Didn’t sleep well last night and the Muse is mute, so here’s a little screed from Ron on leadership (or lack thereof).
Leadership . . . a combination of understanding the situation, developing a viable strategy to handle it, and having the character to make your strategy work. Soetoro rarely understands the situation, primarily because he doesn’t understand economics, foreign policy, health care, taxation, immigration, The Constitution, or the American people. That, of course, keeps him from developing the necessary strategy to handle the problems that come up. And his lack of character keeps him from giving a damn about his failure to see the problem and its consequences, develop a solution for it, and implementi his plan without disastrous results.
Here’s his policy: See a problem, make a speech.
The essence of leadership is recognized by whether a person feels burdened by awesome power or revels in it; whether the responsibility feels like a trap or stimulates new solutions and resourcefulness; whether pressure from other people moves the leader or causes him to move them. Soetoro revels in the power like a cold hog in warm mud. On the flip side, he HATES the responsibility and goes to great lengths to transfer blame to his processor or his political opponents. And he is far more interested in his legacy, his place in the history books as “first,” than doing what’s right for the country and its people.
Good leaders don’t spend their time trying to find out whose fault some problem is but what’s the best remedy for solving it. They take responsibility instead of making excuses. The best reflection of a good leader can be seen in the standards his staff and his personal assistants set for themselves. A great leader will never take the credit for what his people accomplish and will more often use the pronoun we than I.
Leadership is NOT about speechifying or telling jokes or raising funds or being everyone’s friend. It is not defined by personal attributes extolled repeatedly by tingly-legged obsequious media but by results, POSITIVE results, such as cutting the national debt as promised during the campaign. Making friends and influencing people is basically just flattery, and like flattery is ephemeral and superficial. Leadership involves the ability to elevate one’s performance to higher standards and turn vision into reality. Soetoro is a gladhanding posturer who is perfectly content to read other people’s words from a teleprompter, to fly around in AF1 at great cost raising money to ensure his party maintains its grip on the Senate, and being seen with athletes and other entertainers whose contribution to society is as valuable as Nutra-Sweet in seltzer water.
The best leaders recognize problems before they become crises or emergencies. They also have integrity, whether they’re the quarterback of a football team, the foreman of a work gang, a commanding officer of a military unit, or an executive running an office or a company. Soetoro has repeatedly proven that he has the integrity of a sieve along with the experience of an amnesiac and the skills of a giant sloth.
How dare you insult giant sloths!
Management involves making sure things are done right. Leadership is making sure the right things get done. Soetoro doesn’t have the experience to judge whether things are being done correctly, whether they involve the military, terrorism, the economy, health care, the budget, the deficit, race relations, the IRS, drones, phone taps, status of forces agreements, disaster relief, or tiddlywinks. And as far as getting the RIGHT things done, all indications are that he has developed the inverse approach.
His only real skill is reading what someone else has written off a
TelePrompTer.
“Speak softly and carry a big stick” was a terse bit of advice from a former president. Soetoro speaks loudly and carries a putter. The leaders of governments which formerly were our friends now laugh at his inefficacy, and our enemies revel in his ineptitude. He is a bogus potus, a Kenyan Keynesian, and a dilettante sycophant.
But he is our first Diversity (All Hail Diversity!) president and we see on a large scale what happens when you combine affirmative action with the Peter Principle and you make the result the leader of the most powerful and prosperous country the world has ever known.
Back when I first joined the Navy (well over half a century ago), we had procedures and protocols and rituals for handling phony bastards and modifying their behavior. Some of them involved blankets, some involved a bar of soap in a sock, and some involved certain substances that triggered great irritation to particularly tender parts of the anatomy. Apparently none of those were ever employed while the young Islamic-educated Soetoro was in Paradise and what used to be the Golden State.
We may never recover from what Obungler and the Dimocrat Party have done to this country. People growing up now will not be able to do as well as I have done over my past 67 years. Too bad, but they did it to themselves. They believed the hype and slogans of the Dimocrat Party. I am glad I won’t be alive to see the culmination of the plans and schemes of the Dimocrat Party and the rat bastard commies who are the leaders of that party. I weep for my beloved country.
We’re doomed!