Obama's Stimulus Package

Several things caused me to scratch my head at my fellow citizen's - not to mention the Press Corp's - continuing ability to suspend disbelief after listening to President Obama's "press conference" last night. The wallowing obeisance of the press, his so called inquisitors, was a sight to behold. But that George W or any Republican president ever got such a suckup. Obama's violations of Presidential press conference etiquette were many, and blatant. The sins of The White House Press Corp were manifold:

- There were no multi-part questions (a staple of Bush inquisitions) to speak of, wherein the answer to the first part must necessarily indict the answerer by the time he got to part two.

- There were no indignant follow ups either by the original interlocutor or anybody else.

- There were no "have you stopped beating your wife" premises as prelude to any substantive question.

- There was no indignation when Obama outright ignored many of the questions put to him, regurgitating boilerplate instead. Bill O'Reilly and former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer were all gushy about Obama's "mastery". Me? I simply saw the same manically overscripted automaton I've been watching for two years now.

- There was not a whit of incredulity as to some of Obama's more fantastical statements, such as "there is not one ounce of pork in this bill", or, that all Republicans - who are numerically incapable of having any impact on the bill at all - are sabotaging his stimulus package, or that his bill "would create or save up to 4 million jobs". Interesting to note that on that last, this is his fourth clarification, having over the past month gone from "new jobs" to "saved jobs", and from "2.5 million" to "4 million".

It really is easy to demonstrate your "mastery" of communications when not only sychophantic press, but also the likes of Bill O'Reilly fail to document how such whoppers have evolved.

- Finally, there was no Helen Thomas character assassination. Too bad. It was one of the things I so very looked forward to in her questions to Presidents all the way back to Ronald Reagan.

In one astounding Foot In Mouth moment, Obama - in portraying the "catastrophe" that our current economic troubles will become unless his stimulus bill is passed - direly warned us that he was not so concerned about the 3.6 million jobs lost since the recession started last year; no, he was most concerned that 80% of those losses had occurred "in the past three months", suggesting that the crisis is accelerating.

In other words, things have only really started going to hell since he won the election. There's more where this came from. The Stock Market didn't really start tanking until - in the last month of the campaign - it was apparent that Obama had the election won. Using Obama's own methodology, a reasonable person might conclude that Democrats taking power has destroyed the economy.

Far be it from a partisan like myself not to draw those conclusions. I'm just not convinced that those are the kinds of comparisons he wants to continue to make to the faithful, though.