House of Eratosthenes

We do not hand out the coveted Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award casually. We certainly do not hand it out just because certain individuals out there deign to request that it be granted to them.

But ya know what? That isn’t a disqualification, either.

Mike Simone, one of my friends over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging, is well deserving of the one hundred thirteenth BSIHORL award because of this bumper-sticker-suitable entry:

If you voted for Obama in ’08 to prove you’re not a racist, you’ll need to vote for someone else in ’12 to prove you’re not an idiot.

I’m sad to say, the evidence of Mike’s correctness is all around us today, April 27, 2011, the day His Holiness decided to release His own long-form birth certificate. The blogosphere has gone supernova over this. Actually, not really. It is faintly rumbling. Maybe we should call that “stirring.”

The right side of said ‘sphere is yawning, saying (roughly paraphrased) “Good. Now we can stop paying attention to whether He’s a legal President, and start paying attention to what a gawdawful President He is.”

And the left side of it is screaming “RAAAAAAAACISM!” So you see, nothing is really changed too much. Except, those birthers who were supposed to be maniacal and never satisfied by anything, so what’s the point of releasing the long-form? Actually they’ve been reasonably quiet.

And the end of the day, it’s looking like just another thing King Barry The First should’ve handled differently from the way He did. Oh, and the date 4/27/11? I have a standing challenge for any Obama fan to argue this particular date was a good one to release the long form…according to the interests of the country. I have no doubt it was in the interests, or at least perceived to be in the interests, of the democrat party or of Obama’s re-election campaign. Even then, it looks like an asset that quickly turned into a liability, like something that exploded out of control. Some “tiger by the tail” thing that escaped inept management.

But show me how it was in the interest of America for its President to release His birth certificate on Wednesday, the twenty-seventh of April, in the third year of His first term.

And oh my goodness isn’t this more than a little bit awkward:

“We don’t have time for such silliness,” the President said this morning. And then he flew off to Chicago to be on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

It’s just strategic thinking beginning to end. And I mean that adjective literally, the way you read it straight out of the dictionary:

strategic : designed or trained to strike an enemy at the sources of its military, economic, or political power.

So if you grant Barack Obama the benefit of every possible doubt — and in His world, you damn well better, because as I explained in the post previous He isn’t used to anything else — He really came out on top here! He really socked it to those birther teabagger Republicans. And that’s what it’s all about!

Go look up at that definition again.

Well, two problems with that. One, I don’t think so. I don’t think “Teh Won” won. My standing question “how does it help the US of A to release this on April 27, 2011?” remains a standing question; it is unanswerable. Unless you’ve been living in a hole, you know Obama was painted into a corner by that fellow with the bad hairpiece whose name cannot be mentioned out loud on April 27, 2011. Rhymes with “plump.”

Obama let go of the saucepan handle after He already got a third-degree burn. He didn’t release any document; the document jumped out of His scorched fingers. Once again, inept management. And it looks like it.

Two: My April 27 query is unanswerable because the plain fact of the matter is Obama did not act out of concern for the welfare of the country. Obama acted — again! — to the benefit of Obama.

Obama failed to preside. He acted, again, as His own public-relations manager. And then He failed to attend even to that relatively miniscule task with any degree of competence.

My friend Mike addresses those who labored to prove to — whoever — that they weren’t racists back in 2008. The one flaw in this message is that those who are capable of hearing it, don’t need it. It is self-evident that Obama is not a healer of racial divisions, and cannot be one. He’s too…strategic. And therefore He is inherently divisive. It’s always going to be that way because it always has to be that way.

Add up the following: the attack on the “stupidly” acting Cambridge police, Eric Holder’s “cowards” and “my people,” Justice Sotomayor’s “wise Latina,” Van Jones’ rants against white polluters and mass murderers, the president’s declarations like the following: “And if Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘we’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us….’” Or the following, “We can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.” Or the race, class, gender video appeal to “young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women who powered our victory in 2008 [to] stand together once again.” What, then, is left of a supposedly racially neutral presidency?

