He wasn't refering to the former VP...

A commentator on MSNBC described President Obama’s demeanor in a press conference yesterday as “dick”. Several apologies later said commentator found himself suspended indefinitely. Uninteresting is the chatter regarding appropriateness and whatnot. The commentator happens to be a liberal political analyst and many MSNBC “personalities” have said much worse in regard to conservative politicians without any consequence, but whatever. MSNBC is exactly what it is and displaying a quick trigger in protecting the thin skin of a President they support isn’t surprising and neither is the idea that a liberal commentator might actually make a comment like that, who knows, he may even have thought he was complimenting the President. What’s more interesting is the question of whether or not the President can be accurately described by that term.

Dictionary.com provides the following definition listed third and sourced from the “Collins English Dictionary”:

dick (dɪk) — n …

2. ( Brit ) clever dick a person who is obnoxiously opinionated or self-satisfied; know-all …

Along with a helpful usage note:

The third sense of this word was formerly considered to be taboo and it was labelled as such in previous editions of Collins English Dictionary. However, it has now become acceptable in speech, although some older or more conservative people may object to its use.

Very interesting, so it would seem that conservative people may object to using the word to describe a self-satisfied know-it-all. But from the strict definition could a press conference in which the President used his daughter’s homework habits as a cudgel to beat up congress, decried private jet owners and described people’s earnings as tax giveaways to them that should be redistributed as scholarships be considered self-satisfied and know-it-all? Perhaps it depends on one’s political persuasion meaning that there is an argument to considering the argument in the affirmative.

The President’s most distinguishable characteristic is an almost inhuman confidence in knowing the exact cause of and the solution to every problem in our country. This confidence doesn’t even dissipate when he’s proven wrong (in those rare instances he actual utters something that isn’t a strawman argument and can be measured somehow). When nothing promised from the stimulus happened, resulting in more than $800 billion added to the national debt for no discernable benefit to the economy, the President stated that the economy was worse than he thought and that the stimulus actually saved the economy from being even worse. Never once acknowledging that none of what he claimed could be proven. When millions of jobs failed to materialize as a result of the stimulus the reply was the invention of a statistic as laughable as it is impossible to measure, jobs “saved”.

The President has derided Republicans for driving the economic “car” into a “ditch” conveniently ignoring that the greatest deficits by far accumulated during the Bush administration occurred after 2006 when democrats controlled both houses of congress and therefore budgets. The President has called out dirty oil companies, every auto maker not owned by his administration, profit hungry limb taking doctors and countless other entities for being evil caricatures of the type typically seen only in cartoons.

English is a tediously complicated language and perhaps there are other definitions to be considered for the phrase ‘obnoxiously opinionated, self-satisfied know-it-all’ but a basic understanding of those words together happens to precisely describe the President. It seems unfortunate that a person could lose their job for making an accurate statement that is typically considered verboten only by conservative people. Perhaps MSNBC is undergoing a format change.