Claims: Constitutional Law Professor, an absolute prevarication. Claims to accomplishments in office, all prevarications. m/r
Our Callow Commander-in-Chief | National Review Online 7-18-14
Why is insouciance Obama’s first response to international
crises?
It is at times like these, when he is pushed kicking and
screaming into the crucible, that Obama’s callowness shows. For his supporters,
that jejune, jocular air has been a plus for almost six years. For the rest of
us, it has served as a liability and an irritation. Yesterday, it became a
wholesale embarrassment.
On the perpetual-campaign trail, the pattern is familiar.
Trotting up to the podium, the president fist- bumps the audience’s stragglers
and smiles a toothy and humble grin at those who catch his eye. While speaking,
he responds to obsequy with obsequy — “I love you too!” he will tell admirers
whose voices rise above the crowd’s — and greets the boos that his
speechwriters have sought with faux-surprised entreaties “to vote.”
Thematically, his is a simple morality play, of one act and with one star. He
is the prophet, illustrative of all that is good and great in the world; his
critics antediluvian monsters. Regardless of the topic, the president sells
himself as a common-sense-loving moderate patriot who manages at every juncture
to insert himself in between the two extremes that are tearing the country
apart, and who is adamantly opposed by a wicked, venal enemy that flatly
refuses to relinquish its political prerogatives or constitutional claims. In
the early years, he stuck mostly to platitudes — to telling his side of the
story. Now, he casts his own tale as one of opposition — the new kid in town
who is hoping to shake things up in the back rooms of the saloon.
Obama is often caught on the back foot — more often than not
being informed of the big political stories by the media and not by his staff.
Still, given how quickly the rest of the world cottoned on to what had happened
in Ukraine, it is difficult to believe that, when he stepped onto the stage in
Delaware yesterday, he was incapable of changing his plans. He did not.
Instead, the president spent a grand total of 38 seconds on the downing of the
plane, describing what he knew to have been an atrocity as a “tragedy” that
“might” have happened, and then going back to slamming Republicans for refusing
to agree with him on infrastructure spending, to joking with his adoring fans,
and to suggesting that America needed to stop indulging in what the more
traditional among us like to refer to as “politics.” It would, as David
Freddoso observed, have been as if George W. Bush had continued to read “Why
Daddy Is a Republican” after he had learned of the attacks on the Twin Towers.
Even Obama’s traditional allies noticed that this was a little odd. Piers Morgan, no firebreathing right-winger he, tweeted that the president “massively dropped the ball just now. 23 Americans killed and he says ‘it looks like a terrible tragedy’ then back to jokes?”
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