Is Obama Smarter Than A Schoolyard Bully?
58For Example....
Our President's talk about "...whose a** to kick...." is absolutely amazing to me. Sure, I'm familiar with that sort of declaration. We all are. Kicking somebody's a** is the top priority for every drunken bar fighter, wannabe gangsta, and/or schoolyard bully unable to think of anything more creative and/or constructive. In other words, it's thoroughly male...and thoroughly juvenile.
It is not wording we need to hear from a sitting President of the United States faced with a crisis of Deepwater Horizon oil spill enormity.
Ever.
My old 6th grade English teacher taught me to keep your target audience in mind. "If you believe your reader may not understand big words or ideas," she reminded us repeatedly, "Break it down. Little bites. Little bites."
That was long before all those "little steps" personal development programs that came along later. She was ahead of her time.
Okay. Mr. President, since boots on throats and kicking of tails seems to be the limit of your intellect regarding the world of people who actually work for a living, I'm going to lay out one specific portion of the answer to your early gusher problem. Let's do it "by the numbers":
1. From day one (but better late than never), you and Governor Jindal and Ceo Tony Hayward should have formed a close and cooperative coalition.
2. For now, let's not talk about stopping the flow. Little bites, okay? Not even the oil-blocking berms. No, not the underwater oil plumes, either. Little, little bites. Let's just go with one really really really specific aspect, okay? Namely, the cleanup of surface-riding oil. Am I going too fast for you?
3. A whole lot of creative, inventive, and competent people have come forth with already proven ideas to help with cleanup. For example, if you spread plain old ordinary agricultural hay on oily water, the hay will absorb a whole lotta oil and leave relatively clean water behind. But nobody in the government and nobody at BP will even talk to the hay folks. We need to fix that.
4. So what if some of the ideas out there are just as looney tunes as some folks claim? Your CC (Cleanup Coalition) could assign specific areas for the hayseeds to test their stuff. If it works, you're heroes. If it doesn't, you can still show all of America and especially all of Louisiana that you're pure dee gettin' after it. From any angle, it's a win-win situation.
Oops. You've got that MEGO look, that "My Eyes Glaze Over" thousand-yard stare.
Should've known. Most schoolyard bullies don't do well with the printed word. Guess a picture is required.
The Coalition Structure
It wouldn't require a lot of time on your part. Governor Bobby Jindal would, I'm sure, be more than willing to do the real grunt work. He could set up an office in a heartbeat where people with oil-cleaning solutions could check in, get assigned to a test area, and go give it their best shot. Need to come up with more realistic jobs than hiring too many census workers? There you go!
To keep tabs on the results, you and the Governor and CEO Hayward just get on the horn once a day, five minutes on some days, never more than half an hour...and all three of you could be on top of this aspect of the cleanup within days. Really on top of it, not just talking about it.
Still confused? (*Sigh*) I forgot. Gotta dumb it down for the bully. It's like this:
1. The Governor does the hard part, overseeing the day to day logistics, hiring and supervising people who assign and monitor testing of cleanup methods, definining areas, counting the beans, etc.
2. You just cut the d----d red tape! Regulations slowing things down? Suspended! Licenses slow to process? Expedited! You just run your mouth (playing to your strength), and wow, do you look good. It's scary how good you look. If you actually did this, even Sarah Palin might have trouble beating you in 2012.
3. Tony, the CEO for BP, mostly goes along with the program, objects to a test where he sees it could be a problem cleanup technique being proposed, but never possessing veto power. He's there to aid with the image of solidarity...and to pay the bills for the cleanup as they come due.
Forecast
Would this structure do the job? Yes. It would.
Will this structure ever come into existence? Maybe. Unfortunately, that may not happen until Sarah Palin takes over the Oval Office.
Because the current President of the United States of America, nominal leader of the Free World and historically considered the most powerful man in the world, does not appear to be smarter than a schoolyard bully.
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Maybe he's not doing anything about the clean-up because he doesn't want to. He's certainly demonizing BP and oil companies in general - maybe in order to stop all drilling?
Larry, those who don't pay taxes are undoubtedly a significant portion of that 47%--but not the whole picture. I know that for a fact because I've got a (now retired) uncle who paid taxes for a lot of working years, not to mention a kid sister who's an RN and still paying them...and they BOTH continue to think he's two steps higher than God.
True, my sis didn't graduate at the head of her high school class like our middle sister and I both did, but hey, she came in second. I can't even put it down to any obvious lack of intellect.
