Loose Canons
Jed Babbin
The American Spectator
1/11/2011
…There is no evidence whatsoever that the attack on Giffords and the others is a result of political rhetoric. The political anger there is — built over nearly two years of the Obama presidency — resulted in a force that ejected of 63 House members last November. And the root cause of the anger is to be found in the man who resides in the White House.
Every president is responsible for the political climate while he is in office. Using the Bully Pulpit, controlling his agenda and in dealing with the Congress and the public, every president has at least great control — if not sole control — of the level of heat in American politics. When a president loses that control, like Obama did last fall, it presages a political disaster for him and his party.
President Obama is a tumultuary. He governs by inflating or inventing crises which he insists must be acted upon as he prescribes with an immediacy that tolerates no delay or debate. His signature remark — repeated again and again — is that “The time for talk is over. The time for action is now.”
Obama derides debate, and refuses to answer critics, choosing instead to end the discussion. In January 2009, challenged by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Az) on the shape and size of the economic stimulus package he proposed, Obama cut off the discussion by saying, “I won.”
And that is his style. Whether it’s angry words spoken with a preternatural calm or calm words delivered in a visibly angry demeanor, he has cultivated the anger that propelled his legislative agenda through Congress in a tsunami of unread and undebated legislation…
…It’s rare for Obama to appear angry and speak angrily at the same time. The best example was his December 7, 2010 press conference at the height of the congressional fight over extending the Bush-era tax rates. There, Obama apparently adopted the angle Sen. Bob Menendez took a week earlier. Menendez had said that negotiating with the Republicans was almost like negotiating with terrorists.
In his press conference an angry — even petulant — Obama lashed out at Republicans, saying “It’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers, unless the hostage gets harmed…The hostage was the American people.”…
Read the entire article at The American Spectator.
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