Of Mice & Media
This past week President Obama unveiled his two best ideas for ending our economic crisis and unleashing a job creation tsunami. Apparently he has been keeping these powerful plans in reserve, waiting until they were most needed. In case you missed them, be ready to sleep better tonight after hearing these flashes of genius.
One: patent law reform.
I'll give you a moment to catch your breath.
Two: further extend unemployment welfare, commonly referred to as unemployment benefits or, more humorously, unemployment compensation. Ninety-nine weeks is insufficient.
This alone, Obama claims, somehow creates 100,000 jobs. It harkens back to his campaign pronouncement that our dependence on foreign oil would end if we just kept our cars tires properly inflated.
Imagine if former President Bush, Sarah Palin or Michele Bachman or even Rick Perry offered up these same suggestions and then, their work done, headed off to a $35,000 per plate fundraising dinner. But these announcements came from Obama, so instead of being greeted by the media with laughter and ridicule, it was reported with straight faces in respectful tones - as if he'd said something sane.
This, from the supposedly smartest president ever. Well, we may have been reading this guy all wrong. He may not be an ignorant fool or a sinister socialist bent on destroying America. He may just be insane. And dangerously insane at that.
He is so confident his patent law reform idea and extending unemployment pay directive will magically transform the gigantic turd of an economy he has made into a blooming garden of jobs, he also urged Congress to just stay away from Washington and not bother working on anything - their help just isn't needed. Plus, it might interfere with his rich guy's vacation at the huge mansion in the rich peoples' playground, Martha's Vineyard.
If people haven't figured it out by now, this past week should have done it. This guy holds us all; every one of us, rich or poor, union worker or capitalist titan, conservative or liberal, Congress, the Constitution, America in contempt. It's simple. He surveys a collapsed home market, disappeared retirement savings, sky-high unemployment and under-employment, trillions of private capital either on strike or fleeing the nation, the drain of three failing wars for which he can't enunciate a coherent purpose, then he looks you in the eye and tell you that he has a solution: patent law reform. He might as well spit in your face and tell you to go inflate your tires and stop bothering him. Mr. Cool reads his ever-more-outrageous nonsense from his Teleprompter, turns his back and sneers at us as he walks back into the castle.
It's fun but also a little painful to watch his media defenders, notably including the gang at MSNBC, grow slowly but noticeably disenchanted and puzzled by their messiah. They're finding it harder and harder to explain his casualness toward the crises encircling us, and patently (pardon the pun) asinine pronouncements like these two of last week.
But these poor boobs in the media are still a long way from realizing that not only have they been used as dupes, but that he holds them in contempt right along with the rest of us. Wood puppets, Obama must think to himself, have more intelligence than these fools. What fun it is, he says to himself, to turn Congress into a cock-fighting circus, the media into drooling sycophants, to shrink America to its proper size.
At the barns where my racehorses are stabled, there are barn cats and there are invading mice. The cats have a job to do, as police officers; as guards. But cats are sadistic toward mice. Cats are not content to just chase them from the barns or even to quickly kill them. Cats are not interested in doing their job. Cats have a game of their own. Cats toy with mice. They catch them, let them think they are escaping, then catch them again. They hold onto their tails and let the mice vainly strain for freedom or safety. The cats' sadistic torture of the helpless mice sometimes goes on for hours. The mice die slowly, wearing out, giving up.
Perhaps this President is not only an extreme narcissist with an obviously unwarranted superiority complex and disdain for all his inferiors - maybe he is a sadist too. He is the cat, we are the mice. Go ahead, squirm and squeal. He likes it.
