Press Conference 3

I was mostly impressed last night with how vapid and feeble our media tends to be. They have little tablets from which they read their questions, apparently too feeble minded or too long winded to remember what they are planning to ask. When they finally manage to get the question out, it frequently turns out to be pretty worthless; designed not to elicit any information but to see if they can make the President say something that he doesn’t want to say.

Fat chance, they are not in his league. Lambs to his wolf.

For the most part he took the non-questions, smiled, and then provided informative and relatively non-political answers. He didn’t make a bunch of mini-speeches and sling cliches around either. It is really nice having a President that I can enjoy listening to.

It boiled down to him saying that the job is really, really hard in a way that was completely devoid of complaint or whining. He said that he was the right man for the job in a manner that was devoid of arrogance, and that he had the right team for the job. He said that the administration was off to a really good start, and his demeanor implied without the least self aggrandizement that he was thriving in the office.

He did shuffle his feet a bit on the torture issue, calling it by name but carefully avoiding connecting it with the previous administration. When asked about providing help for the 50% unemployed people of color in New York, he threw platitudes around pretty freely to avoid giving the true answer; that he is doing nothing to target them or groups like them.

On the question about the “state secrets” thing he flat blew major bs at us with the statement about the act being “too broad” and the DOJ working to narrow it down, and on the issue of having to use arguments in court due to lack of time to prepare.

On the first, the arguments his lawyers used go beyond the already overly broad arguments used by the Bush Administration, and both have broadened the narrow definition of the act beyond sanity. As to the second, any court in the land will grant additional time to prepare under reasonable circumstances. In fact. in one of the cases in question, the judge even offered a delay which was declined by the Obama lawyers.

I did quite like the way he sidestepped reporters efforts to get him to to outright bash the Republican Party, and his suggestion that a policy of simply rejecting everything was, "not an effective policy."

So my bs meter report was that it twitched slightly on one question, it fluttered in the yellow zone for another, and it was flat on the peg in the red zone for another. But it was comfortably on the zero peg for ten questions. Not bad, not bad at all.