That (Bad Word) Obama

Opinion | thepilot.com

You know, after rereading last week’s column, it occurs to me that maybe I really have been going a little too easy on President Barack Obama.

Oh, sure, I called his plan to intervene on behalf of Libyan rebels a “terrible idea.” I criticized his intervention in Syria, even though I later had to admit his part in getting Syria to give up its chemical weapons stockpiles was, in the end, a good thing. You can look it up.

But judging from my research into the online Wingnuttosphere, I feel as if I’m remiss, because I apparently haven’t even scratched the surface of the Kenyan Usurper’s perfidy. So, let’s look around and see what else we can blame on TBO —That (Bad Word) Obama.

* In Norway’s Hardangervidda National Park, a hiker recently came upon a terrible sight: the corpses of 323 reindeer, killed by a single lightning strike.

Now, a bunch of egghead “scientists” will probably try and tell you tell you thatthis is something that happens when the reindeer huddle together in a thunderstorm. But science, as we know, has a liberal bias.

Obama, as we also know, hates Christmas, what with all his talk of “Holiday Trees” at the White House (I know multiple fact-checkers have noted that the White House actually uses the word “Christmas” and only “Christmas” in describing the tree. Facts, as we also know, have a liberal bias as well).

Anyway, if a bunch of Santa’s shaggy helpers are found hooves-up and smoking in a field, we all know who’s to blame, don’t we? I’ll bet TBO was even playing golf when those reindeer died.

* Last week, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick whipped good Americans into a righteous fury when he refused to stand during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Kaepernick explained that he was “not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” Clearly this is the fault of TBO, who we’re told over and over is the most divisive president America has ever had.

It’s bad enough that he’s black, he has to keep reminding us of it. This has done nothing but embolden other public figures, like professional quarterbacks, to remind us that some of them are black as well. Even worse, they have to keep reminding us that black people might have some actual legitimate grievances about the way they’ve been (and still are) treated in this country.

I mean, a lot of it’s true, but how dare a public figure make us feel bad by reminding us of it? This would never have happened if it hadn’t been for TBO.

* It seems that Republican Maine Gov. Paul LePage is going straight off the deep end. On Aug. 24, he claimed to have a “three-ring binder” which proved that “90 percent” of drug arrestees in Maine were black or Hispanic. Asked to provide the binder, LePage had himself a conniption.

“Black people come up the highway and they kill Mainers,” he railed at reporters. “You ought to look into that! You make me so sick!”

When The Portland Press Herald did look into that and reported that FBI statistics showed that only 14.1 percent of Maine drug arrestees were black or Hispanic, LePage, realizing — as all good Americans do — that statistics also have a liberal bias, doubled down: “When you go to war, you shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy, and the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of color or people of Hispanic origin.”

I won’t even go into what LePage said about a state legislator who insinuated that LePage’s comments about shooting “enemy” blacks and Latinos might be a wee bit racist. Suffice it to say that even my powers of euphemism fail when it comes to reporting those comments in this newspaper.

In the resulting furor, LePage suggested he might resign, then immediately retracted the idea. Now, before the advent of TBO, an elderly erratic white Republican governor would probably have been able to rave about made-up statistics about blacks and Latinos without fear of contradiction. But poor Gov. LePage, in the era of TBO, has to deal with pesky questions about actual “statistics” which, as we know … well, you know what kind of bias they have. How is an old racist supposed to keep his sanity in such times?

Answer: He can’t. And it’s all the fault of That (Bad Word) Obama. Isn’t everything? I can’t wait till his term is over. Then everything that ever goes wrong anywhere will be That (Other Bad Word) Hillary Clinton’s fault.

What They Need in Louisiana

Opinion | thepilot.com
Certainly everyone’s heart has to go out to the people suffering from last week’s floods in Louisiana.

The devastation is truly stunning, and I hope you’ll join my family and other people of good will in sending donations to any one of the many worthy charities providing relief to the unfortunate folks in the area. After all, this is the sort of occasion which should bring all Americans together, right?

Well, as the eminent Professor Byrd used to solemnly intone to us at UNC Law School: “One might think that. But one would be wrong.”

As usual, there’s a noisy cadre of right-wingers who see a terrible tragedy and think, not “How can we help?” but “How can we blame this on President Obama?”

We saw it in the wake of the Benghazi murders, where Mitt Romney literally did not wait till the bodies were cold before he took to Twitter to politicize their deaths, and the right-wingers haven’t let up since.

And so it begins again, with the inevitable kvetching about, “Why did Obummer wait so long to go down there for his photo op? He was playing golf! … It’s Obama’s Katrina!”

Well, as for why the president waited till this past Tuesday to visit, it is very likely because the governor of the state, John Bel Edwards, asked him to.

“It is a major ordeal,” Edwards said. “They free up the Interstate for him. We have to take hundreds of local first responders, police officers, sheriffs, deputies and state troopers to provide security for that type of visit. I would just as soon have those people engaged in the response rather than trying to secure the president. So I’d ask him to wait, if he would, another couple weeks.”

Donald Trump, of course, ignored this simple logic  and made his visit last week, where he passed out a few packs of Play-Doh and vamoosed as soon as the cameras were off.

Because if there’s one thing wet, thirsty, homeless people need, it’s some Play-Doh. You can squeeze it to take your mind off your troubles. You can use it to plug leaks. In a pinch, you can even eat it. Ask any kindergartner.

So what was the president doing? Merely signing the orders and making the declarations needed to mobilize the people who can actually do something besides look concerned for the cameras and pass out toys — which those people proceeded to do.

Let’s get one thing straight. The criticism of President Bush over the botched response to Hurricane Katrina had very little if anything to do with how long it took Dubbya to get to New Orleans. The criticism was due to failures that caused hundreds of needless deaths due to cronyism and incompetence.

The response to the Baton Rouge tragedy appears to be at least competent. Resources are getting where they need to go. We don’t have, for instance, a Navy hospital ship complete with rescue helicopters wandering around the Gulf, futilely waiting for orders, which happened after Katrina.

We don’t have FEMA turning back donated supplies of water, preventing the Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel, and telling doctors and nurses who volunteered to help the sick and injured at the New Orleans Airport to mop floors instead “while people died around them” (as later revealed by a CNN investigation).

Instead, as Layton Ricks, the president of Livingston Parish, told the “PBS Newshour,” “What I needed (the president) to do was declare the state of emergency. He did that. FEMA ramped up really fast. Under Gov. Edwards, along with (FEMA Administrator) Craig Fugate, they were helping us get the assets that we needed at that time.”

That’s what happens when a president appoints someone with nearly 30 years of emergency management experience to head FEMA, rather than a guy who’d previously ran a horse breeder’s club but who was a big fundraiser for Bush. Results are what the Baton Rouge area needed from this administration, and that’s what they’re getting.

Some people are so dedicated to the idea of excusing the failures of the President Who Must Not Be Named that every crisis has to become “Obama’s Katrina,” and the response to every terrible thing that happens anywhere in the world is not to sympathize with or to try to send aid to the victims, but to immediately go online to complain that the president played golf somewhere in the general time frame.

Don’t be like those people. If you’re able, grab your credit card or your checkbook.

Donate food or clothing. Volunteer, if you can. Check out the opportunities for all of that at http://volunteerlouisiana.gov. Do something to build up, not tear down, your fellow Americans.

THE GOBSHITES SPEAK: Inveterate liar Frank Staples (aka "skylinefirepest") , who posts every week to tell everyone how much he hates the column he reads every week, is particularly incoherent this week:

Dusty road...is there any Republican that you could like? It's attitudes like yours that keep us from compromising on anything. It's carp [sic] like the liar in chief putting forth a man for the Supreme Court that is an avowed 2nd Amendment hater and should therefore have never been submitted as a Supreme!! It's stuff like this, where trump went and the liar in chief went golfing, that keeps the liberals in something to write about...you know, on those days when hillary is still not being charged and there's only the hatred of trump that excites you. You're a pitiful man, dustie road, [sic] even for a rabid liberal.

