Stumble It!
"Intuition 3" from Xen Mode Custom Art. See also our own similarly suggestive Photoshopped image of cauliflower as glacial landscape.
If the business of America is business, sagging souvenir sales of Obama vs Bush t-shirts and mugs may be an encouraging sign of a changing politico-cultural climate:
The cheery image of former President George W. Bush appeared on a billboard in Minnesota earlier this month, next to the words, "Miss me yet?" It appears a lot of people think it's a fair question.
The online store CafePress saw a spike in demand for items featuring the same image as the billboard, the New York Daily News reports. Ten "Miss Me Yet?" items were on the company's list of its top-selling designs, CafePress spokeswoman Jenna Martin told the Daily News.
"There were no Obama-themed designs on the list," she said.
Not that most of us on the right side of the aisle would really want GW — with his own big-government baggage and lingering if unfair aftereffects of Bush Derangement Syndrome polluting the political waters — back in the White House, but Dubya had what Michael Barone calls "one crucial ingredient, intuition":
Great leaders have it, though it sometimes fails; failed leaders don't, though their plans sometimes succeed …
Barack Obama, so far seems to belong in the second category. Like everyone who gets elected president, he entered office brimming with confidence, convinced he could end the hostility of the Iranian mullahs, Islamist terrorists, the leaders of China and Russia, and the likes of Hugo Chavez. At least so far, that confidence has proved to be dreamy …
Obama's two predecessors also suffered from failures of intuition. Bill Clinton recovered and got deserved credit for the 1996 welfare reform and the 1997 balanced-budget deal. George W. Bush recovered and deserves credit (though Joe Biden is claiming it now) for the success of the Iraq surge strategy.
Obama "so far seems" to lack intuition? Barone is more generous than we are inclined to be. You either have it or you don't. With his tin-eared failure to respond to the Tea Party/Brown Revolution tsunami or understand average citizens' "bitter clinging" to our Shining-City belief in American exceptionalism, the current occupant of the Oval Office has proven to us again and again that he just doesn't get it. Hillary herself said it best in the heat of primary season two years back: "Americans don't need a president who looks down on them."
It takes quite a bit to get the majority of the people to really think about what is truly happening. 9/11 concentrated their thoughts, and GW was able to use forcefull means to combat our enemies. However, he had to use language that was not too offensive to the educated class. As far as the role of governmnent interference in our lives, the majority was not giving it much thought, and GW's intuition told him he must not make an issue of trying to severely limit it if he wished to retain a compromise with the liberals. Obama got the majority thinking. It looks like the majority is now awake.
Posted by: goomp | February 22, 2010 at 09:11 AM
Our current Oval Office occupant is utterly deaf to the voice of We the People and an arrogant nincompoop to boot. There is no redeeming quality to the man, other than the fact that he is transparently anti-American and utterly unelectable to a second term.
Posted by: Gayle Miller | February 22, 2010 at 09:15 AM