Obama’s strange bus tour

Funny headline at Lucianne.com:

Looks like Darth Vader is in town… Obama draws
fire for foreboding ‘Bus Force One’
Reports of small children and elders running for
cover somewhat exaggerated.

And below it this:

Obama’s midwest bus tour message backfires
With nothing to say and no plan at the ready
(yet?) the whole act seems futile.

Which reminds me of a joke. What do you get if you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Unitarian? Someone who goes from door to door with nothing to say.

- end of initial entry -

Jim C. sends this:

LA replies:

It’s good, except for the “Zero Experience.” That is STUPID. Hasn’t it occurred to anyone that the man has had two and half years experience as president of the United States? Conservatives sound SO STUPID when, of all the cosmic criticisms they could make of Obama, the one they emphasize the most is that he has no experience.

When Lincoln was elected president, his total experience in high political office was one term as a congressman, 12 years earlier. Yet conservatives, who worship Lincoln, keep saying that the worst thing about Obama is that he has no experience, when in fact Obama had four years as a U.S. senator when he became president—twice the length of time as Lincoln’s term as a congressman, and representing a whole state, not just a congressional district.

Not only that, but many of the people constantly shouting “No Experience” at Obama are supporters of Michele Bachmann, whose total experience in high political office is four years in Congress.

In any case, the question of how much experience Obama had before he became president is irrelevant now, because now he’s had plenty of experience, more experience than all but 43 other men in our nation’s history.

Just wondering, but why did God create the human race so that they keep endlessly repeating phrases without thinking about whether they make any sense?

David B. writes:

Your comment about conservatives making “No Experience” their main criticism of Obama bears out what I have said for a long time. Namely, the sheer stupidity of so-called conservatives.

If it’s not ignoring the immigration issue during primaries, they make the most stupid argument imaginable, as in this instance. The best thing Obama has going for him is having “Conservative Republicans” as his opposition.

When have mainstream conservatives shown any imagination, foresight, or shrewdness in combating the liberal establishment?

Paul K. writes:

Now I know two Unitarian jokes. The other is:

Q: How do you make Unitarians move out of your neighborhood?

A: Burn a question mark on their lawn.

JC from Houston writes:

Or how about Sarah Palin’s half term as governor plus her time as mayor of a small, and I mean small, Alaska town.

Daniel S. writes:

This fit in with the stupid obsession that the mainstream conservatives have with polls and popularity ratings. If Obama’s approval rating drops a point or two Sean Hannity and the rest of the idiot brigade act as if this seals the end of the Obama regime. The mainstream conservative movement is intellectually bankrupt and can do little more then present the most childish challenges to Obama.

Kevin J. writes:

If you look closely at the photoshopped Obama campaign bus, the white circle reads “Obama ‘08.” It’s an old image, so the “Zero Experience” slogan is apt.

LA replies:

Ahh, I assumed—probably others did too—that this was a take-off on the current bus tour. I agree that that given the date of the parody, the “No Experience” part is appropriate. But that doesn’t change the observations about conservatives’ continued reliance on that criticism.

Also, I just noticed, the lower part of a woman’s body is sticking out from under the front of the bus. So the inspiration for this PhotoShop parody was probably the first time Obama (at least the first time when he was a national figure and people were watching) “threw someone under the bus”—namely his grandmother Madeleine Dunham, when, in his race speech in March 2008, he called her “a typical white person.”

Given Obama’s notoriety for throwing people under the bus, you’d think his advisors would have told him not to have this big bus tour. Though obviously there were bigger reasons than that for avoiding this embarrassing and desperate-looking PR gimmick, which seems like the very image of a lost presidency. Bush the elder throwing up on the Japanese prime minister was a mild gaffe compared to this. A closer analogy to the disastrous imagery of this bus tour would be the photo of an exhausted and depleted Jimmy Carter dropping out of a running race in, I think, the summer of 1979, accompanied by a New York Times headline, “Carter, exhausted, drops out of race.” Hmm, it’s almost as though Obama were throwing himself under the bus.

Also I’m wondering, was the expression “throw someone under the bus” coined in 2008, when Obama did it to his grandmother and then to Rev. Wright, or did it exist before then? And if it was coined about Obama, who coined it?

August 18

Jim C. writes:

I thought the image was a parody of the current bus tour. Nonetheless, I thought it funny because of its context. Remember, the whole point of the tour is to meet “average citizens,” reassuring them that better times are around the corner. And while the “no experience” headline should have read “totally incompetent,” I still thought the parody worked.

AC writes:

I think that when conservatives say that Obama has “no experience,” what they are saying is that Obama has no experience with success. I suppose that one could counter that getting elected POTUS, getting Obamacare passed, and his administration accomplishing all the little things that they have been doing to remake society along racial socialist lines are all “accomplishments.” So, perhaps a truer statement is that Obama has not accomplished anything in his life that has taken impressive individual effort or that has helped humanity (as opposed to helping just his partisan constituencies).

Paul K. writes:

You wrote: “Given Obama’s notoriety for throwing people under the bus, you’d think his advisors would have told him not to have this big bus tour.”

Some have suggested that they call this the “Throwing America Under the Bus Tour.”

As for the expression itself, there is (of course) an entry on its origin at Wikipedia. Apparently “throwing someone under the bus” became a popular catchphrase among sports writers in 2004.

LA replies:

Thanks for looking that up. Interesting that it’s so recent.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 17, 2011 09:02 PM | Send