In the old days, Medicine Shows rattled along the back roads of rural America dispensing patent medicines that cured, well, everything. The Medicine Man, invariably called Professor, was a talented showman and raconteur. He lectured about his miraculous elixir, mixing grandiose claims with folksy anecdotes.
At some point during the show, one of the rubes in the audience would step forward—sometimes limp forward—and challenge the Professor’s claims.
The Professor would dole out a precious teaspoon of his miraculous cure, usually rot-gut whiskey mixed with molasses.
The rube would gulp it down.
And poof.
The rube was was cured.
Of course, the afflicted rube was a plant, in on the con.
Everyone knew that the medicine man was a fraud, but people wanted to believe. They wanted to believe that this salesman was different, that this cure really worked.
Last night, watching President Barack Hussein Obama’s press conference, I felt thrust back in time to the con men of the medicine shows. Obama is more polished than the quacks of old, but he’s just another snake oil salesman.
And he’s got his confederates in the audience: The Press.
Except for ABC’s Jake Tapper, who might be the only only honest journalist in the Washington press corps.
Obama is selling a fantasy: He will cut costs and improve health care.
How?
He’ll appoint an independent commission—translation: reliable political hacks—and cut waste.
Because that’s what government does so well, cut waste.
So much for details.
The oily barker always ended his show with a dynamic flourish, something to put the audience in a buying mood, most often a Hoochie-Coochie girl “from the mysterious East” who swayed her hips while playing a ukulele.
Trust me, at the time this was considered unbelievably sexy.
Anyway, Obama also ended his show with a flourish. Lacking facts about the incident, Obama declared that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly,” thus falling back on the vulgar race hustling of his mentor Jeremiah Wright.
This not so subtle hint that America is still institutionally racist should, Obama and his cynical handlers believe, put the American public in a buying mood.
The question is: are the American people rubes?
Please take a moment to sign this petition.
Update: Joshua Pundit directs our attention to Obama’s, um, truth disability.
Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.
12 Comments
From this photo we could understand how the peoples faced the lack of medicine.
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Miranda:
I think you’re right, it’s just that first they told us the door was jammed, which maybe I could accept, but then they said he lost the key or he was locked out.
But you know what, the president is making such a buffoon out of himself over this that it doesn’t matter if it was staged or not.
This kind of stuff really angers fair-minded Americans and Obama’s poll numbers are starting to really fall. He’s below 50% for the first time as president in today’s Rasmussen Poll. Do yourself a favor and visit Rasmussenreports.com every day. This is the guy who predicted, the ONLY GUY by the way, the Nov. election to the exact percentage point. He’s also a helpful guest to my show.
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Jake,
Heh. I figured that if one of the pre-eminent black intellectuals would pull a stunt like this it would be Cornell West! Gates, at least in the past, has been less of a showman than West. (Why isn’t Thomas Sowell considered one of the pre-eminent black intellectuals in the country.)
I’m not going to be so critical of the President, after all he was elected despite the fact that 90% of all white voted for the white candidate despite his superior credentials last November. Oh, wait. Never mind.
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Dear Jake: I have one small disagreement with your posting. It IS possible to come back from vacation and have problems with your door. It happened to me, in winter, not in Summer. It was cold, wet, damp winder weather. For two weeks, nobody opened or closed the door. When I came back, I had no trouble OPENING it, but either the door or the doorjamb was swollen and I couldn’t get it SHUT.
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I had Obama in the P.I.P. during the baseball game and noticed he was taking a long time for each answer. For someone that was in the Senate less than 4 years he knows how to filibuster a press conference better than any other president in my memory. And he never answered any questions.
The rubes are the democrats in Congress that think this reform is what we need.
Unfortunately they are taking money from our wallets to buy the magical elixer. How many aspirins did you need after watching the entire PC?
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I watched the press conference and was absolutely amazed – amazed that someone like this could actually be our President. He lied with such audacity, totally at ease with his dishonesty, and he knew that people knew he was lying and it bothered him not at all, so convinced that he can get by without being called to account.
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I could not watch Obama’s pronouncements for too long just as I could not stand most of the speeches of earlier presidents that were filled with sound bytes and boilerplate. Proves yet again (and we will never learn) that a politician is a politician is a politician, left or right, dark or light. We need to take the future of this country in our own hands and need to march on Washington to oppose every single politician of every stripe.
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I can’t even watch the news or read it online, Robert–I am in awe of you. My head would have exploded one minute into the “show”.
Jake, I agree about Gates. The story keeps changing. You should see how academia is spinning this one; it’s sickening.
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Robert,
As to your closing question:
I am desperately afraid that the answer
may well be; yes, the American people,by
and large, are indeed rubes.
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I am convinced the Henry Gates incident was a stunt here’s why:
First we’re told the door was “jammed”… whic is kind of hard to believe that someone would leave for a week to find his door stuck so much that a grown man couldn’t bust it down.
Then we were told he locked himself out… a more plausible story, if it hadn’t been the SECOND story we head.
Third, the first thing Gates does when the cops come to the house asking if he needs help is to go into a tirade… extremely rehearsed if you ask me.
Also, I’m supposed to believe that in Cambridge, 1000% liberal through and through, one of Gates’ neighbors doesn’t know who he is and is so shocked to see a black man trying to get a door open that they call the cops before going over and asking themselves? I’m supposed to believe that Gates’ neighbors don’t know him? Really?
Finally, the whole stunt takes place on the very week that he and his colleagues are to appear in CNN’s terribly-rated, but still much ballyhoed, “Black in America 2″ series with Soledad Prison O’Brien, (she’s named after a prison by the way, kinda makes you wonder if her parents knew that in the future CNN viewers would be imprisoned by her lack of talent), a FORMER student of Gates at Harvard!
Gates and his race hucksters know that Obama’s election, however misguided, puts their entire, ahem, scholarship out of business. They NEED incidents like this one to keep it going, in case anothr Larry Summers gets to be president of Harvard and has the gall to actually ask what they Hell their “scholarship” is exactly. For doing just that, Summers was run out of Cambridge, but he had a very good point.
Expect former Harvard African American Studies scholar Cornell West to have a similar incident soon at Princeton, or at a train station, or some such place.
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Bill:
I considered it my duty as a blogger to sit through the whole charade.
Oh, the things I do for my audience.
A majority of the MSM are no longer independent; they are government collaborators, in short, an unofficial branch of the Obama government.
When the press is no longer free, Democracy becomes an annoying after thought.
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Well, I watched 10 minutes and couldn’t take it anymore. The “press corp” is nothing more than sycophants – and when asked even a moderately challenging question, B.O. would then lunch into a 5 minute – or more – speech about – nothing. At least nothing related to the question.
Question: Why is this called “reform”?
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