Obamateurism of the Day -- from HotAir

[Eupher]

It's a mirror image produced by the VRWC.

All the more reason for the dude to stop flailing and slap on some antiperspirant.

[thundley4]

It's a mirror image produced by the VRWC.

That was what was claimed at first, but the picture was later verified as real.

[obumazombie]

That was what was claimed at first, but the picture was later verified as real.

My conspiracy launch is encountering a shower of sparks as it grinds to find good traction.

[Eupher]

One of the reasons Barack Obama didn’t make it earlier to Louisiana was his speech to soldiers at Fort Bliss to make the second anniversary of the end of combat operations in Iraq.  He might have gotten more cheers in the evacuated areas of Hurricane Isaac’s landfall.  According to the Daily Caller, Obama met with such a stony reception that he tried to cajole a reaction out of the audience:

His praise for the soldiers — and for his own national-security policies — won cheers from only a small proportion of the soldiers and families in the cavernous aircraft-hanger.

The audience remains quiet even when the commander-in-chief thanked the soldiers’ families, and cited the 198 deaths of their comrades in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The audience’s reaction was so flat that the president tried twice to elicit a reaction from the crowd.

“Hey, I hear you,” he said amid silence.

The selected soldiers who were arrayed behind the president sat quietly throughout the speech.

That, says Damian at e-Nough, is the real OOTD:

So when Mr. Obama brags on himself, silence. When he promises something, a smattering of applause. When he recognizes the military, cheers. Now why is that? [We consider why that is.] Perhaps it’s because they sense the depth of his sincerity (and this). Perhaps it’s because they have experienced his support first-hand (and this and this). Then again, perhaps they’ve been fooled once too often.

In an e-mail to me, Damian adds:

But of course Mr. Obama is not hearing them. Not at the podium and not in his policies. It is an unintended irony. That is the Obamateurism. That and Mr. Obama’s rhetorical lameness laid bare. And there is also the delicious synchronicity of Mr. Obama going flat at a military base named Bliss.
Mr. Obama now needs an applause light to cue his audiences when to clap, when to laugh.

How bad was the speech and its reception?

CNN and MSNBC ended their coverage of the speech before it was half-over.

Maybe Obama would have been better off speaking to, er, empty chairs.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/04/obamateurism-of-the-day-818/

[obumazombie]

What would an empty suit have to say to an empty chair ?

[Eupher]

What would an empty suit have to say to an empty chair ?

Need a hanger?

[obumazombie]

Need a hanger?

That's quite good really.

[Eupher]

We've seen this one already, but it's something that needs to be hammered again and again and again...

In 2008, Barack Obama promised to change the way Washington works and to bring people together.  In 2012, CNN’s Jessica Yellin asked Obama why he couldn’t accomplish that in his first term, and Obama said that … it’s his family’s fault (~2 minutes, via Breitbart):

[CNN video at the link]

Even Yellin couldn’t quite believe this answer. “If this is such a priority,” she told Candy Crowley and Dan Balz, “why didn’t he do it?  I mean, you can carve out one night a week to go out and socialize and reach across the aisle.”  That excuse also ignores the 100-plus rounds of golf Obama has already played, eating up most of the Sunday time that could have otherwise been spent with his family — or even using golf to reach across the aisle, which Obama has done so rarely that it merited a large amount of media attention when he invited John Boehner along on a round.

New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor wrote about Obama’s use of free time in an article earlier this week:

For someone dealing with the world’s weightiest matters, Mr. Obama spends surprising energy perfecting even less consequential pursuits. He has played golf 104 times since becoming president, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, who monitors his outings, and he asks superior players for tips that have helped lower his scores. He decompresses with card games on Air Force One, but players who do not concentrate risk a reprimand (“You’re not playing, you’re just gambling,” he once told Arun Chaudhary, his former videographer).

His idea of birthday relaxation is competing in an Olympic-style athletic tournament with friends, keeping close score. The 2009 version ended with a bowling event. Guess who won, despite his history of embarrassingly low scores? The president, it turned out, had been practicing in the White House alley.

But his failure on Hope and Change were because he was spending so much time … with his family.  Given his track record of blaming everyone but himself for his own failures, using his daughters as political shields is sadly just par for the course.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/05/obamateurism-of-the-day-819/

[obumazombie]

Palestinians and other muslim terrorists have perfected the technique of using women and children as human shields.