At least my brother-in-law gets it. Does he ever.
Note: At the risk of sounding really ignorant, I have to admit I had somehow missed that undoubtedly ancient description of his having bulldog mouth and a puppy dog butt. Awesome. (And accurate.)
Sheila, that's definitely a possibility. I fully expect him to use it as an excuse. But I also suspect he'd be happy to get the spill cleaned up IF he could have that happen in a way that gave him all the adoring credit from a grateful America and somehow trashed Bobby Jindal's reputation. There's no way I (or anyone else with a lick of natural common sense) can truly get inside Obama's crosswired brain, but an educated guess would be that--looking toward 2012--Jindal scares him about as badly as Sarah Palin does. Sarah walked away from the position of Governor in Alaska because to do so benefitted her beloved home state. She is a true stateswoman, putting the good of Alaska ahead of her own personal concerns. B.H.O. is the dead opposite of that.
After the November midterm elections, hopefully, he'll be politically dead as well, essentially a lame duck for two more years but effectively neutralized.
Remember in November.
My postulation here is this. He knows nothing, I mean nothing about drilling. This is number one. BP, TransOcean, Halliburton on the other hand do. They have been unable to stop this thing. What the heck is the loon supposed to know that they do not.
GOOD NEWS IS THIS: THIS MORNING ON OUR LOCAL NEWS HERE IN MINNESOTA....BP HAS CONTACTED A GENTLEMAN HERE WHO HAS PERFECTED W/A PATENT a cap which will fit on top of the pipe with hydraulic workings to allow/disallow the flow of the oil......Should BP actually adopt his solution.....it may be over....when I say over....the flow of oil may be stopped from the massive hole in the bottom of the sea.
Now, we are left with the horrendous cleanup and the extreme loss of fish, shrimp, wildlife, wetlands, beaches, charter fishing, and life support for the people in the affected areas of the Gulf..... and we are faced with hurricane season. So noone is out of the woods, but if the oil flow is actually stopped.....this is a good thing. As far as the loon...personally he never should have been involved...for what does a loon know of these things???? As far as the cleanup....it will take literally years from experience living on the coast. Years....BP will be broke by the time it is all over. That's my answer and I'm stickin to it. Bring on Palin!!!
Use the Internet.
Set up monitored web-sites to which ideas can be submitted, commented on, and ranked by professionals. Then folks won't have to travel to one specific point to check-in with their ideas, and they can get constructive feedback. Solutions can be offered to any aspect of the problems created by this spill.
Assign roles:
BP pays (they've already accepted that role in ads on cable)
BP leads the effort.
The government cuts the red-tape. (We can hope & pray)
Academia reviews and submits ideas.
Engineers review and submit ideas.
Anybody with a brain reviews and/or submits ideas.
Media advertises the top five or top ten. (CNN is already doing that, and maybe FOX too)
All refrain from accusations, assigning blame, or any sort of action that mught encourage contributors to fulfill their roles in appearance only.
Key is commitment to solving the problem, getting the ideas flowing, and setting up the infrastructure that allows it to work. It appears to be in progress, but, at least one network counting the days, much like that first one-hundred days of the presidency.
Is that too simple for the current reigning genius?
WMH, the cleanup could go much more quickly than most realize IF, as Jim says, those involved simply cooperate a bit and use what's available.
For example, Kevin Costner owns a company that has a patented machine that separates oil from water at 99.9% efficiency and with extremely high production capacity--and BP has already ordered 32 of them. This was in an article in our local paper today.
Unfortunately, Jim--yes, that very much does appear to be too simple for the current reigning genius.
maven101 Level 5 Commenter 23 months ago
Leroy Brown he ain't...Obama's bulldog mouth and his puppy dog butt is getting old...yet he still carries a 47% approval rating !!...Could that be the 47% that don't pay any taxes..? Perception being everything in politics, Obama is perceived by most intellectually engaged Americans as a hapless, aloof, incompetent bureaucrat whose progressive management by committee, pass the buck, blame game approach to governance is shown as a dangerous weakness and a total disconnect from American values...
Excellent commentary with not just questions and criticism, but also with positive answers and solutions...Someone needs to bitch-slap Obama and get his attention away from his perpetual image making and campaign mode and do the work he was hired to do...the work of the American people, not a progressive agenda...Talk about fiddlin' while Rome burns, Obama throws parties at the White House several times a week while Jindal screams for assistance and gets red tape from an Obama administration...
Always enjoy reading your well thought-out commentaries...Larry