The Scatological Obama Doctrine

ABC’s Charlie Gibson famously put Sarah Palin through the wringer when he interviewed her in September of 2008, to the point where Glenn Reynolds suggested that the McCain-Palin team should have videotaped the interview separately, to allow viewers to compare the results with what ABC aired. One of the most contentious moments during the interview when Gibson stared over his bifocals, pretentiously dangling at the base of his nose, and with his legs crossed to reveal his massive double-soled Florsheim wingtips, imperiously asked Palin to explain what the Bush Doctrine was.

It would have been fun for Palin to respond, “You go first, Charlie.” Perhaps she might have gotten him to recite the infantile Gibson Doctrine, which he espoused to Larry King in 2003:

“I grew up in the Vietnam era, which is probably one of the signal events of my life and I think affected everybody of my generation. And we used to have a little framed sign hanging in our bedroom, my wife and I, that said, War is not good for children and other living things, and I believe that. So I don’t like covering war and I hate to see them occur.”

And speaking of infantile foreign policies, the Obama White House is currently defining the “Obama Doctrine” as “Don’t Do Stupid Sh*t,” Jamie Weinstein writes at the Daily Caller:

“For those pining for an Obama Doctrine victory for the president, here it is: ‘Don’t Do Stupid Shit,’” Politico’s Mike Allen wrote in his daily tip sheet, the Politico Playbook, Saturday. “Playbook rarely prints a four-letter word — our nephews are loyal readers. But we are, in this case, because that is the precise phrase President Obama and his aides are using in their off-the-record chats with journalists.”

Allen went on to point out all the places the phrase has popped up in recent days and weeks.

“If the aim was to get this phrase in circulation to define the Obama doctrine, mission accomplished!” he wrote. “It appeared in the L.A. Times at the end of Obama’s Asia trip this spring, was reprised in the lead story of Thursday’s New York Times, and is used TWICE in today’s NYT — once in the news columns, and once in a column by Tom Friedman, who was part of an off-the-record roundtable with Obama on Tuesday.”

“WHAT’S CLEAR is that the White House is pushing this line hard, and effectively,” he concluded. “What’s not clear is how a high school cliché will help successfully define a foreign policy that many on the right and left find soft and uninspired.”

What’s also clear, as even the left-leaning National Journal noted last week, “The White House is Exhausted,” and an administration that the MSM predicted in 2008 would be the second coming of Lincoln, FDR, JFK and God Himself combined is reduced to scatological mutterings to define itself. No wonder Obama himself is signalling that he’s relived that the end of his administration is finally in sight.

And of course, it goes without saying, if your motto is as childish as “Don’t do stupid sh*t,” expect plenty of stupid sh*t to occur on your watch — and with nary a pony to be found underneath it all, to borrow from a favorite phrase of the Gipper.

Update: Not surprisingly, Twitter is having a field day with this report, including this excellent query:

Was “Don’t do stupid shit” the operative foreign policy principle for Hillary Clinton or just John Kerry? @ron_fournier

— Steve Janke (@steve_janke) June 1, 2014