President Barack Obama delivers the most boring speech of his presidency
a success, who would? Of course his
last State of the Union was filled with
happy talk about the current
condition of the United States and its
limitless future. He has a year left to
convince America and his posterity
that his tenure has not been a
failure.
He’s got his work cut out for him.
According to Gallup, a mere 23
percent of the American people are
satisfied with the direction of the
United States. But since it’s unlikely
the president is going to get any part
of his domestic agenda through
Congress — and since he really
doesn’t want to do much of anything
abroad — he might as well take a
shot at it.
But not that shot.
In what was arguably the most
boring major speech of his
presidency, Obama didn’t even
attempt to make a consistent
argument or prove the case he was
making for his presidency and the
glorious moment to which he has
brought this country.
He began by saying he was going to
keep this one short, but, in fact, it
ran more than an hour — and don’t
think that was due to the thunderous
applause continually interrupting him.
There was no thunderous applause.
The text and the sound bites were so
dull, even the efforts by his fellow
Democrats to provide a positive
soundtrack seemed forced and
halfhearted.
His fundamental argument Tuesday
night was that he’s saved the
economy — indeed, he’s done such a
bang-up job that he implicitly took
credit for the fact that gas is now at
$2 a gallon.
Though maybe he does deserve
credit, since the Saudis are furiously
pumping out oil to make sure
Obama’s new buddy Iran can’t make
too much money from it as it makes
its way to a nuclear weapon down the
road.
Oh, and speaking of Iran, the
president said nothing about the fact
that 10 American sailors were
arrested earlier in the day for the
crime of being in a boat
. Obama would permit no muddying
of the waters in his portrait of an
America so on the right track, only a
bad person might think otherwise.
(No mention of San Bernardino
either, by the way.)
People who say the economy is
worse than it was when he took
office, he charged, “are peddling
fiction.” And, of course, it’s true that
the economy is larger than it was in
2009.
But median wages are lower than
they were when he took office, and
it’s not a fiction that people know it
and don’t like being told they’re
somehow wrong for feeling as
though something has gone very
wrong.
This is not exclusively his doing —
median wages have been stagnating
for 15 years.
But health insurance costs that have
risen due to ObamaCare, and which
have contributed mightily to the
pocketbook squeeze, sure are his
doing.
Bizarrely, the president then pooh-
poohed the threat from ISIS and
terrorists around the world by
assuring Americans we would wipe
them out — and that to think
otherwise was somehow dangerous
because it empowered the bad guys.
He spent more time and showed
more passion lecturing Americans
about their conduct toward Muslims.
He’s right that behaving badly toward
Muslims, or committing a crime at a
mosque, is a terrible thing.
But saying that “when a kid is called
names . . . we are diminished in the
eyes of the world” is a kind of
schoolmarmish bushwah that should
force even the most sentimental
person to have to restrain himself
from throwing his remote through his
TV.
Except that his eyes had long since
glazed over from the tedium.
Oh, and the president gave Joe Biden
the job of curing cancer. In 12
months. Good luck with that, Joe!
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