House of Eratosthenes

Chris Matthews has now figured out what Peggy Noonan nailed down over two weeks ago: Our nation’s first Holy President does not have something called “executive command,” nor does He seek it, since said command would require a solid ownership of the technical details relevant to the oil spill…or any other given problem. This is not the Obama way. He convenes panels, commissions, councils, committees. These exercises in group-think are executed not quite so much to produce the answer that provides the greatest potential for a good outcome, but rather to produce the answer that will bring the least damage to His presidency. For His political ambitions, the outcome is about as beneficial as anything else possibly could be…which in this case is not much.

For the rest of us, it’s about as beneficial as whatever would be produced by a monkey throwing darts at a spinning circle.

Oopsie. “Monkey.” Was that racist?

There really is no race involved; this custom is so much older than the Obama Administration. We’ve made these offices to be filled by an executive who will possess singular, individual ownership of a problem — an then the executive convenes panels so that there is no ownership. “I was following the recommendation of the blue-ribbon commission,” he’ll say.

Sarah Palin had some thoughts about Obama’s speech as well. FireDogLake would like to make Palin the focus; they’re not too fond of her comments. They’d like to critique them before anybody has a chance to pay attention to them.

But Palin does have executive command. She sees entities, and she sees responsibilities that are upheld by those entities. In the case of the oil companies, she understands their mission is to bring a return on investment to the shareholders. Which means they can be trusted to bring oil up out of the ground — and that is all. Sure it’s not in BP’s interest to have this kind of disaster drag on day after day, but it isn’t appropriate to trust them to prevent it when the rest of us, be we direct consumers of oil or be we not, have such a heavy stake in it. Her words strike an appropriate balance, she even swivels Bill O’Reilly around to her point of view when he does not initially agree, and FireDogLake cannot stand it.

And now I’m going to say something exceptionally unkind.

Barack Obama is doing everything exactly right. He comes from a dysfunctional piece of America, one so obsessed with interpersonal communication that the persons living there are thoroughly drunk on it. He is one of them. They are blisteringly angry, right now, with Him. They live out their lives by avoiding technical details like vampires avoiding holy water. They voted for Him, because they didn’t want Him to be one of them; They wanted Him to be better. They wanted to bundle up all of the bothersome technical details they cannot begin to understand, throw them at Him, and have Him sort them all out with his hopey-changey-wonderful-charisma-or-whatever.

That is how they do their thinking: They externalize it. It is their very fabric. You are reminded of this when you try to discuss things with them: “Do you presume to know more about global warming than hundreds of Nobel-prize-winning scientists?”

Here He is treating arcane technical minutiae precisely the same way they do, by punting to someone else. How dare He!

His antithesis, Palin, maintains at this late hour a very high unfavorable rating. That is because the wrong people are being asked. The hopey-changey-charisma people don’t want to be part of the decision-making process. They want someone much better — meaning, different — to make the decisions. They want to throw the decisions at someone else, someone entirely alien, just as Obama wants to throw the decisions at committees.

They should be made irrelevant and ineffectual, because that is what they wish to be. They don’t want to be held accountable to anything. They just want to hear themselves talk.

We have a President who lacks executive command, and doesn’t want to have it, voted into office by people who go to great lengths to avoid it and really don’t want to learn anymore about what it is. These are the folks who have so few stories to tell about going against the majority; they’ve never done it, except for those rare occasions on which they thought they could flip the majority around. If it worked they came out the hero, and if it didn’t then of course they gave up.

Well, you aren’t going to have this executive command unless you can tune into the vibe of the biggest majority of all, which is reality. And you cannot master reality if you do not assume command of the relevant facts, and what they mean. You have to think like a builder in order to do that.

In 2008, that is not what this nation wanted, so today we do not deserve to have it. We got some guy who’s good at giving speeches, good at packaging up the “whatever” so that the gift wrap is lovely regardless of the contents. We got that, because that is what we said we wanted.

Now we’ve got a real problem and there’s no leadership installed that is prepared to deal with it.

There’s a profound lesson in there for us all.

Update: Daniel Hannan says I admit it: I was wrong to have supported Barack Obama.

These errors are not random. They amount to a comprehensive strategy of Europeanisation: Euro-carbon taxes, Euro-disarmament, Euro-healthcare, Euro-welfare, Euro-spending levels, Euro-tax levels and, inevitably, Euro-unemployment levels. Any American reader who wants to know where Obamification will lead should spend a week with me in the European Parliament. I’m working in your future and, believe me, you won’t like it.

Power, greed, intrigue, “unintended” consequences.
If one can actually pay attention to some of those annoying XBOX 360 games that include thinly veiled history lessons (NOT found in US unionized “educational” institutions) along with the blow-stuff-up filler, then the formula is right there, simply replace the names of the allegedly interested parties.
Assassins Creed
Just Cause
Alpha Protocal
Bioshock
One won’t find these among the miles of used “Madden” and “Sims” games for sale at 10 cents on the dollar.
Of course, the same can be said for (also NEVER seen in the syllabi , or “resale” rack, of so-called progressive institutions)
Atlas Shrugged

Imagine,
“All hat, no cattle!
“Egg management fee (wink)” comes to mind as well.
- CaptDMO | 06/16/2010 @ 12:16

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“Executive Command”?Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

“Executive Command”?
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010