Mark Halperin: "Obama Is In The Jaws of Political Death"

Bullshit.

Quote:

With the exception of core Obama Administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusions: the White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters. This view is held by Fox News pundits, executives and anchors at the major old-media outlets, reporters who cover the White House, Democratic and Republican congressional leaders and governors, many Democratic business people and lawyers who raised big money for Obama in 2008, and even some members of the Administration just beyond the inner circle.

Such bullshit is almost beneath my contempt. This is just made-up nonsense. There are no quotes in the entire article.

Oh, it's not that I don't think that the Obama admin could go down in flames, get beaten in 2012, and go down in short-term history as a disaster.

For it could, it could.

That's what happened to Jimmy Carter, after all--and he was a pretty good president.

But, see: steal a presidential election, fail to take warnings about terrorism seriously, fail to provide a steady hand in the wake of the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, let the perpetrators escape so that you can start a bogus, irrelevant, counter-productive war that saps our blood and treasure, and ruin the economy...and the press won't really do any more than tut-tut at you a bit.

But fail to play the Washington game like they want it played...find yourself with an economy devastated by the other party and fail to fix it immediately...try to reason with both friends and enemies as if they were adults instead of just playing power politics...these things, my friends, will not be forgiven. For these sins, you will be branded The Worst President Ever by our friends across the aisle and their sidekicks in the media.

Some friends of mine on the right have long liked to refer to Obama as "the black Jimmy Carter"...and I've always thought that the comparison was apt, despite the erroneous intent to insult. Carter was a good man who did a pretty good job for the country given the crappy hand he was dealt. But he didn't have the bullshit in his soul that the country seemed to want. Make good policy, and sit down and speak truths to the American people even as if they were rational, and, apparently they hold you in contempt. Smile stupidly and tell them that it's "morning in America" and you are apparently to be revered as the greatest of recent Presidents...whether or not your administration circumvents the law.

I've never thought that Obama would be a two-term President. Until McCain picked Palin, almost half of me wanted him to win so that the GOP could reap what it had sown. But, not only could we not risk Palin, things had gotten so bad that I figured that four years of Obama--even if followed by eight (or twenty) years of unjustly blaming the Dems for failing to fix the disaster the GOP had made--was better than another four years of a Republican president (and, I thought, Senate).

Obama is about where I'd expect him to be in the polls given the state of the economy and the fact that the right-wing noise machine has cranked it up to eleven. Instead of just saying this, we get brainless losers like Halperin making up just-so stories about how the administration is imploding. (Remember...these are the same folks that brought us a breathless electoral "emergency" in 2000, despite the fact that the public was perfectly calm and wanted everyone to settle down and count the votes...)

Jesus, when did everybody get so stupid?