Memorial Day Weekend: Daddy Hasn’t Plugged The Hole Yet

The last refuge of a president who can’t find his ass with both hands and a Secret Service detail is the kids.

I know, I know, that was uncalled for, but I couldn’t resist.

In the 1980 Presidential Election Jimmy Carter asked his daughter, Amy, what the most important issue in the election was, and Amy said it was by far “nuclear arms.” The economy was in the tank, the Iranian hotage crises was ongoing, and we had the leader of the free world consulting his daughter for advice.

All together now—Aw, how cute!

Reagan won in a landslide and since that time wise presidents have steered clear of injecting their children into their political dialog with the press. … Until last week.

Last Thursday, 30 years after the now historic Amy Summit, we were informed that Barack Obama – progenitor of the first Beer Summit - is all over this oil spill thing in the Gulf and that Malia and Sasha are in the White House to make darned sure of it.

Progress at last!

According to my POTUS Tracker at the Washington Post the President was off Friday. The POTUS Tracker maybe broken but I shook it and it still won’t give me Barry’s schedule. Nope, the Boss (no disrespect to Springsteen) was off.

Finally the answer to why it took the President nine days to recognize a potentially cataclysmic disaster was ongoing in the Gulf of Mexico: he was thinking about vacation. Wait a minute, that was another vacation. Oh well.

Really one has to understand the President’s urgency to get a few days on the links in Chicago, have dinner with old buddy Louis Farrakhan, and maybe drop by the Trinity United Church of Christ for a good old-fashioned race-baiting sermon. I figure Barack deserves a day off after that grueling presser Thursday. I mean, in the last 309 days he has held a grand total of two, count ‘em, two press conferences. Whew! All that heavy lifting.

And there isn’t much doing in Washington anyway. The spill is pretty much taking care of itself, and Joe Sestek, well, Bill Clinton has that under control. Right, Rahm? Bill does have it under control, right?

Barack Obama did not create the disaster on the Gulf, and, some would say, he is powerless to staunch the tide of crude washing into coast. The later is debatable but what is not in dispute is the President’s complete lack of the perception of leadership in the face of disaster.

It took Obama nine days to even acknowledge the blowout on the Coast and 39 days to address the nation on what progress, if any, the administration has made in stemming the worst of the catastrophe. It took him those same nine days to extend his condolences to the families of the BP employees that died in the explosion.

What is missing in this President is thoughtfulness, that and a seeming lack of maturity.

We have seen it from the beginning of his presidency: He twice made thoughtless comments about Las Vegas, which resulted in millions of dollars in convention cancelations to the hotels there; he was thoughtlessly unreachable for four days after the Christmas Day bombing attempt; and he thoughtlessly blamed the Cambridge police, not knowing facts or details, when they arrested his Harvard friend. The President’s first term of office has been riddled by such incidents. Ask Binyamin Netanyahu who the President thoughtlessly left to twiddle his thumbs while he went to dinner with Michelle and the kids.

Mr. President, it is your responsibility to be presidential, it is your responsibility to be thoughtful enough to keep the public that elected you informed; it is your responsibility to remind yourself of the oil spill in the Gulf every morning, not Malia and Sasha’s.

Uh, Barack, The Oil Spill In the Gulf?

If you are, say, 48 years old and have spent your life being educated in Ivy League institutions and working on the side social organizing low-income people to demand more government handouts, you really don’t know much about running things.

H.L. Mencken’s old adage applies here: “Those who can — do. Those who can’t — teach.” Pretty much sums it up. Unless, of course, you are good-looking enough and bright enough to convince somebody you should be in Washington. … Keeping in mind, you still don’t really know how to do anything … except teach.

Herein is America’s dilemma. We elected a highly educated, good-looking, charismatic young man with a Columbia degree and a Harvard Law degree and absolutely no experience in the private sector and who probably isn’t qualified to be a U.S. Senator, much less President.

Better than 50 percent of the public bought it and now we have an oil spill no one seems to know how to shut down, much less clean up. We have 12 million illegals across the country that believe they are entitled to come and go as they please and get free health care to boot; we have green jobs czars when there is little usable green technology; we have an insane mullah in Iran speeding toward building a nuclear weapon.

