Columnist Says Calm the Heck Down

June 9, 2010 by PaulM Posted in Current Events, Election 2010, History, Lowell, Politics, Culture 2 Comments

Columnist Froma Harrop from the Creators Syndicate via the Providence Journal advises critics on the Right and Left to take their criticism of President Obama down about ten notches below sputtering mad. Read the column here, which I picked up from www.realclearpolitics.com.

2 Responses to Columnist Says Calm the Heck Down

  1. kad barma says:

    Is this columnist serious? Are we being asked to forget the complete absence of executive leadership (as opposed to ideological leadership) while the big BO is consulting sagaciously with all those vaunted “experts”?

    For one ironic example, Obama has self-admittedly never even bothered to call BP CEO Tony Hayward on the phone. Apologists are saying “what good would that do”, but I’ll tell you what good I know it would do–it would put the guy on notice that he’s accountable to somebody other than BP shareholders in this fiasco. But the columnist is (apparently) satisfied that Barack is calling other people instead.

    Are you kidding?

    There’s ad hominem nonsense that has no productive place in the discourse, which I would agree has no productive place in the discourse, but there is also intelligent and reasoned criticism that’s being ignored, and, by columnists like this, and the entire executive branch, it would seem, swept under the proverbial rug.

    “It’s complicated” is NOT a reasonable response from my president, and I, for one, won’t stand silently by while he patronizingly tries, yet again, to use it as an excuse to avoid his personal responsibility to simplify it for us.

  2. kad barma says:

    Just for fun, here’s an AP review of the contingency assurances submitted by BP when they received their license from the Federal government. (Which Obama now heads).

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100609/ap_on_bi_ge/us_gulf_oil_spill_sketchy_plans

    At the very least, I think this would be a useful premise by which Obama might engage both Federal regulators, as well as British Petroleum, in a discussion about responsibility and accountability on behalf of the electorate which he represents.