House of Eratosthenes

So I’m reading about what the President needs to do tonight and I’m reading about what the Secretary of State did & said yesterday. It is clear that Clinton’s statement came out of the President’s “debate prep.” Not so much in a “ya think?” way but more in sort of a “like duh” way.

Hillary is clearly playing the good soldier on the eve of the crucial second presidential debate between her boss, President Obama, and challenger Mitt Romney. After Vice President Joe Biden threw Clinton under the bus during the vice presidential debate, stating that neither he nor President Obama knew anything about the security situation in Benghazi, Hillary stepped out to the front to take the hit.

But, from the first link about what the President needs to do, we have…

“The first thing he can do is show up,” says a well-connected party strategist who shares the Democratic view that the president disastrously failed to engage in Denver. “He needs to be Joe Biden without the smirks.”

The strategist wants to see a forceful Obama — a really forceful Obama — take on Romney. “The ’47 percent,’ he ought to be shoving up Romney’s a–,” the Democrat says. “Romney can say he apologized. But Obama can say an apology doesn’t change things. Romney didn’t misspeak. That was a two-minute oration that basically gave Romney’s view of America.”

Problem: Putting this all together and smooshing it around in a big ball, and then adding to that this consequent sub-scandal about the President receiving intel briefings on His iPad, it doesn’t seem to me that this is going to work. It won’t work with the undecided voters and it won’t work with the base either. Depending on how you define “base,” I suppose…

I mean, just think out the message. You’ve got this Holy President who cannot be bothered to show up at intel briefings, opting to receive the briefing content on His iPad so that His time can be freed up because He’s the President and so forth. It obviously doesn’t work because He had to abandon the practice after the Benghazi debacle, under a cloud of embarrassment. But that’s alright because the guy who is going to be the President’s debate opponent, tonight, has a “view of America” that acknowledges that some 47% see themselves as victims and don’t want to take responsibility for anything. Therefore, Romney isn’t going to go around the country and chase their votes because there’s no point to it. And the President doesn’t have a similar view?

What exactly is He doing with all this time saved from not bothering to show up for daily intelligence briefings? He plays a lot of golf, goes out to appear at fundraisers, guests on Letterman and on The View. It has become rather difficult to envision Him burning any midnight oil hashing out details of legislation with representatives from Congress or anything like that, this seems to be entirely delegated to smart legal-beagles who must know what they’re doing…while our First Holy President goes out to give more speeches. Do those speeches have something to do with being a President for all Americans, to contrast Him with that insensitive guy who “doesn’t care” about the “47 percent”? Eh…no. And that isn’t just my opinion, President Obama has made history with His reputation as a polarizing president.

Probably as a result of comments like “cling to guns or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them,” an infamous snippet He delivered at…yup…another fundraiser. It’s not an isolated case by any means. You don’t have to listen to an Obama speech for very long before you hear it: Some class definition of loathed individuals, people who can’t be reached because the President’s skin is too dark…or they have too much money in the bank…or both of these things. In any case, these are people who don’t need any more influence, they have had plenty enough already. That’s the common theme. It does not paint a picture of an effective critic, who has room to talk about Romney failing to properly care for & about the 47%.

Keep in mind the picture being painted, is not being painted by a conservative blogger, it’s a self-portrait the President is painting of Himself. He travels around the country giving speeches, He’s pretty sure the security things back in Washington will sort of work themselves out — and they don’t — while He delivers speeches excoriating “millionaires and billionaires in their corporate jets.” Right after stepping off one of the country’s biggest jets. Then He rips into Romney for ignoring the hopes and wishes of the forty-seven percent because, you know, ignoring half of America is something I guess you’re only supposed to do when you’re already sworn in, or something.

I don’t think a sans-serif Biden performance is going to polish this turd into a stepping stone for the President’s re-election, I just don’t. President Obama will deliver it all with flourish, and no small measure of talent, I’m sure. He’ll arouse wonderful warm feelings in people who make their decisions with lots of feely and very little thinky, it’ll work on them. But He had them already.

