Goldberg: Obama’s tough talk is a real kick

By Jonah Goldberg

In the movie “The Andromeda Strain,” scientists discover an alien bacteria with the potential to destroy humanity. Immediately, government protocols snap into place. The nation's experts drop everything and race to their lab to work on the problem.

However, in a scene that was cut from the movie, these top-flight experts don't race to a remote installation beneath the Nevada desert. Rather, they fly to Washington to coordinate strategy with the hands-on commander in chief.

The nation's greatest minds nervously assemble in the Oval Office. The can-do president, all business, asks the first question. “So, whose ass should I kick?”

OK, that didn't happen. But it would have if President Barack Obama had written the script.

By now you've heard what he told NBC's Matt Lauer. “I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar,” Obama told Lauer. “We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick, right?”

Riiiiiiight.

A creature of elite universities with a progressive's love of technocrats, Obama is most comfortable leading colloquia of perfect-SAT-score propeller heads.

It's like a “Tonight Show” joke.

And speaking of the “Tonight Show,” let me reassure both editors and readers of family newspapers everywhere about my use of the word “ass.” Historian Steven Hayward reminds me that in 1979, Jimmy Carter responded to Ted Kennedy's primary challenge by declaring he would “whip his ass.” It was one of those moments of presidential lameness that conjures the same bile of pity, schadenfreude and heebie-jeebies one feels upon seeing a middle-aged bald dude with a long gray ponytail dancing at a rave.

Anyway, Johnny Carson repeated Carter's ass-whipping remark in his opening monologue, without any punch line, explaining that he simply wanted to aggravate the network censors. After all, you can't get in trouble for quoting the president of the United States accurately.

Much like the ass-whipping Carter, Obama is in danger of becoming a figure of ridicule, which is particularly ominous for a presidency that runs almost entirely on high-octane rhetoric.

For instance, Obama recently told high school students in Kalamazoo, Mich., “Don't make excuses. Take responsibility not just for your successes; take responsibility where you fall short as well.” As many said, this was odd advice from a man who would put the blame for the hitch in his golf swing on eight years of George W. Bush.

In that same interview with Lauer, the president said he hadn't bothered talking to Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, because he knew Hayward would “say all the right things to me. I'm not interested in words. I'm interested in actions.” This from the man who swore that words were magical and thought it was worth sitting down to talk with the president of Iran?

The Washington Examiner's Chris Stirewalt says the president is caught in a “hypocrisy trap.” Obama dug a massive rhetorical hole for himself, and now anything he says amounts to digging deeper. Among his promises: He'd end partisan bickering, make the world swoon and persuade the oceans to halt their attacks on the land of George W. Bush. Instead, he's made Washington more partisan. The world did swoon for a minute but quickly moved to shrugging and laughing. And as for the receding oceans, well, they're filling with light-sweet crude - just one more thing the president blames Bush for.

But there is good news. Any day now, after thorough interagency review, the Standing Committee for Posterior Selection will have given provisional approval for a working list of asses for POTUS to kick with an OSHA-approved shoe. Alas, final environmental-impact statements are pending. But once that hurdle is cleared, the president will focus like a laser on ass-kicking.

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