The Big O. is “yet another president elevating personal quirks into a management style,” says the personal-quirk-oriented Maureen Dowd, picking on him for not coming up with her version of a good manager.
She bemoaned predecessors GW Bush, Clinton, LBJ, and Nixon’s acting out in and from the White House — no Carter, note — but expected of this “psychologically healthy” Obama (this from a book she read).
He was “dazzling” as a politician but is “obdurately self-destructive about politics.”
He is guilty of
failing to understand that Americans are upset that a series of greedy corporations have screwed over the little guy without enough fierce and immediate pushback from the president.
So this leftist commentator wants a tough guy in the White House. I do too, but toughness is for beating back the many-tentacled bureaucracy that a president inherits. Forget about it: he’s one of them. He loves power.
But as I have said before, God writes straight (sometimes) with crooked lines, and the Dowd critique is quotable even allowing for her crookedness. In his speech last night:
He appointed a “son of the gulf” spill czar and a new guard dog at M.M.S. and tried to restore a sense of confident leadership — “The one approach I will not accept is inaction” — and compassion, reporting on the shrimpers and fishermen and their “wrenching anxiety that their way of life may be lost.” He acted as if he was the boss of BP on the issue of compensation. And he called on us to pray.
A new last refuge for scoundrels here: prayer.
The rest is to the point, that he’s over his head in spilt oil, crying over it when he should . . . What?
Waive the union-protective Jones Act, say people who also want action, among other things. God, after all, helps those who help themselves, said B. Franklin (not God) in his 1736 version of Poor Richard’s Almanack, but Jewish wise men, Sts. Augustin and Ignatius Loyola and others have told us to pray as if all depended on God, act as if it all depended on us.
Assuming you really want that oil mopped up and do not approach it as an opportunity to rail at big business.
Blithe Spirit 