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Thursday, September 01, 2011

Stuck on Stupid?

"Stupid is as stupid does.”
- Forrest Gump

President Obama is often touted by his ever-diminishing hoard of admirers as intellectually brilliant. Personally, I have never noticed any evidence of his purportedly awesome brain power, perhaps underscoring the fact that I’m too ignorant and stupid to appreciate his greatness. (Obama would certainly think so.) However, an increasing number of reasonably intelligent observers are voicing doubts about how truly smart the current president really is.

Think about it. Here is a man who doggedly insists and appears totally convinced that he has improved the economy. “Sunburned,” the story of a bankrupt solar panel company, tells a different tale. Here was a trendy green jobs operation that should have been roaring hot, buttressed by Obama loan guarantees (read “your tax dollars”), but it went down and took over one thousand American jobs with it. And that’s just a random sample from the Obamanomics files.

Now that his island resort vacation has concluded, Obama is itching to present his “urgent” jobs message. Always forgetting that he is not the king, only the president, Obama invited himself to address a joint session of Congress on a night he knew full well the constitutionally co-equal legislative branch of government would find inconvenient. Congress declined, so the president’s “major” speech (aren’t they all?) was rescheduled to football night.

Oh, what to watch on the evening of September 8? Rarely are Americans faced with such a challenging decision.

Watching the president, one must be prepared to hear a number of stock phrases rearranged for current impact. Obama will talk about “corporate jets” (without mentioning Air Force One), “fat cats” (with no reference to his 2008 campaign contributors), “a balanced approach,” “problems inherited,” and “obstructionists in Congress.” He’ll take credit for killing Osama bin Laden (again) and probably for lessening Hurricane Irene’s impact (is the planet healing yet?). And he’ll be supremely confident that on the night he speaks, the entire country will be sitting on the edge of their sofas, holding their collective breath in anticipation, ignoring the pretzels on the coffee table, gripping beer cans in hand.

He’ll be right about that last part, except the overwhelming majority of American TV viewers won't be in that hyper-attentive pose until his speech is over and they're watching the Saints-Packers game. It now appears that the president has been rescued by the NFL and NBC from conflicting with the kick-off. He will instead step all over the pre-game coverage. Now I ask you, is that smart?