Stumped Speech (Live Without A Teleprompter)
June 8th, 2009 at 10:06 pm by BrianWhat a freaking embarrassment. A foreign reporter mind you has to ask this question because our stateside media can barely wipe their chins off and gurgle out a “call me later” before rushing out of the Oral Office.
It’s funny you should ask that since no one else is bothering to.
Hrmmm….That’s a toughie. Uh, uh, uh….
They’re doing stuff. Not good stuff. And we’ve talked with everybody about it.
Because talking to allies is good. And diplomacy is always my first option.
But they have to meet us halfway and they’re not returning my calls.
Russia and China need to hold hands with us and say, “Hey, that was not a good thing you did.”
Sarkozy: (In zee fronch) WTF is this dumbass talking about?
Is it time for a new Projecte Quel Dommage? Because “We’re sorry, France!” You finally listened to us and started crapping regular and 48 Million American voters, 3.5 million dead people, and 750,000 additional ACORN ballots sent Kofi Annan’s soul child to your bistros to insult your spankingly hot first lady, defile the memory of D-Day veterans and to go on a shopping spree while the country is swirling around a dirty bowl.
Watch the terrible answer given today to a question that should be at the forefront of every press conference when not discussing the economy that he’s ruining. Somehow you just know Letterman won’t be rehashing his “Great Speeches In American History” shtick that he beat to death for eight years.
God, how I miss the flowing prose and elocution of the Bush Years and the concise, judicious reflections of Joe Biden. He may have screwed up everything he was trying to say but right or wrong you never had any question about what he meant.
Simply dreadful.
June 8th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
This fucking idiot shouldn’t be a city councilman, much less president. It’s simply remarkable. Fox news should at least be showing this sound byte so people other than blog junkies will see it.
June 8th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
No, no, no! He’s saying the right things. Diplomacy works.
Why, I’d bet my last xanax that China and Russia are slaving away by candlelight at this exact moment pounding out that joint statement condemning North Korea and Iran imploring the UN Security Counsel to deploy harsh sanctions and authorizing the use of force if they don’t chill the eff out.
Any minute now…
June 8th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Face Book ‘dis shiznit, B-Mac!
June 8th, 2009 at 10:44 pm
I ain’t down with the Eff B, yo. This be My Space.
June 8th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
That was shocking. If it had been a Republican the press would have eaten his lunch. He just showed the world, including Iran and North Korea, that he HAS no non-proliferation policy towards those nations. You’re right, that question should have been a slam dunk – even for this numbnuts.
June 9th, 2009 at 12:47 am
Greetings:
A big Amen on your “Great Speeches In American History” observation. (Actually, I think it was Great Presidential Speeches.) Either way, it got Letterman off my boob tubes. I found myself screaming at least Bush married the woman before he made his babies.
June 9th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Holy crap, man. Anyone who think that Barack Obama is a great thinker is truly living in the Twilight Zone.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Onca again, Obama wastes perfectly good air.
I’m offended by this waste.
June 9th, 2009 at 10:02 am
Aw man, great reminder about the SORRY, FRANCE campaign. Now we have a whole new litany of items for which to apologize, starting with the Bitter Half, of course.
June 9th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
But all you GUYS missed something….didn’t you notice that the first douche’ is wearing eye makeup?
The Castro district called and they want their idiot back………
June 10th, 2009 at 12:13 am
Backstage after the meeting with Sarkozy:
Chin-wiping assistant (Axelrod): You killed out there Mr. President.
BO: I didn’t kill anyone.
Axelrod: It’s an expression sir. I meant to say that you did well.
BO: How did my White Sox do today?
June 11th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Hmm, let’s see. He answered a question in a slow, thoughtful cadence with actual complete sentences. I don’t know what you were watching there, but it seems you guys have all dropped off the deep end. Because he didn’t have a short, pre-rehearsed, pat answer, you think he’s an idiot? Mr. Obama’s predecessor would have responded to that question in a slow deer-in-the-headlights cadence, lacking actual sentences, and likely generating several words new to the English language.
