Cassandra’s bitter satisfaction: while so far I think that it is a bit too early to see everybody in the soup line, an ugly certitude (anticipated by myself and many other people) looms over this nation – we have at the nation’s helm an utterly incompetent and wanton man, and this problem makes the affair much more difficult to solve.
Bellow is an excerpt from today’s Ottawa Citize/ RCP which sums up this situation mercilessly:
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“Too Clever by Half/ By David Warren
[...] Again, to my mind — and it is the only one I have with which to write this column — we would be wrong to think of Mr. Obama as an ideologue. I think he was perfectly sincere in denying that he was anything of the sort, and in claiming that he would be looking for bipartisan consensus. I also think he is sincere in proceeding with an agenda — on bail-outs, the environment, Medicare, life issues, foreign policy, etc. — that leaves most Republicans, and quite a few of the more conservative Democrats, utterly aghast.
How to explain this apparent contradiction? I’m afraid it is easy. As I mentioned during the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was seriously unqualified for the job of president. He had no practical experience in running anything, except political campaigns; but worse, his background was one-dimensional.
All his life, from childhood through university through “community organizing” and Chicago wardheel politics, through Sunday mornings listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to the left side of Democrat caucuses in Springfield and Washington, he has been surrounded almost exclusively by extremely liberal people, and moreover, by people who are quick and clever but intellectually narrow.
He is a free soul, but he is also the product of environments in which even moderately conservative ideas are never considered; but where people on the further reaches of the left are automatically welcomed as “avant-garde.” His whole idea of where the middle might be, is well to the left of where the average American might think it is. To a man like Obama, as he has let slip on too many occasions when away from his teleprompter, “Middle America” is not something to be compromised with, but rather, something that must be manipulated, because it is stupid. And the proof that it can be manipulated, is that he is the president today.
It is at this point that the phenomenon known as “too clever by half” sets in. Technically, it is indistinguishable from arrogance and hubris, but it is unnecessary to stress the point. Sixty days into his first term (and I begin to doubt there’ll be a second), he would seem already to have dug a hole from which no rhetorical skill can lift him.
The video to Iran is the latest catastrophe. Mr. Obama simply does not understand how his “olive branch” will be received, not only by the mullahs in Iran itself, but wherever else on the surface of the planet the United States has enemies. It “reads” — to people who do not share anything like America’s aspirations — as an unambiguous confession of weakness. He has moved the American position towards Iran from offensive to defensive, for no defensible reason. [...]
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As far as Hussein’s latest move towards Iran – the incompentence here has now put us in a terrible situation.
The man’s thoughtlessness is simply unbelivable.
