"Well, it's pretty embarrassing when you can't even handle pirates."

Instapunditry on the reason for the "muted outcry in Washington" after pirates kill 4 Americans:

President Obama did not issue a statement on the tragedy. White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the administration was "obviously outraged by the actions of the pirates."

"And the president, as you know, I believe, has expressed his sincere condolences to the families of the victims," Carney said at a press briefing. "But beyond that, I don't want to get into details."

Obviously... What counts as "obvious" these days? Apparently nothing more that the assumption that he must feel bad about it, even when he says nothing.

Rush Limbaugh thinks Obama is icy cold — like Michael Dukakis... and Buck Turgidson.

Don't let the horrible photo chosen by Media Matters here stop you from listening to the audio. It's an excellent performance by Rush, including his approximation of the George C. Scott performance:



The transcript — along with the Dukakis and "Dr. Strangelove" clips — is here. He's talking about the new Bob Woodward book:

Woodward asks about terrorism, terror attacks, and so forth. Obama says, "We can absorb a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever, we absorbed it, and we're stronger." That, to me, is the equivalent of Dukakis being asked, "If your wife were raped and murdered, would you favor the death penalty?" So Woodward says, "What about terrorism?" Obama figures, "Ah, we can handle it. We can absorb it. We're even stronger." That's not cool. That is cold, and it reminded me of something. One of my all-time favorite movies is Dr. Strangelove. A Stanley Kubrick movie. And one of the characters in this movie is General Buck Turgidson....

And Buck Turgidson is one of these stereotypical generals. He just wants to nuke the world. He just loves war and hates the Russians, hates the commies. He just wants to nuke everything. And Buck Turgidson said, "Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching the moment of truth, both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always pleasant thing. But it's necessary now to make a choice: To choose between two admittedly regrettable but nevertheless distinguishable postwar environments, one where you get 20 million people killed, the other where you'd get 150 million people killed." Turgidson was saying, "Let's send more B-52s! Let's just wipe these people out while we're at it, since we can't call this one back. Let's just be rid of them. We'll kill 20 million of them and that's it. They can't kill any of ours. It's a livable situation, Mr. President."

Peter Sellers playing President Merkin Muffley says, "You're talking about mass murder, general, not war," and Turgidson replies, "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed but I do say no more than ten to 20 million killed tops, depending on the breaks." Here's a guy totally cold and unaffected by the possibility of ten to 20 million people being killed in an accident and wants to say, "Let's go wipe 'em out even further." The president can't believe what he's hearing. You have Dukakis, "If your wife was raped and murdered, would you favor the death penalty?" "No, Bernard. As you know, I've long and consistently opposed the death penalty during all my life." Obama is asked, "Mr. President, what is your attitude on terrorism?"

"Well, we could absorb one of those, a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it but even a 9/11, but even the biggest attack ever we absorbed it and we're stronger. We can deal with it." All these examples are of leftists and they are cold, removed, unemotional, unaffected, uninvolved.

Did he just call Turgidson a leftist?

Anyway, you know how it must pain the average-citizen leftist to hear that Obama, like Dukakis, is cold and unemotional. It can't be true! Obama is about empathy.

[Click here for video of George Lakoff explaining Obama's "empathy campaign."]

Remember when Bill Clinton made us — some of us — think he feels our pain? Obama, aloof, observes that we have an excellent capacity to absorb pain. We're pain sponges, apparently, so there's nothing to get too worked up about.

I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks....

Maureen Dowd says Christine O'Donnell, like Barack Obama, is "smart to think of politics in terms of passion and myth."

That is, Barack Obama, the presidential campaigner. As an actual President, the "passion and myth... are sorely missing." 

Obama’s bloodless rationality has helped spawn the right’s bloodletting of irrationality.

Now, there's an assertion! I agree that the blood is on the right, but I'm not seeing much rationality from anyone.

[Obama] has never shaken off that slight patronizing attitude toward the working-class voters he is losing now, the ones he dubbed “bitter” during his campaign....

