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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2009-03-19

We Might Have To Demote These Guys 

The Junior Varsity might be a bit too ambitious for members of this administration.

Tonight's contibutions, though they didn't actually happen today:

But Cowen was 20 seconds into his second address when it dawned on him that he was giving word for word the speech that Obama had just read from the same teleprompter.

Here's the thing: it's not that there was a teleprompter mistake, though that's not supposed to happen; it's not that it took 20 full seconds for the PM to realize he wasn't reading his own speech (there's got to be a joke about Guiness in there somewhere, but I'll let it pass);

IT'S THAT OBAMA NEEDED A TELEPROMPTER TO GIVE AN INTRODUCTION!

Just for grins, I'm going to try to write a little introduction here; I promise I'll do it as stream-of-consciousness as I can.

"Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. It gives me great pleasure to introduce the Prime Minister of one of America's closest friends and allies, and it is a great honor to continue a long tradition of the White House welcoming the Prime Minister of Ireland on St. Patrick's Day.

Beyond our obvious similarities in governance and values, the long influence and great affinity of America and Ireland upon each other is worthy of such a celebration. Besides a great Irish playwrite, there is a long tradition of Irish American civil servants in some of our greatest cities, manning the Blue Line in Chicago or rushing into burning buildings in New York.

"And so, on this St. Patrick's Day, it is a distinct pleasure to introduce a great civil servant and friend of America, the Prime Minister of Ireland, Mr. Brian Cowen."

Not that hard.

And the second one is just the continuation of and earlier screw-up:

Remember about five weeks ago when President Obama said this:

"Yesterday, Jim, the head of Caterpillar, said that if Congress passes our plan, this company will be able to rehire some of the folks who were just laid off," Obama said today in Peoria.

And then remember how, about a minute and a half later "Jim" said this:

"The honest reality is we're probably going to have more layoffs before we start hiring again."

Well, a little better staff work might have prevented this story:

Caterpillar Inc., gearing down production further in response to eroding global demand, disclosed plans Tuesday to idle more than 2,200 U.S. workers, including 1,526 in Illinois.

So, um . . . . maybe that whole stimulus thingy might just, I don't know, um . . . WORK.

The combination of arrogance and incompetence reminds me of this guy I used to play basketball with. You know the type: talks a great game, has all the gear, walks on the court like he owns it, and then dribbles the ball off his own knee or throws a screaming pass into the third row of the bleachers, and then blames his teammates for it.

At some point, he stopped being annoying and just became a bad joke.

The President of the United States can ill afford to become a bad joke. Obama should ask his predecessor what that does for an administration . . . . or for the country.
Posted by: Michael / 3/19/2009 01:01:00 AM

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