[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]While the vocal but cloudy apostles of apocalyptic global warming absorbed more damaging broadsides over the weekend, more tellingly President Obama’s increasingly defective character hovered into clearer view.
He is like the girlfriend you finally have decided not to see again because there are too many pimples on her character.
The more you know about Mr. Obama, personally, the more vincible he looks. After 13 months of daily, almost hourly, television exposure, the newest peeled-back layers show him to be almost as flawed as your deadbeat brother-in-law who should be doing time.
He can’t sell an overwhelmingly partisan House and Senate on any of his pet causes, including even a tiny piece of healthcare reform or global warming laws. He has spoken to the country almost three dozen times in a year on healthcare, and he is farther behind the public than the good Mr. Zirgulis is in the City Council race. Mr. Obama keeps giving the same speech — if you heard him, campaigning two or three years ago, you know the rote template.
The No. 1 talking point, how enviably smart he is, has been included in every introduction since he came onto the national scene.
But repetition has been unconvincing. His smarts never have been verified, and the dents in Mr. Obama’s rhetorical fenders are obvious by now to his passionate supporters. His university grades remain under wraps. Turns out his inflated intellect is yawningly average, C to C-minus.
Stand a Little Closer, Please
Ever since Mr. Obama came to wider national attention, the landscape has been dotted with warning signs that there was an abyss between the man and the cleverly constructed image.
His foundational coarseness and discomfort with couth behavior in public were bound to be exposed.
A coming out day arrived last Thursday.
Casually observing the President’s I Am in Charge summit meeting at Blair House, I was sleepily leaning on an elbow until Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander engaged Prof. Obama.
“Mr. President,” was the way Sen. Alexander respectfully opened his statement.
When it was Sen. John McCain’s turn, he said, introductorily, “Mr. President.”
Each time, Mr. Obama acted as if they were old school chums who happened to bump shopping carts at a supermarket instead of showing the respect that minimum civility demands.
“Well, Lamar,” was the disdainful, patronizing way in which President Obama airily began his response. “Lamar?” Where was “Sen. Alexander”? “Mr. Alexander”? Or even “Sir”? As I watched, it felt like a splash of cold, uncouth water across my unsuspecting face.
Hey, Boob, Over Here
Ignoring this sizable social gaffe, for the sake of emphasizing his superiority, Mr. Obama kept repeating his graceless penchant.
Throughout his carefully abstractly described youth, he was a child of privilege. Surely even one who had been ill-bred would have had the grace to correct himself.
He never did. This grating suggestion of lack of training was as carefully planned as were the summit agendas of the Democrats and Republicans.
Simultaneously aloof and as casual as if he were chatting beneath a street-light with one of his lower-register Chicago boys, he answered Sen. McCain with patronizing impatience.
“No, John,” President Obama angrily petulantly snapped back at Mr. McCain. John? This ain’t no dimly lighted billiards parlor, pal.
An affirmative action beneficiary accustomed to delicate kid-glove treatment throughout his life, Mr. Obama toyed with the GOP, declining to show the respect they appropriately accorded to him.
His bracingly overt breach of rudimentary manners — which everyone from Culver City to Washington inherently understands — is a natural outgrowth of his insufferably arrogant personality and the elitism that underpins the whole package.
For those of us who have been single more than once in our lives, you have known girls or boys who were okay as first or second dates. They probably were not marriage-worthy, but you were lonely and she was, too. But the better you came to know her, the more her previously discardable defects became vexing, and then clawingly annoying.
Mr. Obama is that so-so first or second date whose character defects have made a third date unpalatable.