The insane have achieved political respectability while the sane act too good for it all. The irrational celebrate while the rational act bored and above-it-all.

Oh, my. This is all so Dowdesque. She gets multiple themes going, many mixed images, and she demands that you believe that she's tied them all together when she says she has. It's ironic here, because she's the one full of passionate intensity and low on rationality. What I just can't buy is that Obama is rational. He's phlegmatic. He always was. You can read that as rational, but it's irrational to do so.

***

I was just reading an old post of mine from April 2007 — "Is Obama a gasbag?":

[I]f I didn't know who he was and that there was a crowd there, I would picture an old man slumped in an armchair, expatiating for the benefit of anyone unlucky enough to be within earshot. It's formless stream of consciousness. Oh, there is that theme of hope. The stream swirls back there at predictable intervals....

[R]eally, such drivel. Just listing a lot of issues and saying hope, hope, hope should not inspire real hope. I can't believe people are hearing this and thinking: brilliant rhetoric. "Intellectual slovenliness" is a much more apt phrase.

Yes, I know, I ultimately voted for him. Here's a post of mine from February 2008 explaining how I got from "gasbag" to the decision to vote for him in the Wisconsin primary. I can't really say that I was terribly rational.

"Jan Brewer has the cojones that our president does not have."

Said Sarah Palin.

"What explains Mr. Obama’s consistent snubbing of those who made him what he is?"

"Does he fear that his enemies would use any support for progressive people or ideas as an excuse to denounce him as a left-wing extremist? Well, as you may have noticed, they don’t need such excuses: He’s been portrayed as a socialist because he enacted Mitt Romney’s health-care plan, as a virulent foe of business because he’s been known to mention that corporations sometimes behave badly."

Krugman, who worries that Obama is "still wrapped up in his dream of transcending partisanship."

The perils of using children as political scenery.

Here's a kid you might feel like laughing at, especially if you enjoy watching things go wrong for President Obama. But please note that this child is sitting where he is sitting because he's in the choir, and the speech is at night. What time is it, and what time is he rousted out of bed in the morning?

A speech, even a pretty good speech, is boring, and it's hard to sit still, whether you are a kid or not. It's terrible to be watched by a big crowd when all you have to do is listen to somebody go on and on in a solemn oration. Here's a boy who participates in choir and probably didn't ask to be placed within the camera frame behind the President of the United States.

The poor kid is now an internet meme. Lots of LOLs. I just want to give him an internet hug and tell all the the adults to stop using kids as political props.

"We have a temperamental WASP in the White House."

Writes Andrew Sullivan.

IN THE COMMENTS: I wrote:

At first I thought Sullivan's sentence was missing a word, that he was referring to the past and meant to write "We have had..." So, we used to have a "temperamental WASP" in the WH, but now we don't and people need to understand that somehow. Then I decided what he meant was "temperamental" not in the sense of moody and unpredictable, but as the adjectival form of "temperament." So, Obama has the temperament of a WASP. I guess you're allowed to have a big old stereotype about white people. And he's applying that stereotype to Obama.

John Stodder wrote:

For the record, I think Karl Rove was the first guy to compare Obama to the WASP stereotype of the sarcastic guy at the country club, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette and making comments about everyone else at the party. I always thought that was the oddest perception, but it's turned out to be very apt.

Correct! ("He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.")

The "story line" of Obama's presidency is "passivity, detachment, acquiescence and compromise" — says Maureen Dowd.

She wants him to "seize control of the story line." Hard to do that if you really are passive and detached.

Here's an exploration into Obama's attempt to demonstrate how focused and resolute he is:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Spilling Fields
www.thedailyshow.com
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"Obama's Dull, Cheap, Successful Speech."

"President Obama’s speeches have always been notable for both their exquisite prose and their unusually high intellectual level."

You know what, Jonathan Chait? You are wrong. Obama's speeches have always been bland. Look into your own head to discover why you heard "exquisite prose" and "unusually high intellectual level."

Obama's "excited about" something "sexy."

