, he has yet to formulate a plan. He has delivered nothing more than shallow rhetoric that works just fine in the south side of Chicago and evidently in a presidential campaign, but when push comes to shove, doesn’t plug the hole.
Folks, I do not fault our President for who he is. He is a product of an enabled rearing where he was indulged. He was indulged as a youth. He was indulged with his admittance into the Universities he attended. He was indulged with his position as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. He was indulged with his state legislative seat. He was indulged with his senate position. He was ultimately indulged with the Presidency. We, as a people, indulged him. We were serenaded by the tempo of his words and now he is President, with no experience in dealing with crisis, accountability or consequence, and our Gulf Coast is suffering as we will all suffer.
This is the revelation. This is the time, the moment, when our leader has revealed himself as a non-leader. This is the moment when the truth is revealed that our President is nothing more than a simple tele-prompter reader with no ability to deal with crisis. This is the time when we realize that our President is incapable, lacking the most important quality we need in a President, the ability to problem solve. He is vacant of the skills and strengths are country needs and demands.
And that’s my Reetzality for the Day.
Thanks for the read.
Brett Reetz
Here’s an interesting analysis of big government. Maybe there’s hope after all, although its tough to root for embedded incompetence. Read on.
PROGRESSIVES CAN’T GET PAST THE KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM
By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds April 4, 2010
“If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?” — President Reagan, Jan. 20, 1981.
Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled “command economies” were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew. In his “The Use of Knowledge In Society,” Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants and needs exists in no single place in any economy. The economy is simply too large and complicated for such information to be gathered together.
Any economic planner who attempts to do so will wind up hopelessly uninformed and behind the times, reacting to economic changes in a clumsy, too-late fashion and then being forced to react again to fix the problems that the previous mistakes created, leading to new problems, and so on.
Market mechanisms, like pricing, do a better job than planners because they incorporate what everyone knows indirectly through signals like price, without central planning.
Thus, no matter how deceptively simple and appealing command economy programs are, they are sure to trip up their operators, because the operators can’t possibly be smart enough to make them work.
Hayek’s insight into economics and regulation is often called “The Knowledge Problem,” and it is a very powerful notion. But recent events suggest that it’s not just the economy that regulators don’t understand well enough — it’s also their own regulations. This became apparent when various large businesses responded to the enactment of Obamacare by taking accounting steps to reflect tax changes brought about by the new health care legislation. The additional costs created by Obamacare, conveniently enough, weren’t going to strike until later, after the November elections.
But both Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and Securities and Exchange Commission regulations require companies to account for these changes as soon as they learn about them. As the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle wrote:
“What AT&T, Caterpillar, et al did was appropriate. It’s earnings season, and they offered guidance about , um, their earnings.”So once Obamacare passed, massive corporate write-downs were inevitable.
They were also bad publicity for Obamacare, and they seem to have come as an unpleasant shock to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who immediately scheduled congressional hearings for April 21, demanding that the chief executive officers of AT&T, John Deere, and Caterpillar, among others, come and explain themselves. Obamacare was supposed to provide unicorns and rainbows: How can it possibly be hurting companies and killing jobs? Surely there’s some sort of Republican conspiracy going on here! More like a confederacy of dunces. Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can’t possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But what’s more striking is that Waxman’s outraged reaction revealed that they don’t even understand their own area of responsibility – regulation — well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation. In drafting the Obamacare bill they tried to time things for maximum political advantage, only to be tripped up by the complexities of the regulatory environment they had already created. It’s like a second-order Knowledge Problem.
Possibly this is simply because Waxman and his colleagues are dumb, and God knows there’s plenty of evidence that Congress isn’t a repository of rocket scientists. But it’s just as likely that adding 30 or 40 IQ points to the average congressman wouldn’t make much difference. The United States Code — containing federal statutory law — is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117 pages long and composes 226 volumes.
No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can’t be aware of all the real-world complications it’s producing, it can’t even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it’s doing.
There’s good news and bad news in that. The bad news is obvious: We’re governed not just by people who do screw up constantly, but by people who can’t help but screw up constantly. So long as the government is this large and overweening, no amount of effort at securing smarter people or “better” rules will do any good: Incompetence is built into the system. The good news is less obvious, but just as important: While we rightly fear a too-powerful government, this regulatory knowledge problem will ensure plenty of public stumbles and embarrassments, helping to remind people that those who seek to rule us really don’t know what they’re doing.
