Taunting Obama as Barney Fife

By John Ransom
Thursday, December 01, 2011

Former GOP presidential aspirant, Governor Tim Pawlenty, on Wednesday took up my call from last week of the president as Mr. Chicken, calling Obama the “Barney Fife of presidents.”

Hollywood actor Don Knotts was famous as the do-nothing deputy Barney Fife in the Andy Griffith Show. Fife, like Obama, was all mouth and no action; brave and boisterous until action was called for and then timid and fearful. Knotts also starred as the famously fearful Mr. Chicken- actually the character he played was named Luther Heggs- in the juvenile movie The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.

“The former Minnesota governor,” says CBS News, “who dropped his bid for the White House in August and endorsed [Mitt] Romney in September, went on to call the president ‘stumbling, bumbling, [and] ineffective’ and compared him to former President Jimmy Carter.”

Except, Carter rarely hesitated in making decisons.

I don’t know how Jimmy would have decided every question Obama has faced; probably wrongly, but he would have been at least boldly wrong.

Obama can’t even get basic President 101 questions right, like approving the XL Keystone Pipeline, which would create hundreds of thousands of high-paying American jobs without Congress having to spend a dime.

Obama’s on record as neither for the pipeline or against it. He thinks American jobs ought to wait until after his election.

And with that attitude, job creation is guaranteed to wait until then

As the president continues his Occupy Brain Space reelection campaign designed to get Americans bickering amongst each other, the Senate Republicans on Wednesday pushed for an early decision on the XL Pipeline by Obama, which if started, would contribute 20,000 jobs in the US right away, plus add hundreds of thousands of ancillary jobs.

The bill contemplated by Senate Republicans would force Obama to make a decision on the pipeline within 60 days.

“Senate Republicans are pushing for an expedited decision on the Keystone XL Pipeline permit, proposing on Wednesday a bill that would require the secretary of state to grant a permit for the controversial project within 60 days,” reports CBS News, “unless President Obama were to publicly determine that the pipeline is "not in the national interest" before then.”

Look for Obama to try to wiggle out of either a yes or no answer on the pipeline.

A “go’ decision on the pipeline could ultimately supply about a million barrels of Canadian oil to the US per day and 400,000 US jobs, most of them almost immediately. But instead, the president, who has been railing against Congress for not passing another expensive jobs bill, just killed 400,000 American jobs, while making sure the price of gas stays high for its citizens.

And despite everything the Obama administration has done to slow down domestic development of oil and gas resources, the oil and gas sector is one of the fastest growing job markets in a very anemic job market. While other sectors are shedding jobs, oil and gas is hot.

“The six fastest-growing jobs for 2010-11,” according to Economic Modeling Specialists Inc’s (EMSI) latest quarterly employment data, “are related to oil and gas extraction. This includes service unit operators, derrick operators, rotary drill operators, and roustabouts. Each is expected to grow anywhere from 9% to 11% through this year, in an otherwise mostly stagnant economy.”

Imagine what would happen if we could get Obama to cooperate with creating jobs just a little bit.

The State Department had already issued an approval for the XL Keystone project back in August and it was just waiting on Obama’s desk for action when the president took his usual route of doing nothing instead. He pigeonholed the approval of the pipeline for at least the next year until after the 2012 election.

Action is something Obama isn’t very good at.

Talking and squawking? Obama’s your guy.

But he’s not an “Action This Day” type of leader, at least not until they make robotic teleprompters in Obama’s shoe size.

Because, until then, expect Obama to be both timid and wrong.

And people need to start apologizing to Jimmy Carter for the comparisons to Obama.

Really.

Obama’s that bad.