I don’t know if I’ve seen a worse public speaker in my lifetime more lionized for his public speaking ability than President Barack Obama (D-IL). The homage paid to him by pundits and anchors across the country for his supposedly unique combination of intelligence and eloquence is shown almost by the day to be as misplaced as effusive praise for Vice President Joe Biden’s (D-Slave State) thoughtful, precise manner of speaking would be.

The difference is, you don’t see people tripping all over themselves to praise Biden’s wisdomousness (to use a term from “Friends), or calling for him to make more public appearances as a counter to dipping personal and proposal popularity numbers. You do — inexplicably — see that with Obama, the architect of so many gaffes just one national campaign into his career (and six months into his presidency) that he already rivals the eight years of President Bush in quotable foibles.

“Fifty-seven states”? “Good morning, Sunshine”? “Ten thousand dead - and entire town destroyed”? Give an asthmatic “a breathayzer–inhalater–er, inhaler”?

Now the latest: Today, in defense of his unwavering determination to establish a government-run health insurance entity to compete with existing private insurers (which his Congressional allies are firmly behind as a means to government-run health care as the only option), Obama made a classic argument for…keeping the government out of the market.

The video:

The quote:

If you think about it, uh…uh…uh, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine.

[pause]

Right? Th-The, uh, no, they are! I mean, i-it’s-it’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.

That statement was followed by a long pause, during which one can only assume Obama was struggling to keep up with what he had just said and wondering why he left his Binky home for this appearance (and, perhaps, was wishing Joe Biden was there to take some attention away from his abject blunder).

“UPS and FedEx are doing just fine.” Yes, they are — and their history shows what real competition between private entities can do for a market.

“It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.” Again, absolutely true; the Post Office has any number of problems, and the only reasons it is still in existence despite providing a level of service and reliability that would drive a private entity out of business are its monopoly on mail delivery and the fact that, because it is government-run, it can lose an unlimited amount of money and remain both in business and in the competition.

There’s no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the Post Office’s existence in the package-delivery marketplace has had the effect of forcing FedEx and UPS to improve their service or to become more competitive.

This brings up a very important question: Why, with the coverage equivalents of FedEx and UPS already serving the American people (at least, as well as they can under a mound of cost-increasing regulation), would we have any desire to hand over our health care to the same crew of failures that runs the Post Office, which even the President concedes is a failure?

[this diary rescued from oblivion by force majeure]

The Corner has a link to this goodie, which includes video. Obama gets out of sync with his best friend the TelePrompTer. The audience chuckles politely at his subsequent strained attempt at humor. What I think is funny besides the obvious is that he catches himself and stops before using the word “TelePrompTer”.

If you can’t trust your TelePrompTer, who can you trust? Can you imagine the field day Olbermann and friends would have had with Bush doing this, proving what a mental midget he was?

Dan Balz looks at the White House’s clumsy handling of the debate over terrorist interrogation. Interestingly, there’s no hint - either from Balz’s piece or from other administration officials - that the President’s change of position was intentional. Read the piece and judge for yourself:

The legacy of George W. Bush continued to dog President Obama and his administration yesterday, as Congress divided over creating a panel to investigate the harsh interrogation techniques employed under Bush’s authorization and the White House tried to contain the controversy over the president’s decision to release Justice Department memos justifying and outlining those procedures.

Obama had hoped to put the whole matter behind him, first by banning those interrogation methods early in his presidency and then by releasing the memos last week with the proviso that no CIA official who carried out interrogations should be prosecuted.

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Yes, he left the old familiar glass-paneled prompters that helped him recall childhood memories he said he would “never forget,” that helped him talk down to attendants at dirt-floored midwestern appearances, and that allowed him to thank himself for a St. Patrick’s Day invitation. But it wasn’t because he didn’t need them, or because he could be trusted to speak on his own to a room full of reporters and a few thousand people watching on television around the country. Rather, it was because he was upgraded to a full-size plasma screen at the back of the room from which to read his remarks.

Here’s a still from Fox News of Obama reading his speech from the new, Giant TelePrompTer:

Look, you can give him (or his handlers) credit for realizing what a story the glass plates the supposedly-articulate president had become utterly dependent on to make anything remotely resembling a coherent public address. However, you can’t give them credit, as so many are trying to do this morning, for ditching the scripting altogether, any more than you can give a kid credit for no longer cheating on a test because he scrubbed the answers off of his forearm and instead brought them to class on a piece of poster board.

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CLICK TO VIEW FULL

Obama and his teleprompter are big news lately. As Vodka Pundit noted in his weekly summary, the right-o-sphere saw the meteoric rise of a new star, Barack Obama’s Teleprompter’s blog last week. Also last week, an hilarious twitpic by Right Scoop (see photo upper right) made the rounds, even garnering an approving mention by Maja Rushie himself. The Tonight Show special olympics slam only further illuminates the crux of the issue.

