By SHERMAN FREDERICK ADVERTISING At the start of the cruise, Capt. Barack Obama looked stellar. He had no experience but, by God, he looked good in a uniform. And he promised us that if we would let him run the
By SHERMAN FREDERICK
At the start of the cruise, Capt. Barack Obama looked stellar. He had no experience but, by God, he looked good in a uniform.
And he promised us that if we would let him run the ship, he could navigate through our economic straits of woe.
Now, after a harrowing 36-month ride, Capt. Obama sounds suspiciously like that ship captain who ran his vessel aground in Italy while showing off for his girlfriend.
That rock wasn’t supposed to be there! I slipped and fell into a lifeboat! I didn’t understand how hard the rocks were! Bush put those rocks there!
Pathetic, really. Under his sole command of the ship, this is the result: higher unemployment, deficits not cut in half, as promised, but doubled with more debt coming.
For those inclined to cut the president slack at this point, I’ll give you 30 seconds to shout out a big, Lucille Ball “waaaa” in lament of the president’s lame excuses. You deserve at least that.
Now, let’s buck up and get real.
The last thing Americans want to hear the captain admitting he’s in over his head.
Yet that’s fundamentally what President Obama did last week in the studio at WAGA-TV in Atlanta.
An interviewer described in the news as a “sympathetic reporter” (what a shock) said he worried about the president getting “pelted in the media” for not cutting the deficit in half in his first term, as he promised.
The president responded thusly, and please, ladies and gentlemen, this is not a shipboard drill. This is how our dear leader acquitted himself:
“Well, we’re not there because this recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of us realized.
“Everybody who is out there back in 2009, if you look back what their estimates were in terms of how many jobs had been lost, how bad the economy had contracted when I took office, everybody had underestimated it. People thought that the economy contracted 3 percent. It turns it was close to 9 percent. We lost 8 million jobs just in a year’s span, about half a year before I took office and about a half a year after I took office,” he said.
“So, the die had been cast, a lot of us didn’t understand how bad it was going to get. That increases the deficit because less tax revenues come in and it means more people are getting unemployment insurance, we’re helping states more so they don’t (let go) teachers, etc. The key, though, is that we’re setting ourselves on a path so that we can get our debt under control.”
Lordy, lordy. That’s a confidence builder, isn’t it?
Let us not forget that candidate Obama spent all of 2008 telling us over and over and over again that we were headed straight to the Great Depression II unless we hired him to fix the economy.
He said it was going to be hard, but if we sacrificed and didn’t run off to Las Vegas and gamble away the kids’ college fund, he’d get us through.
In 2009, we gave him everything he said he needed. Ditto in 2010. In 2011 we waited.
Now it is 2012. And all he’s got is: “This recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of us realized. … (We) didn’t understand how bad it was going to get ”
I’m sorry, captain, that doesn’t cut it. If you want stay on the bridge, you’re going to have to explain yourself better than that Italian captain.
The economy remains on the rocks. The captain doesn’t know what time it is. SOS!
Sherman Frederick, former publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, writes a column for Stephens Media.