You people are so spun up agreeing with yourselves, you can’t even make objective observations.
June 11th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
“Slow, thoughtful cadence” implies that there was some substance at the end of that answer which there was not.
He punted. He said we would do nothing except try to pass UN Resolutions and get Russia and China on board which will never happen unless the NorKs attack one of them.
A reporter asks him how this plan is working and he is fucking dumbfounded. How you can look at the video, if you did (which I doubt), and say that he was thinking through his answer. Jesus Fucking Christ – look at Sarkozy’s reaction while he’s sitting there.
You’ve elected an incompetent fool who is going to let Iran get the fucking bomb and let North Korea threaten Japan with the ones they have. His Peace At Any Price diplomacy is going to get a lot of people killed because he thinks that every tinpot dictator is a big pussy like he is – or should I say, like you are since he’s only reflecting his whacko, far Left constituency.
June 11th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Pearls to swine Brian.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:25 am
You only see what you want to see through your ultra-partisan filter. Spending all day harumphnig with your buddies who only harumph back in agreement causes mental atrophy.
As for North Korea and Iran, there are no easy answers. If there were, everything would be all hunky-dory already. Obama said he intends not to fall into the same old game the North Koreans have been playing where they make threats and then get rewarded for standing down. Seems like you’d want to work carefully to break out of that cycle. Whatever you do, provocation is not advisable. Push too hard and you’ve got a shooting war, and if you hadn’t noticed, they have nukes (aquired/developed while W was president) and not much to lose. As for Iran, their internal politics could make the difference right now. If the moderates come out ahead in the elections, we might have somebody over there who will at least return our calls. Grandstanding over here right now would only help entrench Ahmadinejad. Is that what you want?
If Kennedy had just grabbed his junk and gone with the hawks during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we’d all be dead (or never born) right now. When it comes to nukes, I’ll take careful diplomacy over testosterone-crazed posturing any day. Even the NRA will remind you never to point at a target you don’t intend to destroy, and to be sure of your target and what is beyond it.
But then, none of this is what your original commentary was about. You just wanted to say that Obama was incomprehensible without his teleprompter. He wasn’t incomprehensible at all. You just have no desire to listen to what he said, because it doesn’t jibe with your cartoonish view of the world.
June 12th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Perhaps in some benighted quarters there are still people who think that the Cuban Missile Crisis was solved by Kennedy’s mad letter writing skillz, but others prefer to see it for what it was – the full force threat of military action with bombers in the air 24 hours a day.
Oh yes. I forgot the Democrat birthright refrain – “I inherited that problem.” Bush, who let North Korea get the bomb, did not inherit the policy of appeasement from the Clintons where brilliant strategists Richardson and Halfbright tried to buy off NK with nuclear reactors while they violated the sham non-proliferation treaty that the newest, useless UN Resolution demands that they return to one of these days.
If only every press conference after 9/11 had Bush gone in front of the mic and just kept repeating, “9/11, shit, I inherited that problem. bin Laden bombed the WTC in 1993 and Clinton dicked around bombing baby aspirin factories in Iraq of all places. Iraq? They don’t even have Weapons of Mass Destruction!”
And now we’re in the same exact situation again with Iran. Maybe it’s just the cynic in me who doesn’t think that Ahmadinejad is just going to ride his camel into the sunset as you seem to do but then again I don’t imagine any President I voted for riding into the office of a multi-billion dollar private company on a unicorn and firing the CEO.
Cartoonish is the worldview that thinks hardliners in Tehran, Pyongyang, Moscow and Beijing respect weakness and that we establish Peace Through Superior Flower Power. The truth is that Obama could not give a shit less about North Korea. It’s all a, are you ready for this?, “distraction” from his greater goals of punishing first priority lien holders for believing there was a system of law in place in this country and extorting money out of states to support his car company habit.