If that doesn’t encourage skepticism toward big government, it’s hard to imagine what will.
Examiner Contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, hosts InstaVision at PJTV.com and blogs at InstaPundit.com.
Back to Reetzality. Thank you for the read Mr. Reynolds.
And thank you readers for the read.
That’s my Reetzality for the Day.
Republican Failure!
1. Put a flat tax in their platform.
2. Put a balanced budget amendment in their agenda with a war exception clause. Don’t worry Washington, we’re Americans. We can and will survive without you and your pork and your wet teat.
3. Outlaw, within the party, earmarks. If an earmark is worthy of federal attention, let it stand on its own, in its own bill. Period.
4. Put a term limit bill in the platform. They can grandfather themselves in so the next generation of scoundrels is only afforded a fixed amount of time to scar the country.
5. Re-invent the Department of Energy to do what its supposed to do; Get us to energy independence. Thus, build nuclear reactors, drill for oil and gas on our land, and offer tax incentives, not corporate welfare, for alternative fuel innovation.
6. Fix health care by allowing inter state competition between health insurers, tort reform, and allowing nurses and physicians assistance to provide more care. Institute policies that put health care responsibility, even for seniors, back on the backs of the people and not the government. Terminate the prescription drug plan for seniors. It’s not fair. We can’t afford it. It’s generational theft.
7. Secure the borders and deport illegal aliens.
8. Eliminate the depreciation schedules and allow business to immediately expense capital investments. Eliminate corporate taxes and treat all corporations as a sub-chapter S corporation. Thus, only individuals are taxed.
9. Put a National Right to Work Bill in the platform. Unions need to be put in check. Don’t believe me, look at the industries and geographical areas that are clothed in the union cloak. They are way bad off, because of the unions.
10. Put a line item veto bill in the platform.
11. Shut the lobbyists and special interests down by taking the money out of the equation. You want to persuade a congressman, use your ideas and not your wallet.
12. Require drug testing for recipients of welfare, food stamps, and disability.
13. Vow to shrink and simplify government, another way put, (strange phrase “another way put”) get out of our lives.
14. Stop the Cap and Trade non-sense. Global warming, climate change, call it whatever marketing term you want, don’t put an albatross around our country’s neck in the name of the green movement.
15. Clean up our rivers. Just about everybody lives near a river and most of our rivers are toxic. Folks will like cleaner rivers. It hits close to home. A clean river is a good thing. Folks can go fishing, rafting, canoeing, swimming, all kinds of things. As the late Mayor Daley said, his most intelligent statement ever, “What da’ heck could be better den a fish.”
16. No bail outs. Period. You win, you win. You lose, you lose. And I mean YOU!
If the Republican party does this, they will rule, not by power or need or fraud, but by principles. And they need to do this too; kick out the Olympia Snows and other Rinos (Republicans in name only) from the party. Better to die with your principles than to die a slow death without them. But don’t worry Mr. Michael Steele, if you take my advice your party won’t die, it will triumph. This is your time, the time to do the right thing. Don’t fail yourself. Of course, I might just be a naive idealistic who believes in doing the right thing and is ignorant to the absolute reality of government’s inherent evil. I hope not. Still, in deference to my gut feeling of government and maybe my ignorance, I still don’t let politicians on my boat.
I will tell you this Republicans. If you run on the “We suck less” platform, you will be equally culpable of ruining the greatest thing a people have ever created, America. What’s the saying? Here it is: Screw me once. Shame on you. Screw me twice. Shame on me. The people of America are sick of being ashamed by our government and its politicians.
Head Up Ass!
1. Pick a letter. 2. Include the letter in a sentence.
But instead, here’s what our president is doing, care of Joseph Curl POLITICAL THEATER:
By Joseph Curl POLITICAL THEATER
Just after proclaiming October as National Cybersecurity Awareness Month and just before departing for Copenhagen to lobby for his hometown as an Olympics host city, President Obama found the time Thursday to pop by the posh St. Regis Hotel a few blocks from the White House to hobnob with a gathering of Democratic governors and help raise some campaign cash.
