Why blogging seems a little stale, flat, and unprofitable of late

In the lead-up to the 2008 election, blogging was exciting because there was hope.  Not the synthetic hope Obama was selling, but the real hope that both Hillary and Obama would lose, and that John McCain would be a half decent president.

In the first two years of Obama’s administration, there was no hope, but blogging was still exciting because there was a peculiar fascination, much like watching a train wreck unfold in slow-mo, in watching the way in which a hard Left democratic president who owned Congress would legislate.  On the one hand, there was ObamaCare, which was a serious downer.  On the other hand, though, there was the rise of the Tea Party, which raised that hope thing again.

In the third year of the Obama administration, blogging had some sizzle as we hoped that the smashing Republican victories in 2010 would slow down Obama’s headlong rush into European-style socialism (with a dash of Soviet totalitarianism thrown in), even as Europe began its own slow-mo train wreck.

In the fourth year of the Obama administration, blogging was explosive because we got another election, this time with some very exciting Republican candidates.  Watching them implode one right after the other, right up until Romney’s final implosion on election day, was not fun, but it at least provide scintillating fodder for bloggers.

Since then, blogging has not been fun at all.  We’ve gotten Kerry, Hagel, and Lew in charge of way too much, and we have reason to believe that Brennan, who may or may not be a Muslim convert (despite that fine Irish name) will soon be sitting in the catbird seat at the CIA. Egypt is becoming another Iran, except this time we’re helping the transition out by paying for it in advance.  Iran, meanwhile, is working on becoming another North Korea, complete with sufficiently functional nuclear weapons.  Europe continues to collapse, with a maddened antisemitic comic holding Italy’s elections hostage.

And then there’s Obama.  His four years in office have proven something:  he’s a dreadful little man.  His politics, which he hid for two elections, are lefter than left.  He runs a crude, abusive White House.  He uses political power for patronage and demagoguery.  His favorite (semi) European leader recently announced that Zionism is a crime against humanity.  He recently tried to blackmail Congress by releasing thousands of criminals, something along the lines of “nice country you’ve got here.  It would be a shame if something happened to it.”  His governing style has nothing to do with the good of America and everything to do with what’s good for Obama.

Worst of all, despite his many, many failings, none of it matters.  For a long time, nothing mattered because the press had built an impregnable wall around him.  That was bad enough.  What’s even worse, though, is that, when the impregnable wall fails, people still don’t care:

(a) The president and his administration are responsible for the sequestration idea. (b) Before that fact became widely known, Mr. Obama misled Americans of that fact in a debate with Mitt Romney–and his aides did the same thing in the aftermath of the debate. (c) Thanks to Bob Woodward’s The Price of Politics, the White House has now been forced to admit that, as top White House adviser Gene Sperling put it on Sunday, “Yes, we put forward the design of how to do that [implement sequestration].” (d) Over the last several weeks, the president vilified sequestration as a brutal, savage, and inhumane idea. (e) At a press conference last Friday, when sequestration cuts began and the world as we know it did not end, the president began to moonwalk away from his scorching rhetoric, saying, “Just to make the final point about the sequester, we will get through this. This is not going to be an apocalypse, I think, as some people have said.” (f) Since the sequestration idea was first signed into law by President Obama in 2011, House Republicans have twice passed legislation to make the cuts more reasonable–and Democrats have refused to act on it. (g) In the last week, Republicans have tried to give the president greater authority to make more reasonable cuts–but he has refused it, allowing unnecessary pain to be inflicted on Americans in order to blame Republicans.

To summarize, then: The president has spoken in the harshest possible terms about an idea he and his White House originated and signed into law. He has used apocalyptic language leading up to the sequestration–and then, as the sequestration cuts began, lectured us that “this is not going to be an apocalypse” as “some people have said.” And Mr. Obama has warned about the devastating nature of the cuts even as he has opposed efforts to make the cuts less devastating.

This is Nixonian conduct on steroids, writ large before the American public.  It doesn’t even account for an economy whose growth isn’t even measured in single digits, but in tenths of single digits.  And yet he still has a 47% approval rating.  I agree that 47% isn’t as good as something over 50% would be, but it’s still shocking that his numbers aren’t in the 20s:  He lies, cheats, bullies, destroys the economy, weakens us before our enemies — and almost half of Americans think he’s a great guy to have in the White House.

And that’s why blogging seems a little stale, flat, and unprofitable.  Blogging is more fun when you’re advancing a case as exposed to charting a nation’s demise.