The “Incompetence Crisis”

All last year,  ALL  I heard was how experience didn’t matter.  I heard that being ‘ready on day one’  was a meaningless campaign slogan.  I was told that what mattered was perceived good judgment, intelligence, and speaking skills.  I remember watching the first Democratic Debates and thinking, this guy isn’t ready to be dogcatcher, let alone President. There were no wonky answers on economics or foreign policy.  There was never a show of any detailed plan.  There was always just a nice speech read from a teleprompter with a preacher’s patois, incredible (somewhat contradictory) promises, and messages that could have come from a motivational seminar instead of a political campaign.  I never got on the bandwagon.

I finally found a home over here in the Pumasphere with people of similar thought after being treated like a scourge by other sites (blog or MSM) that had gone over to the hope side.  I’ve been getting used to my role as pariah. I was thinking I’d have to live with it for at least a year.  I figured I’d start getting the you were so right calls sometime in the fall.

Boy, was I wrong!

I figured that because of my experience during the early calls for the Iraq war.  I was the one saying “Iraq has nothing to do with 9/11.  Iraq is a different agenda.  Iraq is a bad idea.”   I actually had some one get up in a restaurant to tell me what a lousy, unpatriotic American I was that didn’t deserve to live in the US. I became a the scourge of all true American patriots.  I’ve been thinking that my 9/11 protest was just a character building experience that would serve me well during the Obama fascination period and that it would probably take a few years of, yet again, being a scourge to all true American patriots before the worm would turn.  Luckily, I found a other like minded out in the Pumasphere so I don’t have to be quite alone as I was with my opinion on the Iraq Invasion.

I think I can honestly speak for a number of us around here.  We didn’t expect to be proven so right so quickly.  At least I didn’t. I was hoping that maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as my gut and head had deduced.  So many of my friends said, he’s not Dubya, so he’s got to be better, you’ll see.   After all, we’d get rid of a lot of really evil signing statements that restrict women’s reproductive choices, the right of all people to love and marry whom they wish, and we’d move ahead on science again.  I’ve said this before, but nearly any democrat would have done any of those things–including Joe Lieberman. Lieberman is one of those folks that I consider marginally a democrat, but even he would have done those things if he were POTUS.  We certainly wouldn’t see any nasty supreme court appointments either.  These were marginal hopes and small changes that I could cling to while knowing that eventually, I would be proven right.  I just didn’t even imagine it would wind up quite like this, quite so fast.

So, if I haven’t made myself clear here, Rush Limbaugh and Governor Jindal may be cheering for a failure.  I’m not in that camp at all.  I’ve just been quietly sitting here telling myself that with all the beautiful things written into the constitution as well as the resiliency of the American people, that perhaps it won’t be quite as bad as I thought it would be.   After all, we survived the incompetency of George Bush and the lunacy of Dick Cheney. Things can’t fall apart that fast!

Boy, was I wrong!

Pumas are the new Cassandras.  Our warnings, unheeded, demonized, and marginalized, are now the stuff of MSM op ed pieces.  I’d like to point you to a few that are searing Obama with legitimate criticisms.   I would think they came from one of the edgier Puma sites but they don’t.  One is from CNN. The other from the UK’s Prospect.  I also have two from the NY Times.  These comments are simply alarming.

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