Not What You Think

Ventilator
At the end of a week of frustrating developments for the White House, at home and overseas, President Obama took time on Friday afternoon to vent.

The president revealed a long list of gripes in a nearly 50-minute news conference: a recalcitrant Congress that is refusing to deliver the amount of emergency funding he requested for a border bill; crises in the Middle East and Ukraine that defy quick or simple solutions; even a press corps that neglected to wish him a happy birthday. (New York Times, 8/2/2014)

The Whiner-in-Chief.

Note to Liberals: this is what you get when you give the country an untested politician just so that you can feel good about yourselves.


What He Did
“Well, you know what?” the president said. “What we did worked, and the economy’s better. It shows you that if you stay at it, eventually we make some progress.” (New York Times, 8/2/2014)

Almost six years after Obama takes office unemployment is over 6% and the Federal Reserve is forced to keep interest rates at near 0%. 

And then there is this (also from the New York Times):

Here’s an unusual but extraordinarily graphic description of the current state of the labor market: If you lined up all of the unemployed shoulder-to-shoulder, the queue of people looking for work would stretch all the way from New York out past San Francisco. (Justin Wolfers, New York Times, 8/1/2014)


Folksy
"We did a whole lot of things that were right [after 9/11], but we tortured some folks," Mr. Obama said at a news conference Friday. (Wall Street Journal, 8/2/2014)

And, to be clear, by "folks" Obama means violent Muslim terrorists committed to the destruction of America and who wantonly slaughter innocents. Those "folks."


Devotion
...the Democratic Party’s activist core is incurably devoted to identity politics — the proposition that people are whatever their gender is (or their race or ethnicity or sexual orientation or whatever seems stupendously important at the moment). (George Will, Washington Post, 8/1/2014)

Will sums up the guiding principle of Liberals.


Generally
When as respected and scrupulously independent a national security expert as David Ignatius calls Kerry’s intervention a blunder, you know this is not partisan carping from the usual suspects. This is general amazement at Kerry’s cluelessness. (Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, 8/1/2014)

Krauthammer manages to eviscerate both John Kerry and fellow WaPo opinion writer Ignatius in two sentences!