Admittedly B.O. did not have foreign relations experience prior to being elected POTUS. IMHO, he's done a fair job...got rid of Bin Laden and so many of his highly placed henchmen that Al Qaida is seriously threatened, has managed his limited foreign presence well enough to not enrage a lot of the world's developed contries while NOT unfairly enriching those locations where the Birthplace theorists would have expected had he harbored preconceived generosity toward those places, has even managed fairly well to convince our neighbors to the south (which are a much more imminent threat than those halfway around the world, IMHO) that we are serious about stemming the tide of illegal immigrants across our southern border.
I watch Charlie Rose on occasion...he often prefaces probing questions with such statements, then when they answer he seems to know waaaay more than he admitted before the question. Brokaw was always one of my favorite broadcast journalists, simply because of his gravely voice...what incredible resonance! The only other "orator" I can remember whose speech was as riveting was Senator Everett Dirkson (now, how many of you can remember him????).
So B.O. relies on a teleprompter...not sure how that relates to his ability to manage the day-to-day duties of POTUS. If we wanted a president who could speak for hours without even checking their notes, much less a teleprompter, we should have run Hillary Clinton. She is incredible, I watched her speak for two hours once without ever looking down or at a prompter, the most coherent speech I have ever heard, with a review of the contents at the end that really drove home the interconnections between the political entities that were the topic of discussion. I was in awe, and not b/c of her notoriety....if McCain could have done the same thing I would have been in awe of him, too.....Palin, we all know, had trouble answering a simple question without adding a reference to the fact that Russia is visible from her back porch....OK, she did get better as the race went on, but never got good at it, IMHO, and my B.A. degree is in radio/tv production, so I know a thing or two about how things work in the media.
Bob, sarcasm and inuendo are entertaining, but not persuasive. We use them to intersperse humorous breaks into our speech every day, how would you like to be judged by only those utterances? I doubt you would like it, so why to use that technique to slur the proficiency of anyone who is in public office. Aren't you much more faceted than what those forms of subliminal semantics would indicate? Rhetorical question....I know you are. Don't you suppose B.O., McCain, (hell, I'll even include Pelosi here in hopes I get to eat some crow one day...it will be a fine day when she convinces me she is anything more than a high-grade moron, but I would be glad for that day and would gladly choke down that stringy blackbird), Biden, etc are deserving of not being pigeonholed on the basis of a few such utterances?
Cheers, Bob! I would love to hear what YOUR thoughts are, not statistics, not the thoughts of the Drudge Report or Charlie Rose or Tom Brokaw, what you believe and why you think you are right to believe those things. You notice I use IMHO in my posts a lot....almost always after I express an opinion or a belief, I am not so egocentric as to think all of my beliefs are correct just because they are mine, would not expect you to be so inclined either.
Doug
