Saturday, April 3, 2010

Ramblin' Man

I'm known to ramble. Sometimes people wish I'd just shut up.

But I've got nothing on Barack Obama.

But Friday, at a question-and-answer session with workers at a battery factory, a woman told him she was overtaxed, and asked if more taxes was wise.

What did Obama do? He answered. More precisely, he talked. And talked. And talked...
Obama started out feisty. "Well, let's talk about that, because this is an area where there's been just a whole lot of misinformation, and I'm going to have to work hard over the next several months to clean up a lot of the misapprehensions that people have," the president said.

He then spent the next 17 minutes and 12 seconds lulling the crowd into a daze. His discursive answer - more than 2,500 words long -- wandered from topic to topic, including commentary on the deficit, pay-as-you-go rules passed by Congress, Congressional Budget Office reports on Medicare waste, COBRA coverage, the Recovery Act and Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (he referred to this last item by its inside-the-Beltway name, "F-Map"). He talked about the notion of eliminating foreign aid (not worth it, he said). He invoked Warren Buffett, earmarks and the payroll tax that funds Medicare (referring to it, in fluent Washington lingo, as "FICA").
But no one should be surprised. Remember when he said the time for talk is over? He simply meant the time for your talking is over. He hasn't shut up since.

And the left is like that. I've noticed that most of the long, obnoxious comments on blog posts are from those on the left.

They're rude, they're wrong, they're long-winded, and they think they are smart.

Maybe that's it. They think they are so smart, they want to educate the rest of us.

I wish they'd shut the hell up. And just go away.

3 comments:

  1. A couple weeks ago your feed in Google Reader stopped updating, then today I noticed my gravatar ain't showing up on your followers. Have I offended in some way?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nick Cohen noted in his book What's Left? that leftist authors were more likely to be long-winded. His explanation:
    Writers write badly when they have something to hide. Clarity makes their shaky assumptions plain to the readers – and to themselves.

    ReplyDelete
  3. innominatus:

    Don't know why Google Reader wouldn't be updating. Unless you have basilsblog.com instead of basilsblog.net -- I dropped full support for .com a little bit back. It redirects to .net now, rather than support the feed from FeedBurner. That could make the difference.

    About the blogroll, you are and have been in the blogroll. Don't know why you're not seeing it. There is a full alphabetical version showing by default, now. The primary blogroll has been by update date/time.

    ReplyDelete

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