Fine Obama Whine

In 2001 I was actually kind of glad that W won the election. How’s that for a crazy opening statement? It’s true. I was so sick and tired of the previous eight years of the constant bitching and whining by the Republicans about the Clinton administration, I thought that if Gore gets elected the whining would ramp up to such a horrible pitch that my head might literally explode. What a nasty mess that would be! Plus, I thought, how bad can W be? I mean the country is in pretty good shape, there’s a budget surplus for the first time since JFK, plenty of jobs, no wars. It could work, right?

Well for the first nine months every thing was pretty much ok. W looked like he was shaping up to be a pretty mediocre president, not a whole lot for either side to go nuts about. I had read “Fortunate Son” by J Hatfield so I figured he wasn’t going to be any kind of visionary or otherwise spectacular leader (as Al Franken said, “We elected the only guy in Texas who couldn’t find oil.”).

That didn’t matter much because the important thing is that the whining had stopped. Whew! My head did not explode and there would be no horrible bloody mess for my wife to clean up. As long as he didn’t get caught getting a bj in the oval office, I figured that the opposing ideological factions that existed in this country could return to a state of civility. You know, the kind where everybody works for the greater good.

We had taken a trip to Europe in April of that year and nearly every European we talked to thought we had shot ourselves in the foot as a country. “Probably” I said, “But listen… no whining.” Towards the end of our trip, on May 8th, after a long day of driving, we were watching euro TV in our provincial motel room and the only sound was cheering. Channel after euro channel of parades and re-enactments of American-loving V-E Day celebrations. Cheering is way nicer than whining.

Then of course 9/11 happened and for about ten minutes we were a country united against a common enemy. And then W stepped up from mediocrity and invaded the wrong country, fought a half-assed war in the right country, let Bin-Laden get away, gave sweetheart no-bid contracts to big oil companies, appointed incompetent cronies, ignored a hurricane, presided over the worst recession since the depression, and the list went on and on.

But the whining noise had already begun. First it was a cry of righteous anger about how our civil rights were being dismantled, habeas corpus being thrown out, lives being sacrificed, money being wasted, our leaders being caught lying to us on a mass scale. Soon however, those cries were drowned out by even more whining.

Question the President? That’s treasonous whaaa, whaaa. I want freedom fries whaa. The French won’t help us whaa, whaa. Either you’re with us or agin’ us whaa, whaa. It’s all Clinton’s fault whaa, whaa…
The pressure in my head began to build. I began researching places to live that had no access to media, TV, Internet, or other people. A cave in the Amazon jungle was starting to look pretty attractive.

I some how managed to survive the cacophonous noise that was very much like scraping your teeth along a chalkboard while sticking your hand into an commercial blender, all the way until 2008.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a new guy sprang onto the scene! A guy who was not a W or a W clone. He was an O as in hero, as in super hero. The O man was here to save the day!
He came from on high to rescue us from the evils, the villains, the Cheneys, the seventh circle of hell, and bring us all back onto the paths of righteousness.

This guy had it all. He was smart, honest, and handsome. He could speak in whole sentences. He could use multi-syllable words. He was a constutional scholar. He was altruistic yet pragmatic. I’ve got to vote for this guy I thought, he’s like a cross between JFK, Billy DeWilliams, and Gandhi!

Sadly, it wasn’t even three months after the inauguration when the shrill cries of contempt rose up like a chainsaw symphony. Oh the horrors! No birth certificate whaa, whaa! Not really American whaa, whaa! Death panels whaa, whaa. We want our country back whaa, whaa. He reads a teleprompter. He’s a grandma- and baby-killing Nazi-communist who wants to run General Motors whaa, whaa, whaa, whaa haaaa haaaa…

And if that wasn’t enough to make my ears bleed, the whining is now starting to come in stereo. Not just satisfied to perforate my right eardrum, the noise is also assaulting my left side. O is trying to do too much too soon whaa, whaa. He got the wrong kind of dog, he swatted a fly whaa, whaa. He hasn’t done anything, he hasn’t fixed eight years of stupid overnight whaa, whaa.