But he didn’t find time to say a word about the war in Afghanistan and what he plans to do about it. He didn’t refer to the deteriorating situation there or take questions from the press corps – which he’s done just once in five weeks.
The 125 or so attendees opened with arugula salad mixed with pecans. On golden embroidered tablecloths under giant crystal chandeliers, they proceeded to the baked salmon over risotto, finishing off the meal with small, delicate dessert canapes.
After meeting and greeting the eight governors and VIPs in a private reception, Mr. Obama assured the supportive crowd that the federal government is staying focused on the important issues.
“I know some folks say we should focus on fixing the economy instead of on health insurance reform,” he said before falling into a familiar pitch on health care. He added that America has a “rare moment where we have a chance to seize our future.”
In the past month, the president has found the time to play golf – four times. He’s had links legend Arnold Palmer and other top golfers over to the White House. He’s shot some hoops with friends and yukked it up with hockey’s Pittsburgh Penguins.
He’s celebrated Ramadan at the White House, eulogized newsman Walter Cronkite in New York City, attended several fundraisers (including Thursday afternoon’s luncheon), appeared on David Letterman’s late-night show (one of eight interviews), delivered two speeches to AFL-CIO rallies and dropped by the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial for a visit with his wife and daughters.
And the brief jaunt to Copenhagen to buttonhole members of the International Olympic Committee on behalf of Chicago’s 2016 Olympics bid was Mr. Obama’s seventh trip out of town since Sept. 1.
Yet still no decision on strategy for the war in Afghanistan.
The president was vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard on Aug. 30 when Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal sent Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates a war assessment in which he said more U.S. troops – and a new U.S. strategy – are urgently needed to defeat a growing insurgency in Afghanistan.
Mr. Obama promptly went to Camp David for a five-day vacation (he’s talked to the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan just once since Gen. McChrystal urged swift action). Forty-three U.S. soldiers have died in Afghanistan in the past 30 days.
After exactly a month, the president on Wednesday convened a meeting in the White House Situation Room with his national security team on Afghanistan, his first since the general delivered his report.
And a stark report it is. Like most military brass, Gen. McChrystal didn’t mince words. He said flatly that he needs additional troops or else the conflict “will likely result in failure.” He urges an additional 30,000 to 40,000 combat troops to right the situation.
So, a day after the all-hands meeting on Afghanistan (the White House even sent reporters a list of attendees, a rarity for top-secret Situation Room meetings), Mr. Obama got down to business – raising a half-million dollars for the campaign coffers of the Democratic governors.
The White House bristles when asked whether Mr. Obama is so distracted by domestic affairs and health care that he is unable to focus on Afghanistan.
“Just yesterday I was asked why we were being diverted so much by foreign issues and why we weren’t talking about health care,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters at a White House briefing Wednesday. “Maybe you guys should huddle, maybe come up with one premise that we’ll at least test for one day.”
Meanwhile, back in the basement of the White House, the president’s top advisers and military officials are far apart on what course of action to take. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton leans toward a troop increase; retired Gen. James L. Jones, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, is not so supportive. The ever-helpful Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. favors scaling back the number of combat troops in Afghanistan and targeting more attacks in Pakistan.
In the end, the White House meeting achieved a consensus to hold more meetings, up to five, including two next week. The president will take “the next several weeks to review our strategy,” Mr. Gibbs said.
Meanwhile, upstairs in the Oval Office, the president spent Thursday taking care of more pressing business. He nominated Carolyn W. Colvin to be deputy commissioner of Social Security. He picked Paul K. Martin to be inspector general of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He issued an executive order demanding federal workers stop texting while driving government vehicles.
And just before jetting off to Copenhagen, he took time to proclaim October as National Information Literacy Awareness Month.
“Every day, we are inundated with vast amounts of information,” he wrote in the proclamation. “Though we may know how to find the information we need, we must also know how to evaluate it,” he said, adding hopefully that modern technology “can help in our day-to-day decision-making.”
Indeed.
Back to Reetzality. Here’s some information Mr. President, your priorities are whacked. You need a life coach. You need to get to work, desk lamp work, not lime light work. Pronto! Get a move on it!