[Eupher]

It’s bad enough when biased news organizations claim to be “fact checkers.”  It moves to the ridiculous when politicians try filling that role.  Even the New York Times noticed that Barack Obama didn’t exactly cover himself in glory when he tried taking on a new role as Arbiter of Truth:

Mr. Obama this week, for the first time, entered the fray. Campaigning on Tuesday on college campuses in Iowa and Colorado, he told thousands of supporters not to believe the opposition’s attacks because, “how do I put this nicely? They will just fib.” On Wednesday in Charlottesville, Va., he ramped up his complaint, winning applause from the estimated 6,500 people.

“Sometimes they just make things up. But they’ve got a bunch of folks who can write $10 million checks, and they’ll just keep on running them,” he said. “I mean, somebody was challenging one of their ads — they made it up — about work and welfare. And every outlet said this is just not true. And they were asked about it and they said — one of their campaign people said, ‘We won’t have the fact-checkers dictate our campaign. We will not let the truth get in the way.’”

Wow — that would be a fine catch for any Obama Truth Squad member, let alone the Truth Commander in Chief!  Except, as the NYT notes, no one actually ever said that they wouldn’t let the truth get in the way:

Mr. Obama was referring, as many other critics of the Romney campaign have, to a comment that its pollster, Neil Newhouse, made to reporters at the Republican convention on Tuesday, dismissive of those faulting the campaign’s television ads. What Mr. Newhouse actually said was, “These fact-checkers come to those ads with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs. We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

Mr. Newhouse did not say, “We will not let the truth get in the way.”

D’oh! Mark Hemingway calls this “a near perfect encapsulation of how the Obama campaign is leaning on incompetent partisans masquerading as “independent” media fact checking organizations to do their dirty work[.]“  I just call it a case of projection.  Like Mark, though, I eagerly await the mainstream media’s fact checkers and their ruling on the President’s attempt to try out for a job.  A few more of these, and Obama may need one in January.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/06/obamateurism-of-the-day-820/

[obumazombie]

The lib/dem/socialists are experts at altering a conservative quote slightly (to massively), then calling it a lie.

[Eupher]

One of the ex officio duties of a President is to be the leader of one’s party.  As many Presidents have learned, this is akin to being the leader of a Cub Scout pack of, oh, several thousand youngsters at once.  However, we haven’t seen quite the mismanagement that took place this week at the Democratic convention, especially not directly provided by an incumbent President.

It started when Republicans noticed that the Democratic platform had removed all references to God, and also a plank that endorsed recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.  Republicans rushed to attack Barack Obama over it, in part to pay back Democrats who had attacked Mitt Romney over the GOP’s plank on abortion.  Platform stories rarely last long, though, because few people bother to read the platforms and candidates largely ignore them as well.  Had Obama ignored the issue, as Romney had with the abortion plank the week before, it would have become a dusty footnote in history.

Instead, Obama and his team turned it into a headline-making embarrassment.  The campaign couldn’t make up its mind if Obama had personally reviewed the platform before its adoption, or had never looked at it at all before the GOP made the omissions an issue.  Everyone agreed on one thing, though: Obama personally ordered that the platform be amended to fix both problems — a process that would require a two-thirds vote on the floor to approve, since the convention delegates had already approved the platform.  Ted Strickland and Cory Booker dutifully went back and wrote one amendment to cover the changes.  No one apparently checked to see if either the recognition of Jerusalem or adding a mention of God would provoke significant opposition, nor did Obama have his team split the issues into separate amendments in order to isolate any opposition.

That set the stage for this memorable train wreck:

[video at the link]

Instead of ignoring the issue and letting it die a quiet death, as it would have done with the favorable media coverage at the convention, Obama’s leadership had a whole lot of Democrats appearing to vote against God Almighty — and booing Him, too.  Suddenly, the nothingburger of a platform dispute erupted into headline-grabbing news, and even MSNBC was forced to cover it.  Obama’s hand-picked DNC chair tried telling everyone that there was “no discord” in one of the worst spin attempts ever caught on videotape — one that had CNN’s Anderson Cooper and his panel marveling that Debbie Wasserman Schultz lives in “an alternate universe” and openly laughing at her:

[video of the aforementioned critter at the link]

There may be a lot of blame to go around on this debacle, which will most definitely be the biggest news story of this convention and will haunt Democrats through the election.  But it all started with the party’s leader fecklessly playing into the hands of his opponents by taking the bait on a platform debate.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/07/obamateurism-of-the-day-821/

DWS is a certified lunatic. And she represents her district in Flori-duh. Could there be a correlation there?

[Duke Nukum]

I'm tempted to donate to 0bummer just in recognition of all the free entertainment he and his freak show provided this week.

[obumazombie]

The owebuma campaign launched another projectile, in anger, to damage the Rmoney campaign, and as has been the trend, the projectile morphed into a sharp edged boomerang.