He can’t walk on water, he’s just a mere mortal human whaa, whaa, whaa!!!

Since Obamaman is less than a year into his term, I’m going to give him some room to work. He may not be Gandhi/Batman incarnate, but if you look at his record and the circumstances surrounding his ascension to the throne, he’s really done quite a lot.
I also think that the big O is working his strategy at a deliberate pace designed to have long-term success, and not just a quick fix.

Whether or not his policies work, there is still the danger that the whining will reach the kind of fever pitch that will make dogs howl and heads explode.

So I’m going to try to ride it out. But just in case, I’ll spread a tarp over the furniture and put earmuffs on the dogs.

Rush, Barnum, and The Rain Man

So by now you’ve probably seen or heard about Rush Limbaugh’s unrestricted 30-minute rant about President Obama on that paragon of news virtue, Fox News, this past Sunday.

And if you’re anything but a ditto head, you’re probably asking yourself (or anyone else within earshot) “What qualifies a thrice divorced, draft dodging college dropout, who’s never had a job in his life that took place outside of a radio booth, to pass judgment on the President of the United States?”

Actually, that’s the question I ask every time I hear an utterance from the great El Rushbo.

But the REAL question is why do we care? Because he’s a genius at making us care.

The fact Rush has little or no formal education has nothing to do with the phenomenon he has become, and rather than let the idea that he has no diversity in his work or life experiences be a hindrance, he has leveraged his ignorance to his great advantage. It makes it much easier for him to believe the things that he says. If he believes it, his audience believes it.

Witness Hannity and Beck who are also self- taught disc jockeys made good with cleverly crafted niche opinions. They don’t got to show you no stinking degrees. To Hannity’s credit, he does have carpentry experience he could fall back on.

No, qualification has no relevance here in the blurry lined world of punditry, news and entertainment. And certainly marital success has no place concerning ones expertise in politics, business, or opinion, (unless of course one is a marriage counselor or something).

Speaking of Rush’s three failed marriages, I’ve heard the term “beard” bandied about on the net quite a bit lately, which seems interesting given his alleged homophobia. But I digress. (Did you see what I just did there? I just inserted a baseless innuendo!)

The point is, Rush is quite a lot like another great American, PT Barnum. No, I’m not referring to the obvious, shopworn maxim “There’s a sucker born every minute.” I’m talking about the genius of Barnum’s ability to find a need and fill it, his ability to package himself as commerce dictated, and the gift of being the kind of self promoter that only comes along every hundred years or so.

That my friends is what it takes to be able to say whatever you want, about whomever you want, and ultimately getting a four hundred million dollar contract to do it. One must give the devil his due.

But… on second thought, owing to the fact that PT Barnum had a much more rounded career (Did you know that Barnum was elected to a two year term as a Connecticut legislator and the mayor of Bridgeport?), I think a comparison to the titular movie character Rain Man is far more apropos. If you recall, in the film Dustin Hoffman’s character was an idiot savant who lived in a world of his own. He was totally incapable in every aspect of his life except one thing. He was a genius at card counting. He had the gift of memorizing and manipulating any card deck in any casino.

Likewise Rush is a genius at only one thing: making us think about him. It doesn’t matter if we love him or hate him, as long as we’re thinking of him, he’s making the big money.

It doesn’t matter if we believe in him or care about his ideology. It doesn’t matter what we think of his qualifications, his ethics or his humanity. It really doesn’t matter that Rush probably doesn’t give a flying crap about what his audience thinks or feels about anything.

What matters is that Rush has the gift of manipulating an audience. That’s the gift that counts above all else when you live in a world where laissez-faire capitalism is the be-all and end-all of life.

All right, there is one other thing that matters… motivation.

People who are altruistic or at least have real ideological beliefs (whether I like them or not) take risks and run for office.

People who don’t, have radio shows…