In other words, if Obama had modeled his presidency after a Colin Powell’s or Condoleezza Rice’s tenure as secretary of State, then race would have been seen as incidental, not essential, to his character and agenda, and support for his presidency would have been predicated solely on principles rather than appeals to particular identity groups. The current rising racial awareness is no accident, but essential to focus support for liberal issues in traditional terms of polarization, victimization, and increased racial identity — especially as independents get frightened and peel off. Since 2009, we are less seen as an integrated, assimilated, and intermarried melting pot, but more a mosaic of competing interests that predicate their rival claims on society based on race, class, and gender.

Bloc voting and identity — the “base” — aid the Obama agenda; race as inconsequential does not. Before Obama, the now explosive and globally viral video of two young black girls’ savage beating of a white transgendered victim in a McDonald’s would have been one of many tragic morality tales about the generic dangers of drifting into the wrong places at the wrong times in an unsafe contemporary America. But after the precedent of the Skip Gates presidential intervention, the question naturally arises — when and when not does the president intervene in local issues, in symbolic terms, to offer the nation a teachable moment on racial bias: when an elite professor is inconvenienced in private or an adolescent is almost beaten to death in public?

Hat tip for that last one to blogger friend Rick.

Obama’s many shortcomings, I’m afraid, are much bigger than Obama. George Washington would have been horrified at the “brand-name politics” that engulfed the presidency sometime during the twentieth century. Every single President [insert surname here] has to demonstrate what is uniquely wonderful about a [insert surname here] administration. The presidency is supposed to be bigger than any one man, bigger than any one name. When the nation first got started, the vision was that these executives would be mere custodians, or stewards, each attending to the task in a way that would be most obviously beneficial. They had their partisan squabblings about what that was, to be sure. But the dream was that this squabbling would recede into the background. It’s a dead dream, now.

In fact, it’s much worse in this century than it was in the last one. We take it for granted that a “wonderful” administration is only supposed to be wonderful to a select few people. This President here, will deliver things to that constituency over there…everyone else should just resign themselves to going without. And then when he gets voted out of office, it’s that other constituency that will benefit from it, and the previous beneficiaries need to become accustomed to not counting for anything for the next four years…and so it goes.

So these three years without showing anybody the long form? That was a clue. Maybe, for the kind of healing our nation really needs, the right president has yet to be born. But if he is living among us, over thirty-five, ready to assume the mantle of that executive power…Barack Obama was not the guy. Because we knew early on that He fits the mold of my Monopoly-brat. He runs into a rule, and where George Washington would dismount his horse, bow courteously, and comply with the rule — it seems to be Emperor Barack’s place to exploit every little margin of doubt, every little loophole, to His advantage so He can stick it to the people who need to have it stuck to them.

What else would you expect from the guy who thinks it’s His place to make the oceans recede? No, that is not a manufactured quote. He really said that.

Twenty-twelve is coming fast. Prove you’re not an idiot.

[…] Imploded Now We Know What He Didn’t Want Us to See It’s Hard to Wreck a Train Best Sentence CXIII Your Obligatory “He Released It” Post Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… XXXIII […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 05/02/2011 @ 07:49
[…] this “that’s racist” stuff isn’t gonna cut it. The situation becomes one adroitly summed up by my Facebook friend Mike Simone, If you voted for Obama in ‘08 to prove you’re not a racist, you’ll need to vote for someone […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 05/29/2011 @ 09:49
[…] this “that’s racist” stuff isn’t gonna cut it. The situation becomes one adroitly summed up by my Facebook friend Mike Simone, If you voted for Obama in ‘08 to prove you’re not a racist, you’ll need to vote for someone […]
- “McCain: Palin Can Beat Obama” | Right Wing News | 05/29/2011 @ 10:05

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Best Sentence CXIIIWednesday, April 27th, 2011

Best Sentence CXIII
Wednesday, April 27th, 2011