Jammin with Charlie Daniels

Charlie Daniels' View

After being in the music business for 52 years it's just about all I know anything at all about -- and in keeping with my admittedly narrow knowledge, I would like to draw an analogy concerning the Obama administration, viewing things from my vantage point.

Ok, let's say you pick out the finest symphony conductor in the world, add the greatest singer and seven or so of the finest classical musicians on the planet.

You get them together backstage and say, "Alright, there are twenty thousand fans out front, standing room only, expectations are off the charts, they are looking for the best show they've ever seen.

Now the curtain goes up in five minutes, the sound has been checked out, the lights set and everything is perfect, the stage is set for the greatest show the world has ever seen.

Now get there and knock 'em out guys!! They're all with you; you're all superstars in their eyes. Go show 'em how it's done.

Oh, there's only been one change ... Tonight you have to do your show playing songs you've never played and you'll have to improvise. There's no sheet music. You'll just have to jam."

Can you imagine the panic backstage??

You see, some of the very finest musicians on earth can't jam a lick. I remember a few years ago when I had a couple of young fiddle players come on stage with me to play "The South's Gonna Do It Again."

They had learned the parts I'd played on the record, arrangement, lead lines, and all and played it perfectly note for note.

Everything was going swimmingly, until I decided to leave the arrangement and jam for a while. When I turned to one of them and told them to take a solo the kid was as lost as a baby sheep in a hail storm.

They had no more idea about improvising than they did about how to build a spaceship.

"The South's Gonna Do It Again" is a simple twelve bar blues song that any musician from any garage band would be able to take a solo on, but even though these kids were extremely talented and played what they knew perfectly, when it came to jammin, they were totally lost. They had just never learned to do it.

To me the presidency is kind of like jammin'. You have to roll with the flow, improvise, adapt to the moment, pick up on what's going on and deal with it.

Our president has never had to jam, he's always had the sheet music in front of him and he's never had to play a note somebody else had not written for him.

One of the biggest mistakes President Obama made when he came in office was to surround himself with a bunch of players who had never jammed either. None of them have ever had any practical experience in the real world.

In essence, they are a bunch of paper tigers. They do an incredible job of spending other people's money and sneaking legislation through the back door, but out in the real world, where there are no scripts, down where the rubber meets the road there is probably not a person in the bunch who could change a flat tire, much less deal with the complex problems America faces.

The only thing Obama has done with out any problem that has arisen is to throw money at it, and in truth, that's sadly all he knows how to do.

When it comes to dealing with things that money alone won't fix like busted oil pipes at the bottom of the ocean or solving the problems on our southern borders he's lost and all those around him are lost.

The Obama cabinet is the most inept bunch imaginable. When people have only viewed the world from the top of an ivory tower they don't react very well when it's time to get their hands dirty.

Obama's people can't even accept real world concepts of the dangerous situations we're dealing with. Eric Holder wanting to try terrorists in civilian courts -- in New York City of all places -- is nothing less than naïve arrogance.

Janet Napolitano's gross inexperience in dealing with security matters is going to end up costing this country dearly.

Putting an unqualified person who has never even been a judge on the bench of the highest court in the land, for nothing more than her political leanings is insanity.

Everywhere you look you see eggheads with nothing more than a college degree to qualify them for the sensitive jobs they hold.

I'm just wondering how long it will take for a majority of the people in this country to realize that the wheel that steers the direction of this nation is in the hands of people who have no idea how to get from point "a" to point "b" without a road map and that road map just doesn't exist. Every trip is different.

I see disaster looming on the not too distant horizon, financial disaster, increasing danger from terrorist attack, unabated violence in the streets, and an arrogant and unmanageable illegal alien population.

It's coming folks and Obama and the band are still in the dressing room looking for the sheet music.

They just can't jam.