Note: I hesitated to use the chosen image in this blog. Then I thought of this: In the private sector, where things like accountability and personal responsibility are demanded, and where efficiency, efficacy, and proficiency are obtained, folks have been told to get their head out of their arsh for, let’s see, not making a sales quota, or finishing a job. So, given that the job Obama is avoiding is one that our military forces’ lives are dependent on, I thought the image appropriate. I’ll even say it, “Get you head out of your arsh Mr. President.” Forgive me if I offend.
Incompetence
STEP ONE. List your options. I’ll give them to you so you can skip this step.
A. Pull out completely. B. Scale back. C. Keep the status quo. D. Ramp up.
There, you have four options. I assigned a letter to each one so you can refer to them by letter rather than the actual title. This will make it simple for you. Now Mr. President, we’ll go to step two.
STEP TWO. What are the likely outcomes of each option? This will take some data and some analysis from military experts. Surprise! We have the most sophisticated advanced military in the world. The information regarding outcomes is at your finger tips. Don’t worry, you don’t even have to process the information. There’s a secret way to get the likely outcome of each option. Ready Mr. President? Ask the military experts this question: “What are the likely outcome of each option?” Step two – Done!
Now, we go to step three Mr. President.
STEP THREE. Pick the option that has the best outcome. This shouldn’t be a tough one, assuming of course that you want our military campaign and the loss of life we’ve already expended and will expend to be successful and worth while. At worst, you might have to ask an extremely difficult question, like, “which option has the best outcome?” I can make it even easier for you Mr. President. This step can be exercised by simply referring to the letters of the options in step one. That’s why I gave each option a letter, so it will be easier for you. For example, “I pick option B.” See, not that difficult. I’m sure you can do it. If you’re nervous about screwing up, use your teleprompter. What ever letter appears on your teleprompter, say it. If you don’t want to use the teleprompter, Gibbs can hold up a flash card. Just say the letter that appears on the flash card and step three is done.
Time for step four. A key step.
STEP FOUR. Execute the “letter,” I mean option, you have chosen. Now this one you’re definitely going to need a teleprompter because it’s going to require an entire sentence, not a long one, but still, a complete sentence. Here’s the sentence: “Do (insert letter).”
That’s it Mr. President. Four steps. All you have to do is listen, pick the best option (by saying the name of a letter) which will be easy because your military advisers will tell you which one to pick, and then say, “Do (insert the letter).”
Done. Four simple steps. Actually, you don’t even have to be there for the first two steps, maybe even the first three steps. Your military experts can tell you the letter you have to say and then all you have to do is insert it in a sentence. You didn’t read the stimulus bill, why get into the details of picking the best option in Afghanistan? Just tell them to give you a letter to say. Then you can go on Letterman or have a beer with a cop or fly to Copenhagen, whatever, while the military experts are doing steps one and two, even step three. See how easy this is Mr. President. Basically, all you’ve got to do is say a letter, one twenty sixth as easy as reciting the alphabet which I’m sure you know. . . right? How many states are there in the union Mr. President? (Fifty, not fifty seven.) O.K. Just in case, a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z.
But here’s the problem folks. President Obama lacks the courage to make a decision. He has brought politics into the equation and unfortunately, when he did that, brought politics in, he spoiled the soup, he created a situation where there is no “best option.” Of course there is a best option, likely General McChrsytal’s option, but uh oh, this option will anger the left and damn it all, the president brought the political ingredient into the mix which is akin to requiring a stove to make good sushi.
The bottom line is this: President Obama is displaying his lack of leadership ability, his cowardly character, his arrogance, and his indifference to what is truly important by claiming he is “considering his options.” How disgraceful, how pathetic. How disgraceful, how pathetic, you ask? Here’s how disgraceful and pathetic: A ten year old could make a call on Afghanistan given this cheat sheet, and I’m not employing a metaphor here.
But not to worry. There’s no Iran building nukes. There’s no Venezuela searching for uranium. There’s no North Korea testing nukes. There’s no Russia flexing it’s muscle. China will never go military on let’s see, Taiwan. And I’m sure the Taliban and al-Qaida, given their love for our President, have called a time out while he considers his options. So, nothing to worry about right. Wrong. Our President’s conduct in this matter is not only disgraceful and pathetic, it is dangerous, really dangerous.
