Gambling Man

[Geee]

American Spectator:

What's wrong? Why the wrinkled brow, Mr. President? Do you no longer think that you can command the oceans to recede and the planet to heal?

Suddenly, it seems, we are witnessing a crisis of confidence -- the first outward sign of an inward glimmer of doubt in the mind of the most self-absorbed and self-congratulatory president in the history of the United States.

According to multiple news accounts, President Obama confessed that the alleged economic recovery is not progressing as fast as he expected. Speaking as always in the first person singular, he told reporters on Tuesday: "I am concerned that the recovery we're on is not producing jobs as quick as I want it to happen."

How could stubborn reality fail to conform to Obama's wishes? Only four days earlier, the president seemed to be perfectly fine. Indeed, in visiting a Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio, late last week, he seemed to be as full of himself as ever when he talked about the miracle that he had pulled off in putting the U.S. auto industry "back on its feet" and saving a million or so jobs. In lauding the results of 2009's $80 billion auto industry bail-out, Mr. Obama told a cheering UAW crowd:

So I placed my bet on you. I put my faith in the American worker. And I'll tell you what -- I'm going to do that every day of the week, because what you've done vindicates my faith.

Clearly, this is a president who loves to gamble. In speaking at colleges and universities around the country, he likes to say that he is prepared to "double down" on education and a clean energy future.

That means: easy money in the form of more low-interest college loans for young people and early forgiveness of those loans for students who forswear the private sector and go into the public sector. It means: billions of dollars in new taxpayer-funded bets on wind and solar power -- bets that fly in the face of reason, given that these new sources of energy are both extraordinarily expensive and wholly inadequate to the task of meeting more than a tiny fraction of our future energy needs.