Some liberals pretend not to understand what the fuss is about. They pretend not to understand that we are saying Obama can’t make words happen without his binky. Ed Morrissey calls these “totally lost” moments Obamateurisms. With all the noise being made, and even the mainstream press unable to dodge it, I thought I’d put together a little photo essay featuring The One and his Number One to straighten things out. So please, join me for a walk down memory lane in a photo show I call “Binky: A Man and His Brain” … (full size pics below the fold)

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[h/t RottDawg, Jeff Emanuel, and ABG]

Presidential Ass-Hattery of the Day: To Leno, and clearly adrift from binky his TelePrompTer, about his bowling ineptitude : “It’s like Special Olympics.”

Ah, no, Barry. Actually, it’s nothing like Special Olympics. This……

….is like Special Olympics.

They offer dignity to people who legitimately need help. They defend the weak. You defend the lazy, the dishonest, the professionally offended, and the freeloaders. That makes you different from them. Quite a bit different.

What, you may ask, is the big deal over what was clearly an innocent little slip of the tongue? Oh, nothing, really. It does bring a couple of things to mind, though….

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At a meeting with veterans’ groups on Capitol Hill, Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) said:

President Obama listened to the genuine concerns expressed by the veteran service organizations regarding the option of billing service-connected injuries to veterans’ insurance companies

Based on the respect President Obama has for veterans and the principle concerns of our veteran leaders, the president made the decision that combat wounds should not be billed through their insurance policies.

Of course, if President Obama really had all that “respect…for veterans” and for “the principle concerns of our veteran leaders,” wouldn’t he have realized (or had one of those “veteran leaders” tell him) what an outrageously boneheaded idea charging veterans for treatment of wounds suffered in combat was?

I mean, seriously — just say that out loud: “We’re going to try to make $500 million for the government by charging combat wounded for their treatment.” Okay, now think about what you just said — if you even need to. Yep — ridickeless stupid, isn’t it?

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President Obama’s TelePrompTer, which has been challenged to a debate by Rush Limbaugh (neither it nor the Mouth of TelePrompTer, Barack Obama, has responded to date), apparently decided yesterday that St. Paddy’s was best observed with some good, old-fashioned shenanigans.

According to the AP:

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen was just a few paragraphs into an address at a St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the White House when he realized something sounded way too familiar. Turns out, he was…giving word for word the speech that Obama had just read from the same teleprompter.

Cowen stopped and looked back at the president to say, “That’s your speech.”

Obama laughed and returned to the podium to offer what might have been Cowen’s remarks. In doing so, President Obama thanked President Obama for inviting everyone over.

What do you do when you’re a one-legged man and your crutch decides to turn on you? Something tells me this won’t be the last time the tool that allows President Obama to sound the least bit coherent, or like he has a clue what he’s talking about, trips him up and makes him fodder for well-deserved ridicule.

Huge tip of the cap to a fellow RS Contributor for the apropos title. He also asks the question, “How many more pictures like this are they going to allow before they install the video screen in Obama’s podium?”

Who knows? One thing is true, as Rush has also noted: the TelePrompTer can serve as a useful whipping boy for the president’s current foibles and failures — as in, “My TelePrompTer tells me the economy is the worst we’ve seen in years!,” “My TelePrompTer says ratcheting up the deficit by a couple trillion more will solve the current crisis!,” and, my personal favorite, “Even though I have enough votes in Congress to pass Porkulus, the Omnibus, and anything else I want without even acknowledging the Republican minority’s existence, my TelePrompTer tells me I’m supposed to be demonizing them in the most old-politics way imaginable, all in the name of Hope, Change, and post-partisanship!”

According to Politico (which has somehow found time to detach itself from Obama’s bodily parts and publish this):

President Barack Obama doesn’t go anywhere without his TelePrompter.

The textbook-sized panes of glass holding the president’s prepared remarks follow him wherever he speaks.

Resting on top of a tall, narrow pole, they flank his podium during speeches in the White House’s stately parlors. They stood next to him on the floor of a manufacturing plant in Indiana as he pitched his economic stimulus plan. They traveled to the Department of Transportation this week and were in the Capitol Rotunda last month when he paid tribute to Abraham Lincoln in six-minute prepared remarks.

Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter is unusual – not only because he is famous for his oratory [eh??], but because no other president has used one so consistently and at so many events large and small.

After the teleprompter malfunctioned a few times last summer and Obama delivered some less-than-soaring speeches, reports surfaced that he was training to wean himself off of the device while on vacation in Hawaii. But no luck.

This romance may be over. Via Iowahawk.

At least, if you believe the American Spectator, which admirably deadpans this hysterically funny revelation:

“It looked scripted beyond the scripted part, the speech,” says one former communications adviser, who has been feeding notes and suggestions to the White House team and worked with them on the inauguration. “Every president has gone into one of these things knowing that there were some pre-arranged questions or journalists to be called on, but this one was pretty ham-handed.”

To that end, he says, the White House is looking to install a small video or computer screen into the podium used by the president for press conferences and events in the White House. “It would make it easier for the comms guys to pass along information without being obvious about it,” says the adviser.

Dan Riehl, once he finished laughing at everybody who screeched about Bush and earpieces in 2004, went on… no, wait, Dan never actually stopped laughing at those poor, deluded folks.  Hard to blame him for that, really.

Moe Lane

Crossposted at Moe Lane.