Stay in your fantasy world, TF. You’ve commented on and off here for several years now. Do us a favor and stick with “off” for a while until you wake up and realize you voted for a megalomaniac who is systematically going to turn us into a third world country.
June 13th, 2009 at 7:41 am
Oh, gee, so sorry to sporadically disrupt your harumph-fest with thoughts that don’t harumph along the Party Line. I realize it might make you feel a little gassy when other opinions turn up on the buffet whithout first being cherry-picked and edited to enhance your vastly superior pre-determined response. Don’t worry, I won’t make you queasy too often. Go back to your friends now. I can hear them harumphing for you.
June 13th, 2009 at 11:55 am
Boohoo. I respect independent thinkers who make sense when arguing their side. Your responses have neither been edited or deleted.
As far as pre-determined responses go, how’d that Iranian election turn out? Seems your Hope ™ for Change (R) didn’t pan out and now your Christ-figure is going to legitimize the hardliners while they’ve cracked down on the opposition.
Yesterday, on the heels of the aforementioned UN resolution, North Korea announced plans for not just another missile test but another nuclear one. Another success!
When you can admit the mistake(s) you made I’ll be here for your confessional.
June 14th, 2009 at 10:14 am
I know I said I’d leave it alone, and I will after this, but I would like to try to clear up some misconceptions.
1. I have never suggested Mr. Obama is Christ-like, infallable, or anything of the like. That is your own rhetoric, keyed into the current conservative meme that requires everyone to either loathe Obama with fervent rage or to worship him as a cultish messiah. I am in neither camp. It doesn’t fit your narrative, but there ate actually quite a few moderates still in existence outside the blog-O-sphere.
2. I didn’t suggest you deleted or edited my comments. You do, however, start your postings here with carefully selected and edited representations of the ‘other side,’ as a setup for your brilliant commentary describing ‘them’ as bone-crushingly stupid, yet somehow cultishly sinister. My appearances here as a very rare dissenting view disrupts that pattern, if only slightly. Sorry if that confused you.
3. As for the circumstances in Iran and N Korea, I maintan my view that both are delicate circumstances better served at this point by careful diplomacy, rather than jocular posturing. At some point the line may be crossed and military intervention required. I hope not. If it is, I hope you’ll support the troops as they go into harm’s way. Either theatre could make Iraq look like boy scout camp.
June 14th, 2009 at 11:23 am
Taken.
When I see somebody on the Left criticize Obama for failure then I will believe it. Instead, I’m treated to goalpost moving and “the honeymoon period’s not over” blather. Whether he’s nominating tax cheats to run the IRS, sending terrorists on luxurious, taxpayer provided vacations to an island paradise, or telling a car company how much money they are allowed to advertise – what he is doing is wrong and anyone should be able to see that on the surface. I get stories about puppy dogs and date nights when there are some serious problems going on here.
That’s what this post is about. He gets put on the spot. It takes a foreign reporter to do it. He appears dumbstruck by a question that what he is doing is not working because he never has to face this line of inquiry here.
As far as North Korea goes. We say we pass a resolution that says their ships will be searched if they meet some high threshold of suspicion. In response to such a tepid measure, China (the holder of our debt), announces today that we better not even go that far. So, we can expect more “provocative” North Korean acts in the very near future
Back to Iran. As we will meet with anyone with no pre-conditions, how does Ahmadinejad arresting his rival post-election and gunning down protesters in the streets going to play with that? Our President says that we have no standards. If we do not “meddle” in other people’s affairs then the truly pro-Democracy Iranians are going to be squelched as harshly as their Chinese counterparts were 20 years ago.
It’s now out there for all to see. Their election was stolen and no one will do anything about it.
In the end, we either prop up someone friendly or we make a deal with the devil. When you have no standards you shake hands with the devil on his terms. Your mileage as to how “careful” that diplomacy is may vary.