And now our feckless opportunist-in-chief learns the wisdom of an ancient Chinese proverb about how hard it is to dismount when riding a tiger. On Monday, a mob in Pakistan (MSNBC.com) burnt posters of President Obama, and likely chanted something provocative. Perhaps it was “Death to America”, unless that’s too… too 1979.
Finally fixed our image abroad, I see. And this is a love-fest compared to domestic criticism. "Stringer/pakistan / Reuters"
Some people just have America-hatred as a hobby, and only fools take them seriously. Others genuinely hate America, and only fools let them dictate our actions. An American president will be widely hated by various folks abroad either because he is weak or because he is strong, because the dollar is strong or the dollar is weak, because we are in their country or not in their country, because we coordinate actions with others or act unilaterally, because we used to treat them well or we used to treat them poorly.
The list of American presidents who were hated in their time by thankless and opportunistic forces overseas is simply the list of American presidents. To scoff at this state of affairs and deride those who have gone before is a damning indictment not of all previous presidents, but of the one who thereby reveals his own thermonuclear ignorance. It is the fool who insists that he knows what all the rest did not, will win where all others failed, and is the bridge or the hope or the key or the one, when he himself has never run anything except his mouth.
It is not because President Obama is a fool that they hate him overseas, although that is why we hate him in America. Overseas, they hate him for neither the color of his skin nor the content of his character–they hate him for the office he currently profanes. It’s as simple as that. On the domestic side, it is not due to the color of his skin that he is hated, yet his most strident supporters, i.e. the media, have no choice but to insist that it is all about race. They have no choice because otherwise they will have to confront the obvious fact that it is indeed the President as a person whom we cannot stand. A Marxist leader of a free country, we will not abide.
He has shown himself to be such a calculating but incompetent liar that his base supports him only because they have nowhere else to go. A quick survey of lefty sites shows that if the hobby-hatred overseas pales in comparison to the implacable loathing from the American right, that in turn is nothing compared to the seething, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, battered hippie complex developing on the left. These neo-Trotskyites are disappointed as anti-American leftists in their sense of betrayal at the Great Red Scare not being all it was cracked up to be:
- Gitmo still open, still at war in Afghanistan
- Israel not wiped out yet
- KSM trial moving off Broadway
- Tax hikes averted again
- resumption of drilling for oil
They are also disappointed as Americans in his non-partisan failing streak:
- increasingly murky military outlook
- broken relations with Karzai, Gilani, Mubarak, Abdullah I & II, and so forth
- massacres in the streets with survivors crying for American support
- fumbling the bin Laden victory into a thirty-version “narrative” series of bureaucratic failures
- unemployment still soaring and after flip-flopping on drilling, to only drill for a capful a day
It is also not the case that the President’s political difficulties arise from the situation in which he finds himself. Contrary to popular mythology, the current mess is neither Bush’s fault nor the result of a far worse problem than at first had appeared. The only real damage done to the economy which was unavoidable in the short term was the housing bust caused by government’s quite visible hand dilating the market. The rest has been big-government solution to the fact that government is too big, such as punishing those who hire, and retarding the progress of those who lend, borrow, save, spend, earn or gain, while rewarding only those who lose, and vindicating only those who quit.
This is plain old-fashioned incompetence, reinforced by a perverse set of incentives from hubris and a loathing of the world’s most successful system of economics and governance. He cannot admit he was wrong about nearly everything he campaigned on and still flirt in public with infallibility. He can hardly be one of “the ones we’ve been waiting for”, or a lightworker, if it turns out that all the hopium is gone, the promises were lies, and the base on the left have been taken for fools by their Emperor and their own new clothes.
Republicans stood by President Obama with regard to bin Laden’s death in a way that Democrats would do well to emulate next time the shoe is on the other foot.
I got this.
This comes over two years past when then-Senator Obama vilified George W. Bush, that administration, branches of the Executive, and employees thereof, and for what? For waging the War On Terror in a grown-up fashion? For producing the intelligence which made our recent bin Laden operation a smashing success?
Obama’s Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder is was still prosecuting the CIA operatives who conducted a lot of invaluable interrogations of terrorists, despite a letter signed by every living former director of the CIA (except Bob Gates and George H. W. Bush, both for obvious reasons) urging the President to drop the trumped-up case. The problem is that this investigation and inevitable prosecution are a payment from Obama to his farthest-left base, with whom he is in enough trouble as it is. And yet he will cave. [Mission Accomplished!]
The president said that he “cannot tell the Attorney General what to do”, when asked by the sister of a man killed in the 9/11 attacks whether the investigation of the CIA agents would be stopped. This is just plain false, and has been proven so several times in this administration. Fortunately for the nation, this President has a habit of hanging on to leftist lunatic policies and letting things deteriorate until the outcry is deafening; then he reverses himself and implements the correct conservative policy. Normally, it is too little, too late, so when the investigation is called off (and I guarantee it will be, once the furor dies down for a week or two), it’s not as though there will be an apology, nor even any certainty that another set of agents will not be hounded into the Star Chamber for the same or similar treatment. Well, one thing at a time. [Indeed, the better-known investigations were called off, but a different set of operatives remain threatened with prosecution.]
Inspiring leaders know that life is not pretty but it is real, and there is no acceptable alternative to winning. Mr. Obama has played and continues to play a dangerous game, wherein those whom he slanders and who cannot reply serve to bolster his position by displacing criticism with silence. He castigates the military, but knows they will not trash him. He politicized the military to an alarming degree by parading them as beggars through the streets during the lead-up to the closely-averted government shutdown, rather than pre-empting such a thing by immediately declaring that every nickel of military pay would continue as “essential”. Every previous president has taken that measure to keep things honest while contentious. Not this president. He incautiously criticizes operations and methods while running, then adheres to the operations and methods while commanding, because in the real world, there is no choice.
His conduct as a candidate toward a sitting President, with the weight of operations and the lives of thousands dependent upon the administration’s ability to keep some secrets, was appalling. Not because criticism is inappropriate (quite the opposite), but because the Democrats have made an art form of leveling accusations which can only be refuted by releasing material which could cause grave damage to the United States, in the wrong hands.
[pullquote]the change that Americans now demand is a change back to the way things were when Bush was President[/pullquote]
He knew that the Bush administration would not give up classified information just to defeat Obama and those like him. Now the argument is being made by facts on the ground, on the air, and all over online. America was never hated because of Bush. America was hated because there is a large minority of very vocal people who just hate America (in public), and that has not changed.
Hope will take a group only so far, and the change that Americans now demand is a change back to the way things were when Bush was President, and America’s image abroad was neither better nor worse than it is today. And as far as that mob in Pakistan is concerned–well, it was Monday. They hate Obama because they for some reason see him as an American.