For either candidate, “appealing to base” means, by implication, reach out to the people who’d never vote for your opposition at any rate, and try to ensure they’ll bother to turn out to vote. The Romney/Ryan ticket has very little work to do here. They’ve gone on to the more time-appropriate and potent reaching-out to the undecideds. This counts double, since failure to reach out to the base results in a missing vote, whereas failure to reach out to an undecided voter results in a vote for the other side.

This is where Benghazi has really hurt Obama. He is truly a solution in search of a problem, said solution being, He can convince lightweight thinkers that He’s sort of God or something. So He appears, to airheads, to be a deity of some kind. Well the debacle in Libya creates a need for Americans to be reassured, not quite so much that they have a deity in the White House, but they have someone who’s capable of overseeing things, applying attention to details. Obama’s inflexible answer to this is to say, I’m zipping around the country but it’s alright, stuff’s being handled. Except when it’s not.

That’s the trouble with solutions in search of problems. When a problem confronts them that exists outside of the problem they intend to solve, rather than tailoring themselves to address whatever was not already addressed, their temptation is to tone that part down, pretend it isn’t really sitting out there, doing what problems do…which, by & large, tends to be: grow. The temptation is to simply sidestep reality, something which seems to come naturally to President Obama & crew. I don’t think it’s going to work here. Romney & supporters would have to say okay, and let the whole thing go. Fine, let’s pretend Benghazi never happened.

But that won’t work either. It hasn’t been just Benghazi.

As the old cliche says: When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

I think I’ve got a decent handle on a lot of what makes liberals tick, but I’m just not wired to handle this one: the idea that things will be different than they are if you just say so enough times.

I don’t even know what to call it (some kind of quasi-gnosticism, maybe?). I remember having this conversation with my mom when I was a kid. “That’s not fair!” I’d whine, in response to some parental decree or other. And she’d invariably say “what’s fair got to do with it?” Or sometimes “who said life is fair?” It didn’t take too many of those for me to realize that my desires were one way, and the world was another way, and in any conflict between the two, reality wins every time.

Similarly, on assignments and whatnot in high school, I’d make these very clever arguments that while my answer appeared wrong at first glance, if you looked at it from this one very rarified perspective you’d see that….. Every day I thank God I had teachers who said “yes, that’s true, but completely irrelevant, since it requires us to assume a viewpoint completely opposite of common sense and observed reality.” Or, as one coach so eloquently put it: “Yeah, but then again, if your aunt had balls she’d be your uncle.”

Liberals have somehow managed to go through an entire life on this earth without learning these simple facts. Through some combination of luck, privilege, and careful social choices, they’ve managed to construct a bubble in which the cleverest argument wins, reality be damned. And if you disagree — i.e. point out the uncomfortable, contradictory reality — you’ll fail the term paper or miss the promotion or pay the tax or face the “hate crimes” legislation or get called a racist and told to go back to watching Faux News, you dumb hateful hater.
- Severian | 10/16/2012 @ 06:01
I see from my e-mail this morning that, once again, Ed Darrell is providing a textbook illustration of exactly how this kind of thinking works. Reality says that when Romney manages an economy the unemployment rate is around 4%, under Obama it’s around 8% or 9%, but they imagine something, write about it forcefully, and that should somehow overcome the facts. Again. Keep things the same, and they will become different, somehow.
- mkfreeberg | 10/16/2012 @ 10:11
Yup. And that’s why I stopped being a leftist, and could never go back.

It’s not even the lies, per se — I play poker; I appreciate the strategic value in a well-deployed lie. It’s the apparent belief in the lies. The doublethink, whatever you want to call it. It hurts my brain too much. I can only stay on my high horse so long about how X is categorically bad, full stop, any attempt to imagine a situation in which X isn’t bad makes you the worst person in the world… except when my guy gets caught doing X, in which case it’s not a tactical maneuver, a lie, or even good ol’ fashioned hypocrisy, but a categorical good, and questioning that makes you the worst person in the world.

