Not Exactly The Fight Of The Century

Not Exactly The Fight Of The Century
Friday, October 5, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky

As you all know, I hate pointing out that I was right. I’m sure the cynics among you are saying to yourself, “I bet it pains him about as much as winning the state lottery.” But what else can I say when I kept telling people to wait for the debate, and the smarty pants crowd, folks like Bill Kristol, Peggy Noonan and Charles Krauthammer, spent weeks harping on Romney to do this, that and the other thing. Through it all, I pointed out that if Romney shot his wad prior to October 3rd, he would, one, help Team Obama know how to prep their guy and, two, give the goons in the media a chance to spin everything he said and accuse him of making endless gaffes.

I was convinced that most viewers would have to acknowledge that one of the two debaters would be seen as a man born to be the president and the other guy would be seen for what he is, a pretender who was born to be the smarmy mouthpiece for a public sector union such as the SEIU, which is what Obama was referring to when he identified himself with the nebulous title of “ex-community organizer.” The question nobody bothered asking in 2008 was which community was he referring to and what sort of mischief was he organizing them to do.

It’s not that I’m so much smarter than the national pundits. Okay, it’s not just that I’m so much smarter than the national pundits. I just knew that Romney’s uncommon decency, good nature and command of the facts, would shine through once he didn’t have to rely on the MSM to filter the message and the man. Think Ronald Reagan in 1980, I suggested.

The other main thing I knew was that Obama does not possess a superior intellect and that he is not a brilliant speaker. It isn’t simply that he depends on his Teleprompters, either. Barely a day has gone by over the past five years when we have not seen and heard him on TV. By this time even if you were one of the left-wing bozos who agreed with his policies, you would have to admit, if you were the least bit honest, that you have gotten tired of his smug little smirks, the arrogant way he tilts his jaw -- as if channeling his inner Mussolini – and the very annoying way he has of breaking up every sentence into two or three separate parts.

I said that once people saw the two candidates sharing the same stage, the undecided few would instinctively recognize which one was the more capable and presidential. They would finally see what a con job the Democrats have carried off in attempting to portray a decent, patriotic American as a loathsome creature whose favorite pastimes are giving pink slips to hard-working members of the middle class, playing footsies with the idle rich and, of course, killing off innocent cancer victims.

One of the sweetest things about the debate was knowing that in 90 minutes, Romney had undone all the damage that the DNC had inflicted, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars in TV ads attempting to depict him as an ogre.

One of the most telling moments took place a day or so before the debate, when Obama showed up at a public event, telling his groupies that essentially he was playing hooky because his handlers were “trying to make me do my homework.” That was the quintessential Obama, the laziest kid in the 11th grade, whining that grown-ups were demanding he do boring stuff like hitting the books and studying when all he really wanted to do was play video games.

From Day One, when he had Pelosi and Reid draw up the details of his trillion dollar stimulus bill and assigned the federal bureaucrats to churn out the 2,700-page tome we now know as ObamaCare, he has shown that the only things he really likes about being president is that it allows him to play a lot of golf and to address fawning crowds of union members, college students, welfare recipients and multi-million dollar donors.

Although I was not surprised that Romney won so decisively that if it had been a prize fight instead of a presidential debate, the referee would have stopped it after half an hour, awarding it to Romney on a TKO, while a bloody Obama hung on the ropes, hoping that at least one witness to the accident had managed to jot down the license number of the truck that hit him.

But as is often the case, you can’t really put the entire blame on Obama. All of his enablers played their role in the debacle. Consider how the two men prepared for Denver. On the one hand, Romney’s steel had been tempered through endless debates with people such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. His skin had been thickened by the endless lies attacking him, his business background, his wife and even her horse.

On the other hand, Obama, who has been treated like the Dalai Lama for most of his life, has spent the past five or six years being coddled by the nannies in the media. He has become so accustomed to being treated like a living saint by the likes of Jay Leno, Oprah Winfrey, David Letterman and the kiss-ups on “The View,” that even when Univision’s Jorge Ramos and Maria Elena Salinas asked him a couple of reasonable questions regarding immigration reform and Operation Fast and Furious, all he could do was look shocked at their unmitigated gall and fall back, as usual, on David Axelrod’s insipid talking points.

If I were Obama, I would be very worried. After all, the first debate was devoted to domestic issues, which Obama assumed would be more or less in his wheelhouse. He had, after all, managed to bribe millions of Americans with food stamps and free cell phones. What’s he going to do when he has to explain how his foreign policies, which he had assured us time and again were working like clockwork in the Middle East, with the killing of Bin Laden and the decimation of al-Qaeda, suddenly blew up in his face with the assassination of Ambassador Stevens and the burning of our flag throughout most of the Arab and Muslim world.

What do you think he will say about all those al-Qaeda flags flying over our various embassies? How will he explain the cover-up that his administration tried to pull off, pretending that these were all spontaneous demonstrations because of some dopey-sounding video nobody has ever seen? How will he defend sending out UN Ambassador Susan Rice as a sacrificial lamb on Sunday news shows to lie on his behalf, thus destroying her credibility in a single day as surely as Obama has destroyed Jay Carney’s over the course of these past two years?

I know that prior to the debate, a lot of Washington pundits claimed that presidential debates rarely have a major impact. But when even left-wing loons like Chris Matthews, Bill Maher and Rachel Maddow, all agree that Romney won, I say there hasn’t been a whopping of such magnitude since a smiling, confident Jack Kennedy trounced a sweaty, five o’clock shadowed, Richard Nixon, who showed up looking like a fugitive from Devil’s Island.

If Obama had been smart, he would have stayed home celebrating his wedding anniversary with Michelle and the kids, and sent Clint Eastwood’s empty chair in his place.

Unlike that lazy 11th grader I alluded to earlier, Obama can’t even whine that the family dog ate his homework.

It was in fact Mitt Romney who ate his lunch.
__________________________________________

To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.