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Friday, July 26, 2013

Jonah Goldberg on the Cynicism of the Obama Presidency

In the fifth year of the Obama regime, the President and the press never accept responsibility for what's happening in Washington. Read the Limbaugh Theorem.

That’s not the narrative you usually hear, because for most of Obama’s presidency, the Washington press corps was enthralled with him. It wasn’t until the dawn of his second term that most reporters stopped asking questions like “Can you create a boulder too heavy for you to lift?”

It’s also odd that Obama has pivoted back to the economy when, depending on whose estimates you use, he’s made similar “pivots” on average once every two to four months since he’s been elected. As one wag told The Weekly Standard, “You do that on the basketball court, you get called for traveling.” But the more apt image is of a basketball player with one shoe nailed to the floor, constantly pivoting in a circle.

But it’s not just odd, it’s deeply cynical. For starters, it was the reelected president — not “Washington” — who took his eyes off the economy to exploit a tragedy for new gun controls that would not have prevented the tragedy itself. His unilateral crackdown on carbon emissions isn’t exactly a full-throated effort to create jobs either. When Congress took its eye off the ball by taking up immigration reform, the White House cheered.

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