The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Not Even Chesley Sullenberger Could Have Made The Spruce Goose A Success

Posted on | September 11, 2011 | 12 Comments

by Smitty

Chesley Sullenberger is as close to immortal as a pilot can get, after his Hudson River heroics. But even that skill could not have made the Spruce Goose a success.

Progressivism is the political equivalent of the Spruce Goose, on a variety of levels. However, BHO is no political Sullenberger, despite the prodigious propaganda efforts of the lickspittle media.

And yet some behave as if there was some way this Spruce Goose could have succeeded, if BHO was just a bit more like Harry Truman?:

“[B]arack Obama is no Harry Truman,” Krauthammer said. It’s not that complicated. Obama is over his head. He is a great orator. He came out of nowhere. He dazzled America. He [has] never run anything. He never actually enacted anything even in the legislature. He hadn’t run a state. He hadn’t run a city. He hadn’t run a business. He is running the biggest enterprise in the world and he has not succeeded. And that is why all of these independents, all of those who believed in a soaring rhetoric, including probably a couple who swooned in the aisles as he spoke in 2008, are now waking up and realizing he is a mortal who is in over his head.”

Colby King, also a columnist for The Washington Post, protested Krauthammer’s analysis and said it was inspired by a “dislike for Obama.”

“I think your dislike for Obama is getting in the way of sound analysis of the situation,” King replied. “Week after week after, it is a personalized attack. And now you are saying, ‘he is stupid.’”

No, this blog is not saying that BHO, the man, in isolation, is stupid. What is stupid is the depth to which 100 years of Progressivism have weakened the American commitment to liberty; have made running peacetime deficits acceptable; have mistaken the government cart for the capitalist horse as the driver for the economy.

The notion that anyone could put wings on these political anvils and somehow make them fly, by propaganda or sheer will-to-power, is what is stupid. In and of itself, it’s still a good thing that the U.S. elected a black man. However, we could have elected Joseph Edgar Foreman to meet that requirement with a less negative effect on the economy.

Category: Barack Obama, Uncategorized

Comments

12 Responses to “Not Even Chesley Sullenberger Could Have Made The Spruce Goose A Success”

  1. Adjoran
    September 11th, 2011 @ 9:49 pm

    You don’t have to say it – I will:  Barack Obama is a stupid man.

    Read his letter in Harvard Law Record defending affirmative action at the Review – it is nearly incoherent, as is any piece of writing traced to the man until the obviously ghost-written “Dreams From My Father” which is clearly the product of a different mind.  Certainly not what you would expect from someone who made Harvard Law School, much less Law Review AND President of it.

    That’s why the paper trail is so carefully guarded.  That’s why he never wrote an article as editor or President of Harvard Law Review.  The profession’s greatest stage for a budding lawyer, and he passes on the opportunity?  Fourteen years as a “Constitutional Law lecturer” at U Chicago, but not one single scholarly article published?

    He’s a Red Diaper baby, schooled only in radical Marxism, carried by Affirmative Action to Columbia and Harvard Law, carried through the Illinois State Senate where the only bills bearing his name are those Senate President Emil Jones just stuck his name upon and, when confronted by the colleagues who actually worked on the bills, defended it by saying “I am making a US Senator.”  130 “Present” votes.

    This is also why he needs teleprompters, and will refuse any debate without short answers to questions from his media allies, because he is too stupid to be allowed to speak long unscripted.

    He’s an actor playing a role.  Sean Penn is a fine actor, and a dumbass without a script.  So is Obama.

    Was that so hard to say?

  2. JeffS
    September 11th, 2011 @ 9:59 pm

    When it comes to Progressivism, especially in the context of  Obama’s (highly limited) capabilities, I prefer the analogy of “lipstick on a pig” myself. 

  3. Richard Mcenroe
    September 11th, 2011 @ 10:47 pm

    I take exception to the assertion that Obama is a great orator.  He has learned one or two rhetorical tricks, long since beaten to death, has a stilted, choppy delivery that serves the Rev. Wright effectively because of his rage but leaves Obama looking uncertain and awkward as he speaks, and his actual texts are a conflation of clichés, puffery and daytime TV tropes that could only — and did, briefly– enthrall listeners who had been victimized by a public education. 

