Monday, August 15, 2011

Obama's new scapegoat: "Bad Luck"

...it's the plaintive wail of the loser, the one who never got the glory that was destined for him, and is bitter towards those who did, regardless of the price they paid in blood, sweat ,tears, and toil.

So it is no surprise that Barack Obama would have eventually turned to the weakest of all excuses for failure.  The only surprise is that he hid behind it so soon - usually, it is after the fall, in retrospect, when our underachiever looks around him, and realizing there is no one else he can credibly blame but himself, that he crawls into the cocoon of "bad luck", where his ego remains blameless for what debacles have ensued.  That Obama has reached for it so early makes me wonder what he has realized about himself, and the direction he is taking the country.

So here are the lies the president is reduced to telling himself, and the nation:

"We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again," Obama told a crowd in Decorah, Iowa. "But over the last six months we've had a run of bad luck." Obama listed three events overseas -- the Arab Spring uprisings, the tsunami in Japan, and the European debt crises -- which set the economy back.

Bush lost New York City and New Orleans to war and nature within a space of a few years. Don't recollect George W. Bush complaining much about his run of luck, for good or ill. Different men, I suppose...

And of course, there is this little bit than Glenn Reynolds likes to post now and again, about luck a quote from Robert Heinlein:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.


This is known as “bad luck.”

No comments: