So, one day, the President of These United States was talking to the Vice President of same. A photographer of said President’s court took a photograph of them talking, and it was posted to the Presidential Internet. Here is the picture.
This picture communicates many things to me. It communicates that Barack Obama believes that walls are a vital part of his leaning strategy. It also communicates that he is a couple of inches taller than Joe Biden. Both men also own tuxedos.
However, I am missing something vital in my analysis. It is apparently because I don’t see what others see, which is never quite said outright. Ann Althouse, however, is not afraid to say it, and I trust her interpretation of pictures like I trust Chris Farley’s interpretation of cocaine and morphine.
People who like Obama are blinded to the way other people see him. This picture strongly says cool to people who love him, but it doesn’t read that way to others… including the many, many people who don’t even want a cool President.
Photo via Instapundit, who has a closeup of the facial expression. The main thing I see when I look at that face is: He’s tired.
Wouldn’t it be funny, Barack, if, after all of this, you wake up one morning, and you think: I hate my job?
What’s he thinking now? Oh, my God, I’m only one-quarter through this thing. And they’re going to expect me to campaign again too? Bleh!
Prediction (longshot): Obama will not run for reelection. How can he do it?
You see? He looks cool. And tired. And maybe like he’s checking Joe Biden’s tie to make sure it’s straight, because Joe Biden is a blubbering manboy who is currently asking Barack Obama for a corn dog, which Barack Obama is tired of hearing, because the place they’re going doesn’t have corn dogs.
Now, it might be that people who don’t like Barack Obama are inclined to believe that a neutral facial expression and a wall lean are signs of his deep and abiding contempt not just for Biden, but for his job itself and perhaps even his own life (Muslims are suiciders, after all). Other people will look at this and believe that Barack Obama licked his thumb, wiped a smudge off of Joe Biden’s face, and told him that he loved him like a brother immediately after this picture was taken, and then they rode wish-powered unicorns into the dinner hall to thunderous applause from all of the forest elves in their kingdom.
There are no other options, by the way. Just those two.
Let’s test out a theory here. I contend that Professors Reynolds and Althouse are disingenuous hacks who lack anything even resembling a rational context through which they could interpret a picture of Barack Obama, and that the picture above was an effort by the White House to show some legitimate downtime between the two most powerful people in America where they weren’t gladhanding and making small talk. We shall test this…by looking at another picture.
Ann Althouse has yet to comment on this, so let’s look at Glenn’s comments:
But why would people lack confidence in Obama on national security? Just look at his masterful presence in this meeting with National Security staffer Denis McDonough in Hawaii.
As we all know, during World War II, FDR led war planning meetings on a tiger. And the only way a President can lead in these troubled times is oiled and shirtless, preferably with a broadsword, as seen below in the following just-released picture of George W. Bush during a meeting discussing the invasion of Iraq in February 2002.
This is quite literally insane. It’s not just the separation of America into Obama sycophants and “everyone else”, or the continuation of the same sort of baldfaced idiotic hunt for manliness and power projection that leads to things like the insistence that George W. Bush had ended terrorism before Barack Obama came into office. It’s the insistence that their great man fetish be lived out at every available opportunity, in every picture and in every expression. There’s only one way that this is possible: a terrible and all-consuming self-delusion.
The issue here isn’t that the target of their ire took a bad picture. It’s that the very existence of (what they consider to be) a bad picture proves every awful thing they ever thought about a person, because why would a good person ever take that picture?
I can’t wait until Obama gets pizza one day. His folding of his slice will show a deep disconnect with the rest of us, as we mash up our pizza with large plastic spoons and then scoop the mush into our slavering mouths. WHY DOES HE NOT GET REAL AMERICA???
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That last picture is what Matthews saw on the Eisenhower…