To balance the media’s hosannas over The One’s first 100 days (you know, the days that he began to remake the world, before he took a day of rest), the folks at National Review give their more balanced critiques.
Newt Gingrich lauds President Obama’s success in being so successful in his first 100 days of doing such bad things to expand the power of the federal government. Example: “President Obama has transformed the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) into giant engines of unsupervised spending. Together, they’ve spent the equivalent of the entire federal budget for 2007, without having to disclose where the money went.”
Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald (the paper not owned by the N.Y. Times) has a round-up of reactions. Particularly good are Don Surber’s collection of “100 Days, 100 Mistakes” and the similarly named version by The New York Post. Surber’s, especially, are wonderful reminders of the mistakes, hilarious and otherwise, that this greatest intellect and President has made. Slate continues to run a “Bushism of the Day” post. I read articles about how difficult Obama is as a target for jokes by comics. The man is a walking parody at least as much as W. The press finds no humor there because they don’t want to ridicule “their” guy, in whose success they are so invested. Remember Chris Matthews? If W or Dan Quayle or Gerald Ford had committed these various inanities and bumblings, there would have been coverage and comic material galore.
For some scary numbers on the first 100 days, see this AP link, of all things.
Americans are treated to a constant lover’s concerto about Obama’s tremendous approval ratings. Overall, he’s doing fine for this stage of the term, though not as well as some. But this is interesting parsing of the polling data, using “strong” approval and disapproval numbers. For those most committed, the opinions on The One are close, within the margin of error.
“The facts of life are conservative.” - Margaret Thatcher
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