"Insulation is sexy stuff... Here's what's sexy about it..."

Stuffing things in cracks?

"... saving money."

Eh. Ugh. I don't know whether to be bored or indignant.

Anyway, take out the gratuitous references to sex, and you've got Obama back in his "tire gauge" mode. Which is fine with me. Prod us with little things that we could just as well deal with on our own. Because it's so much better than these drastic — planetary — solutions his party-mates have been trying to cram down our throats.

"Like Reagan, Obama is a detached loner with a strong, savvy wife."

"But unlike Reagan, he doesn’t have the acting skills to project concern about what’s happening to people."

Wow. That's Maureen Dowd. (Obama's in trouble!) She's writing about the importance of reaching people on a "visceral" level, the way Sarah Palin does.

Dowd quotes a "spiritual therapist": "[Palin's] alive inside, and that radiates energy, and people who are not psychologically alive inside are fascinated by that."

Obama's admirers have loved his thoughtful thinkiness, his cerebreality. But that's getting old and cold.

Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference.....

Where is the animal fire inside the clammily cool Prez? Maureen wants to know. Was it ever really there?

The animating spirit that electrified his political movement has sputtered out.

The animating spirit...

Whose animating spirit provided the electricity back then? Did it come from him, or did we generate it from within as we looked at him and fell in love?

You know, I think what Obama seems to have become, he always was. Shake him all you want, Maureen, but you're like some Star Trek extra (in tights and a tunic) trying to coax heat out of the body of Mr. Spock. I'm afraid these earnest efforts are futile.

"On Sunday, President Barack Obama will execute what might be called a Modified Full Ginsburg..."

"... appearing on five Sunday morning talk shows to make a pitch for health reform. It’s a move few politicians have attempted. Even fewer have been able to stick the landing. The Full Ginsburg, of course, was named for Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer William Ginsburg, who first did the five-fecta of Sunday talk on Feb. 1, 1999."

Of course. Wow. Some people need to get out of Washington more. Does Politico writer Eamon Javers really think that that we all remember the name William Ginsburg and his overexposure on Sunday shows 10 years ago? Or is this just another inane use of the verbal filler "of course"?

When I saw "Full Ginsburg," I thought of Ruth Bader Ginsburg...

... and "The Full Monty"....

... and I wasn't sure what to think.

A naked, yet prim President?

Anyway, yeah, too much Obama on TV. At some point, everyone's going to figure out that he actually is pretty tedious and that he's pushing some routine old political ideas.

That's good. We should get used to him. Very very used to him and tired of him.

And when that happens, it won't be racism. It will be racial progress. He's only a man. A politician. Calm down everyone. Think about whether we really want what he's selling. I bet we don't.

"[T]he inspiring figure progressives thought they had elected comes across, far too often, as a dry technocrat..."

"... who talks of 'bending the curve' but has only recently begun to make the moral case for reform. Mr. Obama’s explanations of his plan have gotten clearer, but he still seems unable to settle on a simple, pithy formula; his speeches and op-eds still read as if they were written by a committee."

That's Paul Krugman. He's arguing that "progressives are now in revolt," that Obama took them for granted and needs to win their trust back. Obama also has a big problem with moderates. Basically, Obama has a big problem. He got lots of people to trust him, chiefly by doing exactly what Krugman now complains about: speaking in vague generalities. It only works from a distance.

The "terminally ill" Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, walks off the plane to a hero's welcome.

Photograph. Just how "terminally ill" is that guy? He should be on a stretcher and have tubes attached if there was any reason for Scotland to show mercy on on the man who blew up 270 human beings. He doesn't look anywhere near close enough to dying. What kind of death panel decided he was dying?

Meanwhile, back in America — and consider that most of Megrahi's victims were American — Barack Obama is displeased:

"We have been in contact with the Scottish government indicating that we objected to it," President Barack Obama said of Thursday's release.

"We thought it was a mistake. We are now in contact with the Libyan government, and want to make sure that if in fact this transfer has taken place, he is not welcomed back in some way but instead should be under house arrest...."

