C'mon, you've seen it - a team with multiple injuries calls up some lower minor-league ballplayers to fill some holes for 15 days or so, and sure, you might get a glimpse at some young talent, but in general you see players who are not ready to play the game at the big league level yet. Sometimes, too, the team will call up one of those 28 year old AAA players, high round draft picks who while showing aptitude at the lower levels, simply cannot compete in the majors, where the game moves at a much, much faster speed in front of howling crowds and a ravenous media.
That's who Barack Obama is, incidentally. A career minor leaguer who shows flashes of talent but doesn't have what it takes to play in the bigs. Alas, lackluster scouting by folks who wanted him to succeed pushed him into a level where he was sure to fail...
Well, that's my "AA/AAA" analogy. I like John Podhoretz's rant in the New York Post best, though:
I don't think any president has ever said anything quite as depressing as the line Barack Obama delivered yesterday: "No matter what some agency may say, we've always been and always will be a triple-A country."
Really? That's the best he could come up with in response to the unprecedented downgrading of the creditworthiness of the United States of America?
Gosh, thanks for bucking us up after the loss to the Bad News Bears, Mr. O! After we shower, can we get pizza and ice cream? You're the best coach a 10-year-old kid ever had!
It may be unfair to task a leader for failing to rise to a rhetorical challenge at a moment of extreme duress.
But wasn't that the very least of what Obama promised in his own run for the presidency -- the capacity to inspire, to rally the people, to represent us at our best, to speak words that soothe and guide and direct? You'd be hard pressed to think of anything more specific he ran on than that, wouldn't you?
This is the worst moment of Obama's presidency, bar none. And, to put it mildly, he isn't rising to it.
Simply put, this Obama -- Coach O, the witless rah-rah guy we saw yesterday-- is not going to be president on Jan. 21, 2013...