Barack Obama: The Ron Popeil of politics *UPDATED*
Bookworm on Sep 08 2011 at 8:47 pm | Filed under: Barack Obama
I’ve been thinking about Barack Obama’s speech. It was a peculiar speech, even by Obama standards. Frantic in tone, pressed in pace, disorganized, hysterical in its demands, extreme in its promises, dishonest in its characterizations, with divisiveness and discord as its goal. It was not a nice speech, in any way shape or form. Nor did it have even the virtue of elegance to offset its mean spiritedness. It was just bullying smack talk.
Not only was it weird, it was familiar. And then it hit me. Obama reminded me of Ron Popeil. Watch this video. You’ll see that Popeil is less shrill than Obama (and quite possibly much more honest), but there’s that same escalation of promises. “But wait, there’s more!”
BUT, WAIT! THERE’S MORE! (Or, as I used to call it, an UPDATE): Thinking about it, the one last thing I wanted to add is that it severely diminished both the office of the president and the nature of Congress to use a Joint Sessions address for that mean-spirited pre-NFL warm-up talk.
BUT, WAIT! THERE’S STILL MORE! If Ron Popeil isn’t your man, maybe Steve Martin is.
Related posts:
- Barack Obama campaigns against himself
- Obama continues to add to the low tone of American politics *UPDATED*
- Barack Obama’s very strange, most peculiar, and quite Marxist family background
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I don’t know if this is really off-topic or not – jobs and the economy, after all – but I thought I’d cut and paste an email I sent to some very smart friends of mine asking for their opinion. I thought I’d go ahead and ask you all for your opinions, too. What do you think is *really* going on?
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START
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I wondered if you could read this (short) two-page article and give me your opinion on what it means.
It concerns the declining value of the dollar.
http://useconomy.about.com/od/inflation/i/dollar_decline.htm
The key phrase:
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Partly as a result of this deficit, the dollar declined 40% between 2002-2008. The dollar strengthened during the recession, as investors sought a relatively safe haven. Since March 2009, however, the dollar has resumed its decline.
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Forty percent of our government budget each year is debt, pure and simple. The Govt is also printing scads of money (under the quantitative easings QE and QE2) and dumping all these dollars into our economy, often in idiotic ways, with only political (Democrat-favoring) strategies in mind. So we have currency dumping AND debt (fake money) being introduced into our economy at an incredible rate. Both of these must be responsible for the continued collapse in the value of the dollar, right?
But then shouldn’t we be seeing simply incredible inflation as a result? I know we are seeing some, but it seems to me it should be far worse. And that has me worried – aside from the debt and the QE money printing, are we actually in a severe deflation otherwise?
Help! I’m confused! I’m beginning to be scared that the economic collapse that looks inevitable to me thirty, forty years from now might actually be one hell of a lot closer to us than that, far closer than I’d ever expected. I can’t figure out what in the hell is going on out there right now.
Any opinions or explanations you have would sure help!
(PS – It’s not helping my peace of mind to have just finished Mark Steyn’s “After America” which offers dire warnings. Nor that I’m reading “Flashback” by one of my favorite SF authors, in which he is positing a collapsed America thirty years from now that is genuinely frightening, and based on similar economic analysis by a guy (Dan Simmons) who I’ve always considered an *extremely* intelligent guy. I don’t know if he’s just having fun with an apocalyptic scenario or if he too considers the current situation to be THAT dire.)
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Oh, you are so right! From the Popeil video, “…all you do is extrude and let your machine does the rest. It’s so darn easy. Now anybody can make fresh homemade sauages.” And that’s how laws are made.
Frantic, hysterical, divisive with discord as its goal – You nailed it Bookworm. What you witnessed was a man on the run (literally and figuratively) and in panic mode.
Mike Devx … put down the books, take a deep breath, relax and oh yeah…keep a pile of ready cash (just kidding).
Read Mish’s blog, maybe it will put your mind at ease. Key word: maybe.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/
He’ll never be successful because hhe does not have an Uncle Nathan as a helper — that is what is missing. Maybe they let his uncle in MA out of jail for this reason and that is in the works.
Mike Devx, I’m with ya’ on this. I just finished reading Aftershock (revised and updated) by the guys who predicted virtually everything concerning the economy up to this point!!! I have no clue what to do with my (meager) portfolio.
I’ve read this short article three times and I am stymied by the contortions, manipulations and tricks of the trade. It’s “procedural” move designed by politicians to borrow more money. We’ve been had!
The U.S. Senate, in an unusual procedure, cleared the way Thursday for the U.S. to lift its borrowing authority by $500 billion to $15.19 trillion, enough to keep the support federal government borrowing through late January or early February.
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/09/08/senate-approves-500-billion-increase-in-borrowing-authority/?mod=google_news_blog
I just feel as though the economic news that is coming in day by day is not making any coherent sense at all.
I feel like so much of the REAL story is hidden and I’m simply not getting it.
Is it that economics is inherently so difficult? Or that I’m so completely untrained that I can’t make heads nor tails of it? Or is it that the full truth simply is not being told?
In any case, no I don’t expect an imminent collapse of the type described by Steyn, nor brilliantly written about by Dan Simmons in his novel (Flashback). But it is true I no longer expect the collpase to occur thirty or forty years from now. When the big guys fall, they fall hard and fast, and we will fall hard and FAST, whenever it happens. I just have no idea when. Because I can’t figure out what is REALLY going on out there.
By the way – what fun that novel Flashback is. It’s a cool murder mystery and action thriller set in a near-apocalyptic American-collapse future thirty years from now. In the book, every dire warning expressed by conservatives has come true because the nation continued on down every current path. In that sense it is a conservative’s wet dream of an apocalypse story, helped along by the fact that the guy is such a damned fine writer. I’ve rtead a number of conservative economic-collapse apocalypse books; the authors’ hearts are in the right place but they’re not very good writers. Flashback is the first conservative economic-collapse apocalypse book that is well written that I’m aware of. Is Dan Simmons himself conservative? Probably yes, but not to the extent of this book’s subject matter. He’s made no secret of his disgust for appeasement of Islamic jihadism, that part is true enough, and he’s written brilliantly around that part of it for years. But the full smorgasboardof anti-left economic assault in Flashback is new for him, and it’s probably entertainment primarily. But what GREAT entertainment!
That damned Mike Devx. I’ve been trying to stick to a budget, but now I have to go out and buy that frickin’ “Flashback.”
I just realized that the Zero and Ella have something in common – somethings break when the open their mouth.
Ella on high notes and the other on low ones…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkt8Dwzl6Sg
p.s. Mike Devx
If it’s of any comfort to you, no one knows what they’re doing. I am convinced that the introduction of the EUro was a very bad idea, poorly thought out and never thought out at all. Until the weak/er are culled (Greece, the PIIGS) we’re all screwed. On the bright side, you have stimulated the economy, – Charles Martel is going book buying.
But wait, there’s more!…..
“The White House Press Office has vomited all over my inbox”
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/white-house-floods-reporters-inboxes-obama-jobs-speech-155956139.html