Thug Life On Pennsylvania Avenue
by digby
So Obama’s a “thug” now. But unlike Vladimir Putin who’s good at being a thug he’s not very effective, which makes it even worse. (Can’t “those people” do anything right?)
The right’s been waiting for the opportunity to use that term since Obama entered the presidential race but until he carjacked BP and shook it down for 20 billion, he hadn’t given them the opportunity. Up to that point, as Greg Sargent pointed out last week, he was Obambi:
Here, for instance, is The Post’s Michael Gerson:
The setting of the Oval Office creates an expectation of decisive executive action. It recalls memories of President Dwight Eisenhower dispatching federal troops to Little Rock or President John F. Kennedy announcing the naval “quarantine” of Cuba. This speech will not be confused with those precedents. Obama urges others to take action, kibitzes with corporate executives, shifts some government personnel and signals the start of a review process. A crisis is met with a study. The action verbs in this speech have somehow gone missing. It is all rather limp and weak.
Gerson, of course, worked for a president who swaggered decisively off the stage of history with some of the limpest approval ratings ever. And here’s Maureen Dowd, cattily mocking Obama because he recently acknowledged to Gulf residents that there are limits to his own power, which Dowd characterizes as so much whining:
“Even though I’m president of the United States, my power is not limitless,” Obama, who has forced himself to ingest a load of gulf crab cakes, shrimp and crawfish tails, whinged to Grand Isle, La., residents on Friday. “So I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t suck it up with a straw.”
See, Obama had to force himself to eat a plate of food in order to prove his heartiness. Get it?
That was last week. Now he’s Barry “Tupac” Obama, the Muslim gangbanger, fo shizzle.
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