Will November 6, 2012, Ever Arrive?
In case you haven’t caught on yet, I can’t wait for the next election to roll around. It’s less than 500 days off, but with Barack Obama in the White House and Michelle and her relatives jetting around the world on our dime – or, rather, our millions of dimes – it feels more like 500 years.
Because we didn’t celebrate Christmas in my Jewish home, I wasn’t one of those kids who counted off the days until December 25. The closest I ever came to that sort of excruciating anticipation was when I was in grammar school and summer vacation was on the horizon. I would start scratching off weeks, days, hours and finally minutes, in my notebook.
In case you haven’t caught on yet, I can’t wait for the next election to roll around. It’s less than 500 days off, but with Barack Obama in the White House and Michelle and her relatives jetting around the world on our dime – or, rather, our millions of dimes – it feels more like 500 years.
Because we didn’t celebrate Christmas in my Jewish home, I wasn’t one of those kids who counted off the days until December 25. The closest I ever came to that sort of excruciating anticipation was when I was in grammar school and summer vacation was on the horizon. I would start scratching off weeks, days, hours and finally minutes, in my notebook.
Even though I have lived through the likes of LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Clinton and the Bushes, I have never wanted to see a White House eviction as much as I do now.
I keep hearing George W. Bush in my head, saying, “When Obama came along with all that Hope and Change malarkey, I said to myself, ‘That fella’s all smoke and no barbecue,’ as we say down in Crawford. But when he kept Gitmo and the border open, expanded the war in Afghanistan, went into Libya, okayed military tribunals, renewed the Patriot Act, expanded my prescription drug plan into ObamaCare and inflated the national debt beyond my wildest dreams, I said to Laura, ‘He’s my kind of guy.’”
Speaking for myself, though, I can’t see Obama’s appeal. To me, he seems arrogant, narcissistic, dour, lazy, thin-skinned and humorless. I mean, just how far down the food chain would somebody have to be to look up to Barack Obama? I mean, Jack Kennedy said he sought the Oval Office because he wanted to be where the action is. At the time, most people were unaware that he and, later, Bill Clinton weren’t always referring to political action. But Obama, who has made it a signature of his administration to hand off important matters to Pelosi, Reid and even Joe Biden, seems to regard gala events, vacations and fund-raisers, as more than enough action to keep this community organizer occupied.
I once jokingly suggested that the notion of hard work being virtuous was a con game perpetrated on the rest of us by those who had inherited or married their money. But, clearly, it’s a notion that Obama has taken to heart. Whether it’s because, as a beneficiary of affirmative action, he not only got into prestigious schools and, at Harvard, was elected editor of the Law Review, where he made history by never writing a single article, he is not a sterling example of hard work paying dividends. This is the nation’s leader, after all, who left it up to Pelosi and Reid to concoct the trillion dollar stimulus and assigned the administration’s mascot, Joe Biden, the man who has replaced Alfred E. Neuman as the iconic face of gross stupidity, to keep America from financial ruin.
The toughest decisions Obama makes are which club to use on the 16th par-five and, of course, what topping he wants on his pizza.
Finally, I must confess that I was amused during the aftermath of the Navy Seals taking out Osama bin Laden when politicians and pundits kept stumbling over the similarity between his name and the president’s. It occurred to me that there was a very easy way to avoid the embarrassment, and that was to keep in mind that one of them was a threat to our nation’s security, a dedicated enemy of Israel and, in his heart, regarded America as the Great Capitalistic Satan, and the other guy was at the bottom of the ocean.