First Obama Blamed Bush for His Failures, Now He Blames Al Gore!

[I am trying Blogger's feature allowing me to post by email, so bear with me if something goes horribly wrong.]

 

That was my first thought when I heard that Obama is now blaming the internet for high unemployment:

 

"Layoffs too often became permanent, not part of the business cycle. And these changes didn't just affect blue collar workers. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs and the internet," President Obama said at a campaign event in Kansas.

 

You can watch video of that, here.

 

By the way, Mr. President, they've had internet-based travel planning for years, long before you became President.  For instance, over eight years ago I brought a woman to New York City on memorial day weekend and booked the whole thing on those kinds of sites.  I never talked to a person, even when I canceled my first reservation and found a new one, mid-trip.

 

And at the end of the weekend, I asked that woman to marry me and is my wife to this day.

 

So Mr. President please stop pretending you know anything about business.  You're just embarrassing yourself.

 

(And yes, I know someone made a similar joke at Insty.  I could say it's a case of great minds thinking alike, but honestly I think it's more like it's an obvious joke.)

 

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By the way, a cool and true story.  While I was up in New York there I was able to get free tickets to see Yakov Smirnoff do a one man show, As Long as We Both Shall Laugh.  We originally got three tickets on the hope that a friend of mine who lived there could come, but she couldn't come so we gave the ticket back to the box office and told them to sell the seat.  Smirnoff's show was actually really nice.  You might joke that his career was one of the victims of the fall of the Berlin wall, but really a good comedian can find humor in any situation, and is not limited to one bit, although it was his signature bit, obviously.

 

But it was a very charming performance where he likened getting married to becoming a citizen of a new country.  The whole time he is surrounded by two life-size replicas of the Statue of Liberty and at the end the lights come down for a moment and suddenly one of the statues is alive, and he dances with her and dips her, like she is his bride.  Yes, you know, how they did it, but like I said, it was really charming.  The spirit of that moment is captured in this poster for the show (from Yakov's site):

 

 

But here's the cool part.  So the whole time he is pretending to draw a portrait of his two children as sort of a running thread in the performance.  Mind you, I am convinced he can draw pretty well, but um…  most of the drawing seemed to happen when you couldn't see, if memory serves.  And then at the end he told us that this night his real children were actually there and they stand up...  exactly one seat away from the two of us.  Literally if we gave away a different ticket, we would have been sitting right next to them the entire time.