Breakfast Scramble: The Luckless Bus Tour

General Frank Savage, from Twelve O’Clock High, via IMDB:

There will be a briefing for a practice mission at 1100 this morning. That’s right, practice. I’ve been sent here to take over what has come to be known as a hard luck group. Well, I don’t believe in hard luck. So we’re going to find out what the trouble is. Maybe part of it’s your flying, so we’re going back to fundamentals. But I can tell you now one reason I think you’ve been having hard luck. I saw it in your faces last night. I can see it there now. You’ve been looking at a lot of air lately… and you think you ought to have a rest. In short, you’re sorry for yourselves. I don’t have a lot of patience with this, “What are we fighting for?” stuff. We’re in a war, a shooting war. We’ve got to fight. And some of us have got to die. I’m not trying to tell you not to be afraid. Fear is normal. But stop worrying about it and about yourselves. Stop making plans. Forget about going home. Consider yourselves already dead. Once you accept that idea, it won’t be so tough. Now if any man here can’t buy that… if he rates himself as something special, with a special kind of hide to be saved… he’d better make up his mind about it right now. Because I don’t want him in this group. I’ll be in my office in five minutes. You can see me there.

Barack H. Obama, a/k/a Dumbo, via Bruce McQuain, Questions and Observations:

“We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again,” Obama told a crowd in Decorah, Iowa. “But over the last six months we’ve had a run of bad luck.” Obama listed three events overseas — the Arab Spring uprisings, the tsunami in Japan, and the European debt crises — which set the economy back.

“All those things have been headwinds for our economy,” Obama said. “Now, those are things that we can’t completely control. The question is, how do we manage these challenging times and do the right things when it comes to those things that we can control?”

“The problem,” Obama continued, “is that we’ve got the kind of partisan brinksmanship that is willing to put party ahead of country, that is more interested in seeing their political opponents lose than seeing the country win. Nowhere was that more evident than in this recent debt ceiling debacle.”

Reax, Dr. Milton R. Wolf, Washington Examiner:

Mr. Obama, meet the late Robert A. Heinlein, a Naval Academy midshipman-turned-influential-author, who decades before you entered the Oval Office presciently described your administration. It was Heinlein who penned one of the most insightful observations ever of human nature:

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded – here and there, now and then – are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’ ”

Mr. President, you didn’t run into bad luck. You created it.

Reax, McQuain:

If unsupported claims were currency, Barack Obama would be a rich man

Rick Perry, from Michael Falcone et al, Note:

“You know yesterday, the president said I needed to watch what I say,” Perry said. “I just want to respond back, if I may. Mr. President, actions speak louder than words. My actions as governor are helping create jobs in this country. The president’s actions are killing jobs in this country. It’s time to get America working again.”

Good leaders make their luck.  Dumbo makes excuses.

Dumbo’s Magical Misery Tour bus made in Canada, from New York Post, via Ed Morrissey, Hot Air:

President Obama is barnstorming the heartland to boost US jobs in a taxpayer-financed luxury bus the government had custom built — in Canada, The Post has learned.

The $1.1 million vehicle, one of two that Quebec-based Prevost sold the government, has been tricked out by the Secret Service with state-of-the-art security features and creature comforts.

It’s a VIP H3-45 model, the company’s top of the line, and is used by major traveling rock bands.

“That’s the more luxurious model,” Christine Garant of Prevost told The Post.

Reax, Morrissey:

Barack Obama — rock star. Yes, that’s exactly the kind of image that wins votes in the upper Midwest. That’s bad enough, but buying two buses from a Canadian company while promising to create jobs in the US is the worst kind of optics imaginable. Why not use a manufacturer based in the US? I’m certain that Complete Coach Works in California could use the work, for instance, or North American Bus Industries in Alabama. Setra USA manufactures its buses in Greensboro, North Carolina, a key state that Obama could easily lose in 2012. Wouldn’t a $2.2 million buy there have turned a few heads? For that matter, Obama could have bought them from Motor Coach Industries and picked them up in his home state of Illinois at the start of his tour.

Should have rented the bus from Sarah Palin.