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Taunting
Obama as Barney Fife
by John Ransom
December 1, 2011
Former
GOP presidential aspirant,
Governor Tim Pawlenty, on Wednesday took up my call from last week of
the
president as Mr. Chicken, calling Obama the “Barney Fife of presidents.”
Hollywood
actor Don Knotts was famous
as the do-nothing deputy Barney Fife in the Andy Griffith Show. Fife,
like
Obama, was all mouth and no action; brave and boisterous until action
was
called for and then timid and fearful. Knotts also starred as the
famously
fearful Mr. Chicken- actually the character he played was named Luther
Heggs-
in the juvenile movie The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.
“The
former Minnesota governor,” says
CBS News, “who dropped his bid for the White House in August and
endorsed
[Mitt] Romney in September, went on to call the president ‘stumbling,
bumbling,
[and] ineffective’ and compared him to former President Jimmy Carter.”
Except,
Carter rarely hesitated in
making decisons.
I
don’t know how Jimmy would have
decided every question Obama has faced; probably wrongly, but he would
have
been at least boldly wrong.
Obama
can’t even get basic President
101 questions right, like approving the XL Keystone Pipeline, which
would
create hundreds of thousands of high-paying American jobs without
Congress
having to spend a dime.
Obama’s
on record as neither for the
pipeline or against it. He thinks American jobs ought to wait until
after his
election.
And
with that attitude, job
creation is guaranteed to wait until then
As
the president continues his Occupy
Brain Space reelection campaign designed to get Americans bickering
amongst
each other, the
Senate Republicans on
Wednesday pushed for an early decision on the XL Pipeline by Obama,
which if
started, would contribute 20,000 jobs in the US right away, plus add
hundreds
of thousands of ancillary jobs.
The
bill contemplated by Senate
Republicans would force Obama to make a decision on the pipeline within
60
days.
“Senate
Republicans are pushing for an
expedited decision on the Keystone XL Pipeline permit, proposing on
Wednesday a
bill that would require the secretary of state to grant a permit for
the
controversial project within 60 days,” reports CBS News, “unless
President
Obama were to publicly determine that the pipeline is “not in the
national
interest” before then.”
Look
for Obama to try to wiggle out of
either a yes or no answer on the pipeline.
A
“go’ decision on the pipeline could
ultimately supply about a million barrels of Canadian oil to the US per
day and
400,000 US jobs, most of them almost immediately. But instead, the
president,
who has been railing against Congress for not passing another expensive
jobs
bill, just killed 400,000 American jobs, while making sure the price of
gas
stays high for its citizens.
And
despite everything the Obama
administration has done to slow down domestic development of oil and
gas
resources, the oil and gas sector is one of the fastest growing job
markets in
a very anemic job market. While other sectors are shedding jobs, oil
and gas is
hot.
“The
six fastest-growing jobs for
2010-11,” according to Economic Modeling Specialists Inc’s (EMSI)
latest
quarterly employment data, “are related to oil and gas extraction. This
includes service unit operators, derrick operators, rotary drill
operators, and
roustabouts. Each is expected to grow anywhere from 9% to 11% through
this
year, in an otherwise mostly stagnant economy.”
Imagine
what would happen if we could
get Obama to cooperate with creating jobs just a little bit.
The
State Department had already
issued an approval for the XL Keystone project back in August and it
was just
waiting on Obama’s desk for action when the rpesident took his usual
route of
doing nothing instead. He pigeonholed the approval of the pipeline for
at least
the next year until after the 2012 election.
Action
is something Obama isn’t very
good at.
Talking
and squawking? Obama’s your
guy.
But
he’s not an “Action This Day” type
of leader, at least not until they make robotic teleprompters in
Obama’s shoe
size.
Because,
until then, expect Obama to
be both timid and wrong.
And
people need to start apologizing
to Jimmy Carter for the comparisons to Obama.
Really.
Obama’s
that bad.
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