That shit gives me a migraine.

I wouldn’t even mind it if this kind of thing fit into a clearly posited scale of values. You know, Republicans are all about business, so 4% unemployment is the least we can expect from them; but Dems are all about fairness and social justice, so 8% is perfectly ok if those two things — with numbers attached — exceed some defined threshold. I doublt I’d agree with this, but it’s at least an intellectually honest position that can be advanced and defended in the realm of ethics and facts. But nope — as we saw with Obamacare, conformity is the point; it must be all things to all people all at once, and to question any of that, be it cost, necessity, the timetable for implementation, whatever, means you hate poor people and want to see them die of cancer.

And if you disagree, we’ll keep calling you a racist until you fall into line.
- Severian | 10/16/2012 @ 12:42
I can only stay on my high horse so long about how X is categorically bad, full stop, any attempt to imagine a situation in which X isn’t bad makes you the worst person in the world… except when my guy gets caught doing X, in which case it’s not a tactical maneuver, a lie, or even good ol’ fashioned hypocrisy, but a categorical good, and questioning that makes you the worst person in the world.

That shit gives me a migraine.

It used to make my head hurt too, until I finally got angry. And now I simply respond unkindly to that sort of bullshit. I don’t mind differences of opinion, nor do I mind-too much- the kind of nonsensical standards you mention above. What I no longer tolerate is the decision to wax indignant about some action based solely on the party affiliation of said offender.

My newest sister-in-law is lefty from Barry’s old district in Illinois. Right after the election, she said “I have a lot of faith in Obama.” I responded that being somewhat older I knew what would happen: Obama would adopt most of Bush’s policies and claim that he now possessed heretofore unknown facts that forced him to change his mind about said policies. Of course, I didn’t anticipate that Obama would simply follow Bush’s lead and never say a damn thing about it. Then again, I didn’t correctly anticipate the complete hackery of the left, absent a few exceptions such as Glenn Greenwald. I don’t have much good to say about the Sockpuppet Master, but he has been consistent in his opposition to some policies common to both Bush and Obama. Kind of a lonely voice in an otherwise ethically barren wasteland.

I simply hope that Romney doesn’t screw up monumentally tonight. Even a draw keeps momentum on his side. I was never a huge Romney fan, but I cannot wait to see Barry’s back. Of course, should Romney win, I’ll immediately hear stories about unemployment and the homeless sometime on 1/20/2013. Somehow, I think I can handle that situation.
- Physics Geek | 10/16/2012 @ 13:53
Of course, should Romney win, I’ll immediately hear stories about unemployment and the homeless sometime on 1/20/2013.

And gas prices. Don’t forget gas prices! Remember how you couldn’t open a paper, turn on the radio, or watch tv for more than five minutes back in 2008 without someone blathering on about record!! high!!!1!11! gas prices? Well just a few weeks ago they hit the highest levels ever recorded in America, and the media response…. well, let’s just say that it was muted.

As much as I want to see Barry exiled to the golf course forever (well, until He’s elected UN general secretary), one thing I’m actually looking more forward to is all the presstitutes in the unemployment line. They’ve well and truly sold their souls for four years of Obama; not even raving schizophrenics on streetcorners are crazy enough to believe the media isn’t grossly biased after this. Nothing will be sweeter than watching the Andrea Mitchells of the world having a screaming meltdown on election night.
- Severian | 10/16/2012 @ 14:43
After watching these debates, I believe I have discovered Obama’s religion. He believes everything can be solved by more education. He can’t talk about a single topic without bringing teachers into the discussion. If he is an example of what education can do for you, I’m glad I didn’t get my degree. I’ve talked to farmers that were better educated than the President is.
- teripittman | 10/16/2012 @ 21:23
[…] Severian said: It’s not even the lies, per se — I play poker; I appreciate the strategic value in a […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/17/2012 @ 06:34

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“Biden Without the Smirks”Tuesday, October 16th, 2012

“Biden Without the Smirks”
Tuesday, October 16th, 2012