Obama: I'm not 'particularly ideological'

[struggle4progress]

10. Oh, Mr President! Would a real mountaineer switch direction if the planned ascent

suddenly seemed impossible due to a change in the weather? Hell, no! one presses bravely ahead, heroically determined to move up! up! up! regardless of the likely outcome!

Does a real general ever modify his plans in the middle of a war, due to some shifting of the conditions in the field, motivated perhaps by some desire to save his troops for another day? No! no! no! a thousand times no! We should remember the grand examples of the Western front in the Great War, where generals never once deviated from their brilliant plans but again and again marched thousands! then tens of thousands! and finally hundreds of thousands of men into the enemy's machine gun fire at enormous cost! refusing to be discouraged by their defeats! showing remarkable resolve from their command posts far behind the lines! Now those people were real leaders!

And when a real man jumps boldly into his truck and heads for his destination, does he ever adjust his speed and direction to take into account other traffic on the road? Or does he lift his foot from the gas pedal if smoke pours from the hood, followed by flames? Never! never! never, Mr President! One must remain strong and determined to head where one intended originally to go, without any regard for consequences!

Pragmatists are lily-livered folk, the sort of people who say things like This old can of meat was rusty and bulging, and when I started to open it, some foul-smelling foamy stuff spewed all over the room, so I decided not to eat it. It shows no consistency! It shows no ability to follow-through on one's intentions! Pragmatists say things like I was going to go to the grocery store but the six inches of inch on the road is starting to melt, TV news is reporting full gasoline tanker just overturned in the grocery store parking lot and seems to be leaking, and all ten vehicles that have driven by my house in the last hour have skidded off the road and are stuck in the drainage ditch, so I think I'll just have some peanut butter and crackers tonight. Yeah? Well, what kind of example does that set for our children? Nobody respects pragmatists.