In 1991 the Saudis had an oil spill, the largest oil spill in history, in the Persian Gulf. Estimates go as high as 11 million barrels. They decided not to involve Green Peace, besides, those waters are dangerous to anyone without a gingham keffiyeh and an AK-47.

Most people in the U.S. were too busy watching Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf killing Iraqis to notice. Actually, the Saudis kept it quiet.

No, the Saudis cleaned it up on their own with minimal fuss and little environmental damage. Of course they didn’t have a Nancy Pelosi or an Obama EPA. Well, they didn’t have an Obama.

They did it with vacuum skimmers, tankers, and other devises, and the key to their success (and remember, in 1991, the Persian Gulf was a war zone), was expediency.

A report later released by Saudi Arabian Oil said:

“Saudi Aramco’s rapid and extensive intervention in the 1991 Gulf War oil spill prevented a catastrophe from causing severe environmental and economic damage in the region.”

The Saudi’s mobilized an army, air force and navy to begin cleanup operations, before the spill was contained. Much of the oil evaporated, as it will in the Gulf, but their decisive action curtailed an enormous environmental and economic disaster.

This week the news networks have been abuzz with questions regarding Barack Obama’s action or lack of action regarding the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Could he have done more and done it sooner?

Let’s cut through the BS. Of course Barack Obama could have done more. He could have mobilized tankers from and used vacuum skimmers to retrieve hundred of thousands of gallons of oil before it reaches the coast. In the early hours after the blowout he could have set BP and the United States Coast Guard to work doing controlled burns to diminish and forestall damage.

The New York Times has given him a pass for weeks now, but America must not. Thousands of men and women will be out of work in the Gulf because of the Presidents inaction. Businesses will go under because of his incompetency.

Let’s see to it that in 2012, Barack Hussein Obama goes back to teaching. This leadership thing just isn’t working out.

Rand Paul: The Night the Lights Went Out in Kentucky?

In allowing himself to be sucked into a discussion on 1964 Civil Rights Act, last week, Rand Paul set himself up for failure. Not that he will fail in Kentucky’s general election in November, but he set himself up for it, if he does.

Whether his comments were a simple lack of political savvy or outright racist – and I don’t believe that for a second – the mainstream media will certainly levy the implication of the latter, day after day, until the story loses its legs. Wacko lefties will come out of the woodwork. The impression will be fixed in many voters’ minds like a glaring, Pulitzer-winning photo from a 1960s Life magazine cover. The one where Southern cops are siccing their dogs on defenseless Negros.

And the Tea Party movement will suffer.

Sheer stupidity.

The purist ideology of libertarianism is like Marxism – it looks good on paper. I understand Rand’s views on government enlargement and intrusion into American lives; they are noble and most of them are right.

But the fact remains that an entire population of this country in 1964 was being shut out of American life. The Supremes, the biggest girl group in history, who knocked the Beatles Revolver album out of the Number 1 spot on Billboard, couldn’t get a decent room in the South. With all of their wealth and fame they could not eat in a downtown Atlanta restaurant.

That was simply wrong and the government had to act. Yes, one should have the right to refuse service to anyone, but not to the exclusion of a race. The Church in America had 100 years in which to rectify that crime and it did not act.

And ironically, the law opened up the very can of worms that Paul and other libertarians are now protesting. The Civil Rights Act became a springboard for the government to bash its way into every aspect of private life in the country.

No one in this country detests charlatans like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson more than I. I believe they are opportunists who have little sincere regard for everyday African Americans. In a perfect world I would like every Muslim in this country deported to Azerbaijan.

But I don’t get those rights. They are un-American. They have a right to shop in the same stores and eat in the same restaurants that I do.

The Ku Klux Klan and the Democratic Party ruled the American South with an iron, racist fist from Reconstruction until the mid 1960s, and it would be that way today had not the government stepped in and made it right.

The government should not have had to step in, but as I previously said, good Americans failed to act.

Rand Paul may survive in Kentucky and I hope he does. But this should be a civics lesson for all of us who want smaller government. Someone has to guard the rights of the oppressed and down trodden. It should be us, but when it is not, a government – some government –will.