by Smitty (via Insty)

The president is starting to look snakebit. He’s starting to look unlucky, like Jimmy Carter. It wasn’t Mr. Carter’s fault that the American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, but he handled it badly, and suffered. He defied the rule of the King in “Pippin,” the Broadway show of Carter’s era, who spoke of “the rule that every general knows by heart, that it’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart.” Mr. Carter’s opposite was Bill Clinton, on whom fortune smiled with eight years of relative peace and a worldwide economic boom. What misfortune Mr. Clinton experienced he mostly created himself. History didn’t impose it.

So, is ‘snakebit’ a Patriotic Grace deficit? Or could it be that Carter and Obama are fools, wheras Clinton has the benefit of low animal cunning?

But Mr. Obama is starting to look unlucky, and–file this under Mysteries of Leadership–that is dangerous for him because Americans get nervous when they have a snakebit president. They want presidents on whom the sun shines.

I’ll defer to Da Tech Guy or Little Miss Attila for a more serious Roman Catholic read the topic, but this ‘luck’ business is laughable. What was so lucky about Abraham Lincoln? I don’t think that luck plays any more role than that seen in the Alvin Greene candidacy. I do think there is a general cause-effect relationship between moral turpitude and tragedy.

It isn’t Mr. Obama’s fault that an oil rig blew in the Gulf and a gusher resulted.

True. My emphasis follows:

The administration’s failure to take impressive action after the spill dinged its reputation for competence. The president’s failure to turn things around Tuesday night with a speech damaged his reputation as a man whose rhetorical powers are such that he can turn things around with a speech.

Who gives a flying French fornication whether the action impresses anyone, Noonan? Leadership is not about running a godforsaken popularity contest. ‘Words Matter’ Does Not Mean ‘Words Affect Matter’. You simply cannot ‘give good speech’ and then expect the problem to fix itself. You especially cannot appear un-serious by taking vacations and golfing. Now is not the time. In a good leader, such tomfoolery would undermine all of the photo ops and Oval Office speechifying. In the case of BHO, stroking on the course while the oil spreads re-inforces the notion that, other than campaigning and tearing pages out of the Alinsky playbook, he’s useless. Snakebit?
Peggy:

There is still a sense about Mr. Obama that he needs George W. Bush in order to give his presidency full shape and meaning.

The sense about BHO is that he is a two-dimensional idealogue, selling failed ideas with a rhetorical gloss of success. BHO is crossing the threshold where ‘His [country]men would follow him anywhere, but only out of curiosity.’ And certainly not out of any sense of self-preservation.

Mr. Obama needs Mr. Bush in the corner and doesn’t have him. That’s part of why he looks so alone out there.

I cannot respond to this portion without sounding completely misogynistic.

And seems so snakebit, so at the mercy of forces. When you’re snakebit you get some sympathy, and some will come.

Here is the sympathy, courtesy of Lemmy, in this case, (you secret fan!):
Peggy:

As for the president, the great question is what you do when you start to feel snakebit.

Resign. Just go. Take crooksAdministration with. Anticipate a full set of pardons–concern over recriminations shouldn’t slow the decision.

I echo Bill Quick:

Listen up, you punked, chumped boobs: We looked at Obama not through your rose colored hallucinations, but through the cold, clear spectacles of reality. None of what he’s done since has surprised us one bit. In fact, many of us, myself included, predicted it even before his coronation by people like you. Yes, it’s nice that after a year and a half of horrible examples, the truth about him is finally beginning to penetrate your skulls. But why, for the love of god, couldn’t you see it at the beginning, when it was no less obvious, but your understanding of it might have done some good?
Actually, never mind. Since Obama’s election will turn out to be the worst thing to happen to the leftist project in America in the past hundred years, and will free a generation from the chains of leftist quackery at just the time such freedom is most sorely needed, I actually thank our lucky stars for useful idiots like you two. Without such, we might have been saddled with John McCain, and that would truly have been a disaster for conservatism, liberty, and America.

I’ll add a rider that the Hayekian lesson to draw from this atrocious administration is that ending the Federal Reserve and repealing the 16th Amendment, if not the 17 Amendment as well, are going to be crucial to breaking the Imperial Fed problem of which BHO is merely symptomatic.
Let’s not overly dignify BHO by thinking him the root cause of either the general Constitutional crisis the country faces, or the energy independence crisis that culminated in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Update: Paco-lanche!