Redstate…
Barack Obama and the Rise of Ineptocracy
By streiff
September 6th, 2012 

Bob Woodward is out with a new book, called “The Price of Politics.”  The first excerpts appeared today as Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democrat Party nomination for president. Woodward makes the best case possible as to why Barack Obama should be denied a second term. 

As it turns out the fiasco of a vagina-based convention that denied God three times before the cock crowed — a convention that featured an adulterer and callous killer as its hero on the first night and an adulterous serial sexual predator as the hero on its second to prove just how serious they are about taking care of women — is really a fit metaphor for Obama’s Administration. The DNC (or is it D&C) convention in Charlotte (bonus question: what is the airport code for Charlotte, NC) is a gathering of ineptocrats. Obama’s Administration shows what happens when you put ineptocrats in charge of anything more complicated than a two-car funeral procession. 

Woodward had turned out a series of these tick-tock chronicles on the inner workings of the White House over the decades. Some have been rather good, some, like when he claimed to have presumably donned a ninja outfit and sneaked into Bethesda Naval Hospital to interview a comatose and dying Bill Casey are ridiculous and self-beclowning. Woodward does adhere to the Novak principle in his books: there are only two types of people, sources and targets. In his latest the sources are plentiful and the target rather large, dull-witted, and lumbering. It is sort of like shooting cows in a barrel.

The highlights: 

Barack Obama was relevant to the financial negotiations that prevented a US debt default. 

As the nation’s leaders raced to avert a default that could have shattered the financial markets’ confidence and imperiled the world’s economy, Obama convened an urgent meeting with top congressional leaders in the White House. According to Woodward, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) pointedly told the president that the lawmakers were working on a plan and wouldn’t negotiate with him. 

Obama, surprised, told Boehner and the others that they could not exclude him from the process, Woodward reports. “I’ve got to sign this bill,” he is quoted as saying. 

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) then said the four leaders wanted to speak privately, asking Obama to leave a meeting he had called “in his own house,” in Woodward’s words. The president, fuming, agreed to let them talk. “This was it,” Woodward writes. “Congress was taking over.” 

Barack Obama was on top of all the details. 

Congress’s reemergence as a political force is one of the book’s underlying themes. For decades, Capitol Hill has been ceding influence and authority to the White House, especially to presidents who were bent on expanding the powers of the executive branch. In Woodward’s account, the balance of power has shifted at least temporarily back to the legislative branch during the past two years, aided by the Obama administration’s failure to nurture the alliances that it needed to offset the GOP’s huge victory in the 2010 midterm elections. The Republicans took control of the House, claiming 63 new seats, the largest turnover since the 1930s. 

The book points out that the administration seemed unprepared for the road ahead, as demonstrated on election night in 2010. “Protocol dictated that the president make a congratulatory call to Boehner,” Woodward writes. “The trouble was, nobody in the White House had thought to get a phone number.” 

Barack Obama is respected by his adversaries. 

Boehner sized up his adversary during one of his early private meetings with Obama, telling Woodward: “I just started chuckling to myself. Because all you need to know about the differences between the president and myself is that I’m sitting there smoking a cigarette, drinking merlot, and I look across the table and there is the president of the United States drinking iced tea and chomping on Nicorette,” the gum for smokers trying to break their habit. 

Barack Obama is respected by his allies. 

Read the rest of the article at Redstate