Your Marxist Moron of the Day

Our president, Barack Jimma Carter Obama, made an ass of himself today. As you watch the clip, via Hot Air ask yourself, what if a Republican had said what Obama said.

Ed Morrissey has a spot on analysis of the dripping arrogance AND ignorance our leader displayed.

First, Barack Obama once again demonstrates that he has no idea what gas mileage people actually get from their vehicles, apparently having last owned a car and bought gas in 1978, and has a curious idea about what the middle class can afford these days. While speaking to a crowd in Pennsylvania, Obama scoffed at the notion of high gas prices and told the peasants voters that if gas prices were too high, then maybe they should eat cake instead buy new cars instead:

Obama needled one questioner who asked about gas prices, now averaging close to $3.70 a gallon nationwide, and suggested that the gentleman consider getting rid of his gas-guzzling vehicle.

“If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon, you know,” Obama said laughingly. “You might want to think about a trade-in.”

As we’ve mentioned on several occasions now, the last time anyone drove an 8-MPG vehicle that didn’t include a half-track was in the mid-1970s.  If that was the problem, then a tune-up would solve the problem better than a new car, and it would be a hell of a lot cheaper, too.

Even worse, Obama sounds as bad as Marie Antoinette here.  Actually, he sounds worse.  Despite the common belief that Marie Antoinette said of starving peasants who couldn’t afford bread, “Let them eat cake,” she didn’t actually say it; Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote of it in 1769 when Marie Antoinette was 13, before becoming queen of France, speaking of a “great princess.”  Regardless, Obama fills the role of clueless aristocrat by telling a man who explains that he can’t afford to fill his gas tank at current prices that he should instead buy a new car.

If the press reported it, the retort would prove rather embarrassing — which may be why the Associated Press scrubbed it from their coverage of the event.  A search for “If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon” turned up 26 hits last night at 7:15 pm ET, most of them Associated Press links or links to their affiliates. In each of those, the quote was removed in later editing, which the Bing archiving had yet to clear:

Ah, so, rather than taking this clip, and embarrassing the president, our media hides it! Scrubs it! What media bias you ask? THAT media bias!

Another part of this video that caught my attention was when Obama spoke about increasing domestic oil production. Fine, except that he lies in the video about the size of our reserves, and his administration’s record of crippling domestic oil production!

Obama insisted yesterday that “There is no magic formula to driving gas prices down.” That is true. But there are also things the government can do that will drive the price of gas up. And the Obama administration has done many of them including:

• Immediately after taking office in 2009, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, canceled 77 leases for oil and gas drilling in Utah.
• The EPA announced new rules mandating the use of 36 billion gallons worth of renewable fuels (like ethanol) by 2020.
• Last summer President Obama needlessly instituted, not one, but two outright drilling bans in the Gulf of Mexico.
• After rescinding his outright offshore drilling ban, President Obama has refused to issue any new drilling permits in the Gulf, a policy that the Energy Information Administration estimates will cut domestic offshore oil production by 13% this year
• Interior Secretary Salazar announced that the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic coast, and the Pacific coast will not be developed, effectively banning drilling in those areas for the next seven years;
• The Environmental Protection Agency has announced new global warming regulations for oil refineries;
• Interior Secretary Salazar announced new rules making it more difficult to develop energy resources on federal land.
• The EPA is slowing a pipeline that would expand U.S. access to Canadian oil sands.

So, is Obama just that out of touch? That far removed from the common folks that he cannot even grasp how high gas prices can hurt working Americans? Or is the problem that he just does not care?