Yesterday, President Obama blamed the high unemployment rate, in part, on ATMs and airport kiosks and other areas where we’ve “automated’ jobs.
This is, of course, laughable on its face. Much like so much of what President Obama says when he speaks off the cuff.
I took that one a bit personally, though — I have a friend who spends a great deal of time at his job fixing and maintaining ATMs. If it wasn’t for them, he’d be stuck doing the same thing to human tellers — and his wife would definitely not approve of him doing that.
But as I thought that, I realized — he really does say incredibly stupid things quite often, and almost never gets called on it. And most often, it’s when he is trying to make himself look better — either by deflecting blame, or inflating his own importance.
Unemployment stubbornly refusing to acknowledge his genius and competence? Must be those stupid machines, taking jobs from hard-working Americans.
Remember when he was campaigning for president? Trick question — he’s been running for president for most of a decade, and hasn’t slowed down. Let me be more precise. Remember when he was still a US Senator (in name only, not actually doing his job) and arguing in favor of ObamaCare? One of the areas where costs are being driven up was by greedy, dishonest doctors who unnecessarily perform amputations on diabetics and remove tonsils that don’t need to be taken out.
He tried to tie himself into American history, making his personal story emblematic of America’s biggest issues. He talked about how the Selma march for civil rights had led to his parents marrying — but he was born four years before that march. He talked about how his attitudes towards his own race were shaped by an article in Life that showed a black man whose skin was scarred from attempts to bleach himself “whiter” — but that article never existed.
Earlier this week, he joked that the “shovel-ready” projects that were supposed to be the subject of the big “stimulus” boondoggle weren’t quite as “shovel-ready” as he’d thought they would be. But when that was pushed, a lot of us said that his boasts were BS — and we were roundly denounced for saying then just what he’s saying now.
That’s just a few examples. There are plenty more. But the question remains — is he really that stupid as these would indicate?
No, he isn’t. “Stupid’ is too simple a concept to properly capture just what is going on in his head.
Obama is intelligent. There’s no denying that. But he has several other characteristics that undermine that intelligence.
First, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is. He’s above average, but I’d hardly peg him as a genius.
Next, he’s arrogant as hell. No matter the circumstances, he thinks he’s the smartest in the room, and all he has to do is impart his wisdom and genius, and all will be well.
Finally, he’s lazy. He simply isn’t interested in learning what he doesn’t know.
It’s fairly easy for me to identify these traits — I have them myself, to certain degrees. But I am considerably smarter than Obama, in some ways — I know that I don’t always know better than others might, that there are areas where I don’t know as much as others, and one motto I try to live up to is “I have many flaws, but among them is not self-deception.”
But I also have another major advantage over Obama. I’ve failed before. Rather, I’ve been allowed to fail, and sometimes learn from them. He’s always been protected from failure, so he thinks that he can’t fail.
Hey, bozo: you’re failing. And you’re taking all of us down with us. Including the 47% who voted against you because we KNEW this is what would happen.
Grow up a little, will ya? And get a fricking clue.