[Eupher]

Note to President Obama: when we call something “Bidenesque” … it’s not a compliment:

[video of Barry at the link]

“…marked with three proud words: made in the U.S.A.”

The Weekly Standard points out the similarities:

[video of Plugs at the link]

Readers are cordially invited to speculate on how many times we’d be hearing about this if George W. Bush — or Mitt Romney — had said it.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/10/obamateurism-of-the-day-822/

[Eupher]

One would think that presidential candidates would know better than to try to attempt to use, or even comment on, new technology while out on the campaign trail.  George H. W. Bush just tried to pay polite attention at a grocery store while a clerk explained a bar-code scanner system, and the media played it into a look-how-out-of-touch-the-rich-guy-is story.  Of course, most people wouldn’t consider an iPhone new technology, either:

But when White House trip director Marvin Nicholson handed the president his personal iPhone, Mr. Obama couldn’t get it to work. A reporter who witnessed the scene said the president looked “befuddled.”

“It’s not clear he knows how to dial on an iPhone,” the reporter wrote in a pool report.

Finally, Mr. Obama said, “Oh, I got to dial it in. Hold on, hold on. I can do this. See, I still have a BlackBerry.”

The president then “had a little more trouble dialing,” the pool report said.

And whose fault was that?

The president then has more trouble dialing. When the call didn’t go through, he blamed Mr. Nicholson for having an insufficient cell phone plan.

Well, anyone’s but Obama’s own, of course.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/11/obamateurism-of-the-day-823/

 

[obumazombie]

Not only does owebuma have two left feet, he has two left hands. One with the kung fu grip on your wallet, the other with the sleight of hand.

[Eupher]

Recently, Governor John Kasich claimed credit for creating more than 120,000 jobs in Ohio since taking office in January 2011.  Kasich told the Republican Convention last month that putting the state’s budget back in balance without accounting gimmicks or tax hikes encouraged investment in the state.  Barack Obama wasn’t about to let Kasich take all the credit for that, however:

“John Kasich stood up there and told everybody that Ohio is now number one in the Midwest in job creation, fourth best in America — which got folks kind of confused, because if it’s all Obama’s fault and nothing is going right, what’s going on in Ohio?” the president asked a crowd at a Labor Day rally in Toledo. “Now, I guess the theory was that it’s all the Governor’s doing. But I think we need to refresh his memory — because a lot of those jobs are autoworker jobs like yours.”

Really?  How many autoworker jobs has Ohio gained in since January 2011?  The BLS data for auto manufacturing and auto-parts manufacturing, screen-grabbed below, should give us a pretty good idea.  In January 2011, Ohio had 19,200 auto manufacturing jobs; as of July (the latest data), there are 17,800, for a decrease of 1400 jobs.  In auto parts manufacturing, Ohio had 56,000 jobs in January 2011, and only 54,200 now, for another decrease of 1800 jobs — a grand total of a net loss of 3200 jobs in this sector.



Well, maybe Obama meant throughout his presidency.  The numbers there are almost as bad.  In the first full month of the Obama term in February 2009, Ohio had 59,000 auto parts manufacturing jobs and 19,400 auto manufacturing jobs.  Those dropped to 50,900 and 14,200 in June 2009 at the start of the recovery, and bounced back up to the present level as noted above.  It’s still a net decrease over Obama’s tenure of 6400 jobs in this sector.

Clearly, the jobs growth took place elsewhere in Ohio.  Kasich doesn’t need his recollection refreshed.  Obama needs a refresher course in math.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/12/obamateurism-of-the-day-824/

[thundley4]

Everything good that happens is because of Obama, Piss be upon Him.  Everything bad that happens is Bush's Romney's fault.

[obumazombie]

Everything good that happens is because of Obama, Piss be upon Him.  Everything bad that happens is Bush's Romney's fault.

Wise, you are. Learned, you have.

[Eupher]

It’s tough to get a meeting with the President of the United States, regardless of who’s in the office at any given time.  Heck, even a besieged ally like Israel can’t get the US head of state to agree to a meeting, even when Israel’s Prime Minister offers to come to him:

Feuding between the US and Israel burst into the open when Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, sharply criticised recent US statements about Iran while the White House said President Barack Obama would not meet Mr Netanyahu in the US this month.

Mr Netanyahu made a stinging attack on Tuesday on Washington’s refusal to establish a “red line” for Iran’s nuclear programme – a point beyond which US military action against Iran would be taken. …

The White House said on Tuesday that Mr Obama would not meet Mr Netanyahu when he travels to the US this month for the UN General Assembly session because the two men would not be in New York on the same day. However, Israeli media reported on Tuesday evening that Mr Netanyahu had offered to travel to Washington for a meeting. This was denied by the White House.

