Krauthammer on Obama: 'Charlie Who?'

Shot / chaser pic.twitter.com/djJQsYT10f

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) January 16, 2015

Charles Krauthammer on Europe and the Obama administration’s intertwined no good horrible very bad week:

As for President Obama, he never was Charlie, not even for those 48 hours. From the day of the massacre, he has been practically invisible. At the interstices of various political rallies, he issued bits of muted, mealy-mouthed boilerplate. Followed by the now-famous absence of any high-ranking U.S. official at the Paris rally, an abdication of moral and political leadership for which the White House has already admitted error.

But this was no mere error of judgment or optics or, most absurdly, of communications in which we are supposed to believe that the president was not informed by staff about the magnitude, both actual and symbolic, of the demonstration he ignored. (He needed to be told?)

On the contrary, the no-show, following the near silence, precisely reflected the president’s profound ambivalence about the very idea of the war on terror. Obama began his administration by purging the phrase from the lexicon of official Washington. He has ever since shuttled between saying that (a) the war must end because of the damage “keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing” was doing to us, and (b) the war has already ended, as he suggested repeatedly during the 2012 campaign, with bin Laden dead and al-Qaeda “on the run.”

In June of 2005, Karl Rove caused the left to have their daily meltdown over this quote:

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

But even Rove at his most prescient couldn’t have predicted that in addition to therapy and empathy (as Hillary herself proffered last month), state-sanctioned folk singing would be involved as well.

Presidential administrations often serve as reflections of their predecessors. The libertarianism of the Coolidge era was a direct result of the liberal fascism of the Wilson years. Despite sharing many of the same “Progressive” policies, FDR was very much a referendum on Herbert Hoover. No matter how big he supersized government, the cornpone LBJ was never seen by Democrats as a legitimate successor to the swank prep school style of JFK. The many auras and penumbras of scandals emanating from Bill Clinton’s trousers made many voters in the 1990s long for the grownup presidencies of Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

From Obama deliberately sitting out the march of world leaders in Paris to sending John Kerry and James Taylor(!) in his stead, this week, America is finally getting to see what the immediate aftermath of 9/11 would have been like had, God forbid, Barack Obama been in the White House at the time.

It would not have been pretty. And we all would have needed therapy watching the disaster unfold.

Update: When the Obama administration loses the BBC…