    Worse, as we saw today by comparison with Bush, regarded by few as a great orator, Obama no longer speaks he recites, he performs, with no weight to his speeches because he gives them no weight himself, refusing to engage emotionally with his own words as if to distance himself from their impending failure…

  4. Anonymous
    September 11th, 2011 @ 11:44 pm

    I never watched any of his speeches other than an occasional sound bite on TV while he was campaigning. Did they use the close in shots that are used for many of his speeches particularly from the White House? I ask this because I often wonder why no one there seems to notice how disconnected he looks as his head swivels from teleprompter to teleprompter, never looking straight into the audience/camera. This puts him at least partially in profile not his most flattering angle. I also often wonder if the teleprompters shouldn’t be set lower or something. This might explain why his head is often tilted backwards highlighting his arrogance. Granted the man has nothing useful to say. That doesn’t mean he couldn’t say it better.

  5. AnonymousDrivel
    September 12th, 2011 @ 1:08 am

    “No, this blog is not saying that BHO, the man, in isolation, is stupid.”

    Eh. Facts speak for themselves. He’s multifacetedly incompetent. IOW a SCoaMF.

  6. Mo
    September 12th, 2011 @ 2:13 am

    BHO bored me from day 1.  I never understood the laudatory claptrap about his speaking abilities, other than his ability to hypnotize an audience into adulation while not saying one thing worth remembering! 

    The MSM hasn’t given up, btw, or does that need saying?  “Exclusive Interview” with Teh Won, with Brian Williams, he of the idiot questions on the latest round of “GOP Gotcha” aka the debate at the Reagan Library.  I can barely stand that I have to go to work (and yes, I’m grateful I HAVE work, in BHO’s America) and have to miss what is sure to be a reminder of the Gettysburg Address.  BHO’s feelings about what is going on in America!  Oh the rapture, I’ll be sure to tape it….

  7. Adjoran
    September 12th, 2011 @ 7:16 am

    And if I may nitpick a bit, the Spruce Goose wasn’t necessarily a bad design.  It was never fully tested, because the need which inspired it ended with the end of the Second World War.  The concept – originally from industrialist Henry Kaiser, whose innovations included welding instead of riveting in shipbuilding and cement mixer trucks – was to have a large supply transport vehicle made without steel and aluminum needed for the war effort.  It was a huge “flying boat” more than an aircraft, from what is known, and it passed its initial tests before funding disappeared.

    No one really knows if the Spruce Goose (which contained no spruce, it was birch and particle laminates) could have exceeded the ground effect, or what its effective ceiling or range might have been.  Kaiser surely would have blamed Hughes’ management of the project, which had begun with the war in full flame, and he abandoned the effort when it became apparent it wouldn’t be functional before the war ended.

    So in most substantive ways, it is an inappropriate comparison for the Obama Regime, which consists of a simple if varying mixture of leftist ideology, totalitarian tactics, and garden variety incompetence.

  8. rosalie
    September 12th, 2011 @ 12:08 pm

    I agree totally that he’s not a great orator.  He has a good voice; that’s it!

  9. Bob Belvedere
    September 12th, 2011 @ 12:35 pm

    I’ve always been amused by this whole ‘great orator’ myth.  When he speaks, he has always reminded by of a High School Valedictorian –  the rank amateur aspiring to profundity, hopelessly lost in a sea of milky bromides.

  10. Bob Belvedere
    September 12th, 2011 @ 12:39 pm

    When he tries to come off as a Gospel preacher it is quite laughable.

    As a young lad, I used to lie in bed with an AM radio on Saturday Nights/Sunday Mornings and listen to the black preachers on the skywaves and this clown doesn’t even come close to quality of those men of God.

    The myths devised by the MSM are all so laughable.

  11. Bob Belvedere
    September 12th, 2011 @ 12:40 pm

    Obama is New Coke, perhaps?

  12. Anonymous
    September 12th, 2011 @ 6:39 pm

    Actually, there is one spot on comparison, it became obvious very early that Obama would not become functional before his term ended.