The Israeli media in question for this story is Ha’aretz, which isn’t exactly a bastion of conservatism in the Holy Land.  Still, was this really a snub, considering how tightly packed the President’s schedule must be?  Barack Obama has to meet with a lot of important people, like, say … the Pimp With A Limp (h/t: Power Line):

President Obama was heard on the South Florida airwaves this 9/11 Anniversary morning in a 10-minute radio interview with Miami’s “Pimp with the Limp” DJ Laz from 106.7 WRMA-FM.

“You’re big time. You’ve got Pitbull and Flo Rida and all these guys just beating a path to your door,” Obama said, buttering up Laz. “And so I’m hoping that I can get a little of that magic from you in this interview.”

Hey, maybe Obama just wanted to talk with some regular folk on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 — you know, to share some remembrances and talk about the need to remain vigilant after the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.  Right?  Er …

The two talked tunes, TV, football and top topics of the 2012 campaign.  Obama did not mention the terror attacks that took place 11 years ago today, a fact his critics were quick to point out.

He “avoided talking about 9/11 on 9/11′s anniversary, but made time to mock the Dolphins bad record,” noted the Miami Herald.

That’s not all Obama avoided.  Bibi’s still waiting on Line 1.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/13/obamateurism-of-the-day-825/

[docstew]

It’s tough to get a meeting with the President of the United States, regardless of who’s in the office at any given time.  Heck, even a besieged ally like Israel can’t get the US head of state to agree to a meeting, even when Israel’s Prime Minister offers to come to him:

The Israeli media in question for this story is Ha’aretz, which isn’t exactly a bastion of conservatism in the Holy Land.  Still, was this really a snub, considering how tightly packed the President’s schedule must be?  Barack Obama has to meet with a lot of important people, like, say … the Pimp With A Limp (h/t: Power Line):

Hey, maybe Obama just wanted to talk with some regular folk on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 — you know, to share some remembrances and talk about the need to remain vigilant after the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.  Right?  Er …

That’s not all Obama avoided.  Bibi’s still waiting on Line 1.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/13/obamateurism-of-the-day-825/

If you're expecting the President to act Presidential (as in comporting himself in a dignified manner), you might not want to hold your breath.

[Eupher]

Yesterday, I asserted that Barack Obama was channeling Jimmy Carter on foreign policy. As it turns out, I was being unfair … to Jimmy Carter.  How bad does a President have to be to get a correction from one of the worst Presidents of the modern age?  This bad:

President Carter spoke to Drake University in Des Moines and was asked if he agrees with what Obama said about Egypt:

Carter: “Egypt is an ally of the US, we know Egypt well.”

There have been few foreign policy stumbles as bad as Barack Obama’s dismissal of the Egyptian alliance in memory, and few backtracks as blatantly embarrassing, either.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/14/obamateurism-of-the-day-826/

[thundley4]

Yesterday, I asserted that Barack Obama was channeling Jimmy Carter on foreign policy. As it turns out, I was being unfair … to Jimmy Carter.  How bad does a President have to be to get a correction from one of the worst Presidents of the modern age?  This bad:

There have been few foreign policy stumbles as bad as Barack Obama’s dismissal of the Egyptian alliance in memory, and few backtracks as blatantly embarrassing, either.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/14/obamateurism-of-the-day-826/

Jimmy was right and also wrong.  Egypt was an ally, but since the Muzzie Brohood took over, they aren't. 

[Eupher]

Several Western embassies in the Middle East and Africa in flames.  An American ambassador dies in the line of duty, the first time in 33 years that’s happened.  What does the leader of the free world do?  Travel to … Las Vegas:

President Barack Obama’s Wednesday afternoon speech in Las Vegas is being delayed by about 45 minutes, according to the White House.

Obama had been scheduled to speak at 5:25 p.m. at a campaign rally at the Cashman Center in downtown Las Vegas. He will now deliver his speech at 6:10 p.m., according to an updated schedule released Wednesday morning.

The president was forced to alter his schedule to comment on a Tuesday attack on the American Embassy in Libya that killed four people, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, the White House Press Office said.

Erick Erickson makes the obvious argument about media bias:

Had George Bush gone to Vegas for a fundraiser on a day like today, the nat’l political press would be in an uproar.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) September 12, 2012

This is an OOTD on another level, too.  Incumbent presidents have an advantage in optics — the White House.  Forget for the moment that proper leadership called for the head of state to be seen back in the Oval Office and handling the situation.  That’s exactly the kind of image his campaign should be projecting, too.  Instead, fundraising was a higher priority for the campaign than either providing an example of leadership, or even the appearance of leadership.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/17/obamateurism-of-the-day-827/