The Press Conference
I think tonight was the first time it really sunk in for me that Barack Obama is the President of the United States. The contrast between Obama and Bush could not possibly be more stark. Here was a man who held a press conference for an hour and responded to a variety of questions with intelligent and deeply informed answers. He was thinking and analyzing in real time. After watching Bush fumble, obfuscate, and generally provide poorly-memorized, superficial, and non-responsive answers to questions for eight years, tonight's press conference was incredibly refreshing.
Thank G-d the Bush era is over.
posted by A.L. at 9:02 PM
19 Comments:
right on.
Bravo to the Congressional Republicans for standing up and exposing the Obama "stimulus" boondogle for the transparent fraud that it really is. The following points need to be hammered home to the American people:
*Lay the blame squarely on the shoulders of Pelosi/Reid/Obama. The current economic meltdown
is entirely due to the blatant socialist agenda proposed and partly carried out by this unholy troika starting in 2007.
*Vigorously defend and build upon the outstanding legacy of President George W. Bush, who has been the victim of unprecedented character assasination by the liberal establishment and their stooges in the mass media. Insist on making the Bush tax cuts permanent and extend them with bold new initiatives, e.g. rebating death taxes paid over the preceding 75 years. This is true stimulus not the bogus kind advocated by Obama and company.
*Drastically scale back government at all levels: federal, state and local. So-called "entitlement programs" are nothing but a giant Ponzi scheme which have crippled our economy. Abolish most of them and privatize the rest, e.g. Social Security, thus injecting a massive flood of capital into the free markets. Also privatize education at all levels-we do not need our children indoctrinated in atheism, evolution, premarital sex instead of reading, writing and arithmetic. Church/home schooling and corporate apprenticeship programs provide a much sounder basis for an educated citizenry.
*One can't have a prosperous free-market economy without prosperous capitalists. Class warfare and their vociferous advocates (e.g. labor unions) have no place in American society.
*Obama==Blackojevich (i.e. Blagojevich in black face) and will ultimately suffer the same fate-the sooner the better.
Oh yeah, THAT'LL fix everything for sure...
Obviously it's a total joke, because nobody could be THAT stupid. Ha ha.
The press conference was extraordinary. And was basically a rebuttal of above Anonymous' entire comment. Which is just awesome because it enables the conversation to move forward rather than simply stagnate around that swamp of insipidity.
If the Bush era was truly over, it would not be necessary to leave vowels out of w_rds.
Obama handled himself well. The GOP has controlled the message for way too long and it is refreshing to hear Obama fighting still. Regarding anonymous, I am still laughing at those defending the honor of Bush, as if they are still in denial.
Where have you been AL? Good to have you back. But what about this:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/02/obama-administr.html
This is a pretty damn terrible start to his presidency. What on earth is he thinking? After all we heard from his first few days in office, this is the result.
Comparing Obama against Bush is the definition of "damning with faint praise".
kinda like having a big V8 engine in your car and you get use to it having no power and running on 2 cylinders and then one day you sart it up and it is a 750 horsepower twin turbo badass tire smokin' sonofabitch and you think to yourself, lets see what this baby'll do!
Except for the state secret privilege, apparently.
as to the above 'comment' about how monies should be allocated...ummm, dude....did you say privatize social security? have you checked the markets in say, oh, i dont know...the last year or so?
While I agree to a large extent with the thrust of your post, I find the apparently mandatory lying by high U.S. officials (no less than the President in this case) to be very, very far from refreshing.
HELEN THOMAS: [D]o you know of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: ...With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don't want to speculate.
Did you today's town hall meeting? It was a MILLION times better than any Bush event, where I had to turn the TV (or radio) off because it was too painful to watch.
To start, Obama doesn't screen attendees ahead of time - can you believe that?? Bush's performance felt like a weird charade, in front of an audience of shills with canned questions, designed only for news cycle quotes and the True Believers to gush. All he needed was a laugh track. It was embarrassing to be insulted by the cynicism of those events.
By contrast, Obama's event was fresh and alive. People *liked* him, hearing him, and it was palpable. There was real communication there, and he was really hearing people.
There was a touching moment - I'm sure this will make the news cycles - when a woman really pleaded for him to help her. It was a very direct, heartfelt and personal plea. Obama went over and hugged her, and asked his staff to contact her. Perhaps nothing will come of it - but it literally brought tears to my eyes to see it.
Words can't describe how it feels to have a decent human being in that position! It feels absurd to cheer so strongly just to have a Thinking Adult there (talk about low expectations) - but the abuse and damage of the last eight years has made it so that a simple articulate sentence from Obama can make me weep with, well, Hope.
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I agree that Obama's performance was refreshing and in stark contrast to Bush's nonsensical, superficial and misleading efforts. I did feel, however, that Obama needs to net things out more concisely and not go on so many tangents. I found myself wincing at some points, but on content I thought he was sound if windy. I predict he will get a bit terser as time goes on.
What do you suppose was the intent of Helen Thomas's question about nukes in the Middle East? Everyone knows Israel is the only nuclear armed country in that region and that the U.S. will not say that publicly. Helen tried to ask a follow-up question but he did not let her. What was going on there?
OTOH, Robert Gibbs appears to be Scott McClellan's dumber brother.
MLS,
You really are a glass-half-empty kind of guy, aren't you? At least, when you look at Democrats.
Sure, there are negatives about the Obama administration, and they don't all seem to be wunderkinden. Geithner looks kinda like a sleazebag banker and friend of bankers. Holder seems to like the advantage of the national security exception rather too much. Gibbs does remind us, sadly, of the hapless Scott McClellan.
However, on the whole, looking at the big picture and integrating it, I'm still guardedly hopeful that, in spite of the profound dysfunction of our representative democracy at present, at least some wrongs will be righted, at least some benefit beyond enriching the rich will accrue to the rest of us, and the ultimate collapse of civilization will not occur under this president's watch.
And just how intelligent does a parrot need to be, anyway? That's all the modern press secretary has become, thanks to the dysfunction of the modern press.
C2H50H- maybe you are right. I should be more of a glass-half-full guy like you. Here goes.
I am cautiously optimistic that the ultimate collapse of civilization will not occur in the next four years.
There, I have joined your sunshine brigade.
And it got 50 million viewers! I personally found Obama a little more prolix than I'd like, but with 69% approval and the ability to draw that many millions of viewers to an intrinsically dry, fundamentally wonkish press conference, what do I know?
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