Poor old Frank's never gotten over the day several years ago when he showed up at my office, introduced himself as "skylinefirepest" and asked to see me, but my wife thought he was a nutcase (which he clearly is) and sent him on his way. He's been foaming at the mouth over every column since, and he's not above simply making shit up to fuel his screeching diatribes. 

Obama's Katrina?

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Is the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico “Obama’s Katrina”?

Certainly a lot of right-wing pundits and radio hosts would like to make it so. But then, these people have been looking for something to dub “Obama’s Katrina” since the day he took office.

As the watchdog site Media Matters points out, nearly every crisis, no matter how large or small, has been described by someone as “Obama’s Katrina”: the H1N1 flu, the Fort Hood shootings, the failed Christmas Eve plot by the Undiebomber, ice storms in Kentucky, the Haiti earthquake, the GM bankruptcy, the Nashville flood — I guarantee you, if Obama ever appears in public wearing white after Labor Day, someone’s going to call it “Obama’s Katrina.”

The ironic thing about all this effort to dub the spill “Obama’s Katrina” is that the people who are so eager to do so, such as Rush Limbaugh, are some of the very same people who became bitterly angry when the blame for that botched rescue and relief effort was laid at the feet of President George Dubbya Bush and his cronies.

So maybe when Limbaugh calls this “Obama’s Katrina,” he’s calling it “a really big and unmanageable thing that someone else screwed up and that’s totally unfair to blame the president of the United States for.” But probably not.

The major difference between this and the Katrina debacle is this: Hurricane relief was something the government knew how to do and didn’t do it. For example, as I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, we don’t have a secret oil-well-capping ship hidden away.

During Katrina, on the other hand, we did have a U.S. Navy ship (the USS Bataan) steaming right into the Gulf behind the hurricane with a full complement of helicopters, 1,200 sailors and Marines, a water purification plant and a fully functioning hospital — and it steamed around for six days waiting for orders while people suffered and died.

And that’s just one example of things we knew how to do, but which didn’t get done because of incompetence all the way up and down the governmental chain.

In contrast, we don’t really know how to plug a leaking oil gusher a mile under the ocean. And while we have some technology for containing oil spills (booms and the like), this is the biggest spill anyone’s ever seen. Scientists are studying effects they’ve never seen before. We are, in the words of Indiana Jones, “just making this up as we go.”

This, of course, raises the question of whether we should be drilling that deep at all, or whether we should, as Canada does, demand that the oil companies drill a relief well at the same time as the main one, as well as providing a plan in case of blowouts.

But that’s not a question you’re likely to be hearing from the crowd that was mocking the idea of keeping your tires properly inflated to save gas and chanting, “Drill, baby, drill” in 2008.

Some have faulted the president for not visiting the area enough. In response, the White House has stepped up presidential visits to the Gulf Coast to the point where you begin to wonder if he might ought to just move the whole White House down there. Of course, this leads to criticism from the “Obama is always wrong” crowd that he didn’t come down sooner.

But you know what? If I’m someplace where everything is going down the tubes, I don’t want the president of the U.S. on the ground in the area, sucking up the attention, trailing a battalion of reporters and causing security headaches.

I want him nice and comfy in the White House Situation Room, watching the thing in real time with communications and overhead satellite surveillance that only God himself could rival, surrounded by smart people who he listens to, and a phone he can give orders into. That’s why they built the Situation Room in the first place.

The president summoned top BP oil executives, including CEO Tony Hayward, to a meeting at the White House on Wednesday. We don’t know everything that was said, but there’s one phrase made famous at the time of Hurricane Katrina that I’m pretty sure Obama didn’t use. I’m reasonably sure no one said, “You’re doing a heck of a job, Tony.”