Indicating that we objected... Let me indicate that I find Barack Obama infuriatingly bland. Has he ever showed passion (this purveyor of empathy) – has he ever showed staunch resolve in the war on terror?

Janet Daley writes:

The credibility of Barack Obama’s influence on the world is going to take at least as hard a knock. In the end, all the protests and all the diplomatic pressure from the White House counted for nothing. Scotland’s determination to return Megrahi to the bosom of his family and his homeland was not going to be blocked.

The rehabilitation of America’s standing in the world was going to be one of the great gains, if you remember, of the Obama election victory.... The President and his Secretary of State could do nothing - for all their administration’s supposed global prestige - to prevent what they considered to be an outrage. On yet another score, Mr Obama could not deliver the goods.

Watching the press conference, racking my brain trying to think of who Obama reminded me of.

Something about the singsong rhythm and the complete absence of emotion. Then it hit me: Michael Dukakis!

ADDED: Amba notes that last September, Christopher Hitchens wrote a piece called: "Is Obama Another Dukakis?" ("Why is Obama so vapid and hesitant and gutless?... By the end of that grueling campaign season, a lot of us had got the idea that Dukakis actually wanted to lose—or was at the very least scared of winning. ... [H]aving suddenly got the leadership position, [Obama] hadn't the faintest idea what to do with it or what to do about it.")

IN THE COMMENTS: Amba says:

The absence of emotion! The way Dukakis didn't react at all to the hypothetical of Kitty being raped is the same way Obama had trouble being human about Neda!

[RELOCATED] Obama: "The United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not at all interfering in Iran’s affairs."

The press conference. He respects the sovereignty and deplores the violence.

Major Garrett just challenged Mr. Obama’s tone on Iran, essentially asking why he waited so long to show any outrage and whether he’d been inconsistent. “I don’t think that’s accurate,” the president replies, defending himself. “Track what I’ve been saying. Right after the election I said we had profound concerns about the nature of the election, but that it was not up to us to determine what the outcome is.” And he added, “The United States will not be a foil” for the Iranian government to accuse of meddling.

Excuse me. If I may be so bold. I hate to trouble you but.... I don't mean to impose... I'm not interfering... Far be it from me to suggest anything that you might be able to characterize as meddling. I'm no meddler. Not at all. I'm just over here, modestly deploring violence.

Obama: "I think the irony … is that I actually would like to see a relatively light touch when it comes to the government."

He's trying to mollify conservatives.

I think the irony... is that I now I'm wondering what would the heavy hand of Obama feel like?

"What I will repeat... is that when I see violence directed at peaceful protesters, when I see peaceful dissent being suppressed..."

"... wherever that takes place, it is of concern to me, and it's of concern to the American people. That is not how governments should interact with their people. And my hope is that the Iranian people will make the right steps in order for them to be able to express their voices, to express their aspirations."

Is Obama bland enough? Do you think he could be blander?

ADDED: The State Department asked Twitter to delay taking the site off-line for an upgrade, given its importance as a means of communication among the protesters in Iran. Twitter postponed the upgrade until after midnight, Iran time.

AND: The best ways for us on-line to help the protesters.

AND: From Rush Limbaugh today:

He says, "It's not productive given the history of US-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling, the US president meddling in Iranian elections"? What did he do last Friday when the exit poll data showed that the challenger was going to win? He went out there and started claiming credit for it because of his Cairo speech! He was meddling even then, claiming credit for this massive result....

"As was the case with Chavez's tendentious present, Ortega's speech was intended as a slap."

"Obama was correct not to walk out on the speech. But... [w]hen Obama spoke later, he should have prefaced his promising call for an 'equal partnership' with other countries in the hemisphere with some strong pushback against those who would rather relive the insults of the past than move forward."

Says Eugene Robinson (who just won a Pulitzer Prize).

Yes. As in his campaign, Obama is very bland. For some reason — possibly vaguely racist — American liked the bland. But at some point, bland is not what you want.