Saturday, March 28, 2009
SCHADENFREUDE
How delicious -- The Economist recognizes that there is less to Barack Obama than met the eye:
HILLARY CLINTON’S most effective quip, in her long struggle with Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination last year, was that the Oval Office is no place for on-the-job training. It went to the heart of the nagging worry about the silver-tongued young senator from Illinois: that he lacked even the slightest executive experience, and that in his brief career he had never really stood up to powerful interests, whether in his home city of Chicago or in the wider world. Might Mrs Clinton have been right about her foe?
. . .
... at home Mr Obama has had a difficult start. His performance has been weaker than those who endorsed his candidacy, including this newspaper, had hoped. Many of his strongest supporters—liberal columnists, prominent donors, Democratic Party stalwarts—have started to question him. As for those not so beholden, polls show that independent voters again prefer Republicans to Democrats, a startling reversal of fortune in just a few weeks. Mr Obama’s once-celestial approval ratings are about where George Bush’s were at this stage in his awful presidency. Despite his resounding electoral victory, his solid majorities in both chambers of Congress and the obvious goodwill of the bulk of the electorate, Mr Obama has seemed curiously feeble. There's more, and well worth reading, if for nothing else than to see a sterling example of the thundering realization that being Barack Obama -- and not being George Bush -- isn't sufficient qualification for the presidency. I wonder whether Obama has had that realization yet.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:54 AM
Thursday, March 26, 2009
LOSING OUR WAY
When an individual person spends their time articulating nothing but criticism of themselves and obsessively ridicules his own identity, we recognize the pathology of clinical depression. So what to make of a whole civilization that does the same thing?
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:23 AM
Thursday, March 19, 2009
NO CLUES HERE
Nope, nothing meaningful at all. Move along ...
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:52 AM
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
GIVING UP IN AFGHANISTAN
This was inevitable. Obama definitely doesn't have the stomach for it, so we're going to be pulling out of Afghanistan before long. He'll use the meltdown of our economy as an excuse for changing the policy he ran on. I wouldn't want to be a woman in Afghanistan ...
Oh, and BTW, this pretty much guarantees an Indo-Pak war within the next five years. A nuclear war.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:22 AM
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
MASTERS OF BULL
This piece about how Harvard's MBA program has produced the people who have run our economic society into the ground over and over is worth a look. It glances along one of the main vectors of my ruminations about The Collapse that keep influencing the direction of my thinking: That our educational and cultural institutions are deeply broken, producing group after group of young people equipped with a very wrong-headed view of the world and a very inadequate basic knowledge of fundamentals.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:08 AM
Monday, March 09, 2009
PRESENT
To those few loyal friends who have asked after me, I note that I am still present. Yeah, that's the ticket ... I'm voting "present" right now ... that's all.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. GB< THHotA
posted by Greg 8:32 AM
|
|
