House of Eratosthenes

“You all look really good, really fit,” [First Lady Michelle Obama] told the airmen. “Thank you for eating your vegetables. We need you strong.”

She encouraged healthy habits during a visit with individual airmen at their tables.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be a vegetable guy soon,” she reassured one airman.

It ventures out into “Hello Republicans, gonna make an ad about this?” territory. After all, FLOTUS is practically giving the election away on a plate here. Makes me wonder if future generations will have any idea who Marie Antoinette was; they won’t have any reason to know. And it’s not like this sneering condescension is any kind of a new thing, it’s been on parade since the beginning of 2009, even before that really.

Here we all are just fumbling and blundering and slippin’ and slidin’ like the Keystone Cops. Can’t do anything right! And here comes Barack, or Michelle, the new royalty, throwing out some statement of the form: “Hey [blank], quit [blank]ing.” Oh, my GOSH! Look at this silly dumb thing we’ve been doing just because that’s the way it’s always been done! Good thing the Obamas are here to think outside of the box for us.

Hey you other airmen! Michelle Obama’s right! The nation needs us strong, let’s eat our vegetables!

These are men and women who have families, who’ve made the decision to give their services and their time and who knows, maybe even their lives, to defend their country. And they’re being lectured to about their diets like they’re eight. Gee Michelle, what time should they go to bed, and should they brush their teeth for the full two minutes?

It’s hard to say what perplexes me the most about this. It might be, among the many components of this I’ve seen for the last three years, the one in particular that got her husband in trouble after He intoned from the lectern that the “Cambridge Police acted stupidly” — based on absolutely nothing whatsoever, He got it in His head that there was no reason for the events to take place that He’d heard about second-hand. That, right there, is a sign of just plain poor leadership: The idea that, if something was handled by the local authorities in a way contrary to the way you (think you) would have handled it, there’s no need to learn anything further about it. You are free to leap to extravagant conclusions that, if you can’t understand what was done, it must have been the product of bone-chilling stupid judgment on someone else’s part. They couldn’t possibly have any procedures in place that are outside your understanding, they couldn’t possibly know something about the facts-on-the-ground, that went sailing over your head because you weren’t there. To the substandard leader, all that stuff can be safely dismissed.

Show him a thousand people doing something different from the way he thinks he’d be doing it, that’s a thousand heads stuck up a thousand asses. No need to look into it any further.

I do not see how honest people close in on the end of their forties, living life this way, thinking about it this way…that everyone who does something they wouldn’t have done, just holler over at them “Hey! Do it this way!” and they’ll just…wow, I had no idea how cocked up I was. Look at that, some stranger hollering incredibly simple ideas for a mid-course correction at me. I’d better shape up and do what that guy says!

I don’t think honest people do live into adulthood that way for too long. By which I mean, people who behave the same way off-camera as the way they behave when the camera is on. I mean, picture it; how would such a person walk through, say, a construction zone, each and every little thing being done that he doesn’t understand, is someone doing something the wrong way, in need of his superior wisdom. Why, he’d have hollered himself hoarse before making it fifty yards, right?

I’m so tired of this. If the rest of the country is just one quarter as tired of it as I am, just call this behavior out exactly the way we’ve seen it between now and November…Barack Obama will be lucky to win Illinois.

Seriously, people put up with this? Some of them even like it? Do the polls really say that? I’m skeptical. It’s childish, stupid, more than a little bit daffy, and it looks that way.

Update: You know, it occurs to me this might be a problem with just plain maturity. Imagine yourself, for the very first time, taking a gun apart and looking at the pieces. Or taking a lawnmower engine apart, or a bicycle apart, or a computer laptop apart…these are all fairly sophisticated, capable devices, and among their parts you’ll find a big mish-mash of orthodox and unorthodox. Self-contained and not-self-contained. Here & there you will see things like screws, washers, nuts and bolts, which work a certain obvious way and serve a certain obvious purpose…then you’ll have these very odd bits of metal, levers, cams, things that do not provide their intended function until such time as they come in contact with something else. With those odd-looking strangely-curved pieces of plastic and metal, you aren’t going to form an understanding of how they work until such time as you form an understanding, a fairly rugged one, of how the machine works as a whole — then it will make sense.

This late in the game, Barack Obama has come to represent, to me, an emblem of the bossy little seven-year-old who is constantly issuing these proclamations and orders, with great confidence, since He has not so much a shred of uncertainty about any of them…but He lacks the uncertainty about them because there’s never been any necessity for Him to question anything. Has Barack Obama been stuck on the side of the road with a bent chain on His bicycle? Had to take His computer apart because the floppy drive wasn’t working right? Don’t make me laugh.

He lives in that enviable world, although I do not envy it even a little bit — in which each item therein either is readily understood in form & function with only casual thought applied, or else it’s dumb & stupid. You bark an order at it, and hopefully it’ll shape up its shit.

In other words, sort of a cartoon world in which nothing really works. A Hanna Barbera cartoon world, where you walk without your arms moving, passing the same clump of trees every three or four seconds.

Update: It bugs Terri, too.

I recall all these straw-men President Obama tends to build up so He can tear them down…many of His lectures are formulated for a simple-minded nemesis that, although it may not be obvious, is something He just invented on the spot. “There are those who say” has managed to find a space on the Obama Speech Bingo card — and then there’s the famous “folks ain’t been reading their bibles” speech —

He tends to become embarrassed when He’s caught, how shall we put it, misunderstanding the misunderstanding. In so doing, he imagines a misunderstanding that isn’t actually there. I’m afraid He’s going to become an exquisitely annoying former President.

It reminds me of the blonde joke that takes place in a coffee shop. A blonde typing at a laptop screams because her screen has gone dark and her work appears to have vanished. One of the other patrons helpfully points out that, since there’s no power cord evident, perhaps the unit shut down because it simply ran out of juice. She peevishly clucks her tongue and chastises him, “No, you don’t need a cord on this! It’s wireless!”

Yeah…a lot like that.

[…] Morgan over at House of Eratosthenes takes the time to write about a thing the Obama’s do that is enough to drive one whacko. […]
- Yes, It Bugs Me Too « | 02/13/2012 @ 07:21

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We Might Have Been Hauling Our Heads Around in Our Asses Forever, If the Obamas Never Told Us to Pull Them OutSaturday, February 11th, 2012

We Might Have Been Hauling Our Heads Around in Our Asses Forever, If the Obamas Never Told Us to Pull Them Out
Saturday, February 11th, 2012