Obama: Incompetent or Malevolent?

Obama: Incompetent or Malevolent? | FrontPage Magazine

By David Solway On September 20, 2011

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...The debate is gaining momentum as both the foreign and domestic situations plummet from bad to worse. Is Obama merely incompetent, a man completely out of his depth who has no understanding of real-world economics or realpolitik, who cannot deliver a coherent speech without the aid of a teleprompter, who is compelled to rely on the advice of sharpers and operators, and who has absolutely no prior, genuine accomplishments to his credit outside of a capacity for political maneuvering, polished mendacity and, as David Remnick gushed in The Bridge, the ability to wear perfectly creased trousers? A community organizer as president? A feckless nonentity as Commander-in-Chief?

Or is Obama by no means incompetent but, on the contrary, a brilliant neo-Marxist tactician, a man with a hard-left Alinskyite agenda for the subversion of the United States as a liberal, free-market democracy and its transformation into a socialist oligarchy? A man who deeply resents the primacy and exceptionalism of the country he governs and wishes for nothing more—or less—than to see its status in the world diminish in payback for its perceived transgressions as a pre-eminent power? Are his methods the fruit of deep-dyed education and meticulous reflection? We may be inclined to think so when we assess the evidence: the appointment of unaccountable “czars” to control the life of the nation, the blizzard of bureaucratic regulations that stifle entrepreneurship, the effective nationalization of much of the economy, the partnership with thugocratic unions, the amnesty for illegal immigrants to secure a reliable voting base, the alienation of democratic allies and the coddling of various despotic regimes, including the nascent tyrannies emerging from the so-called “Arab Spring.”

Which is it? Is America governed by a grown-up toddler who has turned the White House into a rumpus room where he can build, dismantle and rebuild Lego-like structures at whimsy or play his video games which he mistakes for reality? Or does he resemble a Mafia-like don surrounded by a gang of tax cheats, perverters of justice, arm-twisters, enforcers of union violence, thieves who call their method of extortion “redistribution,” vote-pilferers and cartel gun-runners?

I suspect that the answer is: both. On the one hand, Obama is demonstrably incompetent, overly dependent on his advisors and backers, far more preoccupied with the high life than with the life of ordinary Americans (e.g., his $50,000 a week vacation rental on Martha’s Vineyard) egregiously miseducated and with little grasp of world history (e.g., the Cairo speech where he managed to get his centuries wrong) or even of the standard usages of the English language (what, pray tell, is a “corpse-man”?), and prone to innumerable gaffes equalled only, perhaps, by those of his vice-president.

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