Obama and the aroma of unreality
Now U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggests that an al Qaeda “franchise” had something to do with the murder of Chris Stevens, our Ambassador to Libya, and three other U.S. diplomats, on September 11, 2012. And here I thought it was all because some weirdo video maker had “hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” That’s what a communique from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo said when the news broke.
To say the the Obama administration has been sending mixed messages on the situation in the mid-East would be a laughable understatement. Their “policy,” such as it is, is (as Der Spiegel put it) “in ruins.” This is hardly surprising. On this issue, as on so many issues, Obama does not have a policy. Rather, he has a sentiment, an ideologically-fired feeling about the way the world should work. If the world fails to conform — as it has so conspicuously failed to do, on issues from the economy to energy to the “Arab Spring” — why, then, there must be something wrong with the world and Obama’s responses is simply to “double down” and keep pursuing the path of failure.
When Obama came to office, among the many things he promised (but failed to deliver) was that “the day I’m inaugurated, Muslim hostility will ease.” Is there a better illustration of the aroma of unreality that hovers, miasma-like, around the Obama administration? On every important issue — growth, taxes, energy, health care,our confrontation with the Islamic world, our relations with Russia — Obama has been guided not by the way the world is but by the way he believes it should be. He has been so ostentatious a failure because he takes his cues not from a recalcitrant reality but from his unshakeable ideological prior commitments. It’s a moral blindness that lives at the center of a certain species of socialism: to regard reality, including human reality, as entirely plastic to a certain emotionally fired view of the way the world should be. If the world fails to measure up, the fault is never with the failed policies but with an uncooperative world. It is the perennial fate of ideologues, from Rousseau and Robespierre through Marx and his many epigoni. Your blueprint for utopia fails, the fault must lie with an insufficiently enlightened populace, “enemies of the state,” lingering counter-revolutionary bourgeois attitudes, etc., never with your policy.
It’s a dangerous game Obama is playing. The question is how much more damage will the electorate allow these self-intoxicated ideologues inflict?
The aroma of unreality is seriously adulterated with the stench of calculated mendacity.
Unfortunately, I fear the answer is, “Lots.”
“Narratives,” which often bear little resemblance to reality, can turn on a dime.
How about: Obama and the STENCH of unreality? Obamao and his rat-packed regime is getting more disgusting each day. Just when I thought he (it) couldn’t sink any lower into the sewer, they do it. November can’t come soon enough. Despite the polling, Obamao is heading for a BIG defeat.
As the former congressman Barney Frank so ironically put it (after the financial meltdown he and his fellow congressional toadies brought into being with their “feel good” policies on mortgages and banking) the solution to the problem is to “give us more power.” That’s inevitably the “solution” these people come up with. It’s a vicious cycle of stupidity and arrogance. I don’t know if the electorate has figured it out yet (that this kind of thinking is the cause, not the solution) but either way, I have the sense that there isn’t much time left.
I’ve likened the perspective of this administration to that of a cartoon-world.
Remember the 1980s tune “Take on Me” by the group “A-Ha?” The video for that song featured a woman paging through a cartoon storyboard when an animated hand reaches out and pulls her into the cartoon, making her a part of it.
That’s the Obama administration’s modus operandi, encapsulated: When the real world with a dead ambassador and a living, breathing al Qaeda collides with the cartoon world they inhabit — where the War on Terror is over, so over that they dare not even speak its name — then the cartoon wins, or at they’ll gamely try to drag reality into the cartoon until the truth finally becomes undeniable.
That’s when you see the administration and its apologists forced to make one grudging, lawyer-like admission after another as their cartoon gets crumpled up.
The Soviets had a saying, “Coming out of the Water Dry.” It referred to the determination of many in the West to ignore Soviet acts of barbarism rather than confront it. Obama has his own version of this Soviet perception when it comes to the American media. He’s gotten so used to being able to say anything and have the media avert their eyes instead of calling him out on his lies that he’s become contemptous in his arrogance. This leads to people like Jay Carney and Sandra Rice looking you straight in the eye and telling you that 2+2=5, and actually expecting you to believe it.
Reality must bend to the cartoon.
Were Obana and Hillar naive? In North Africa and Egypt, Salafists and al-Qaida are exploiting the image of American weakness projecting by an apologizing president.
More from der spiegel, quoting Die Welt
“Obama was naive to believe that one only needed to adopt a new tone and show more respect in order to dispel deep-seated reservations about the free world.”
“But Washington has provided the image of a distracted superpower in the process of decline to the societies there. This image of weakness is being exploited by Salafists and al-Qaida, who are active in North Africa from Somalia to Mali.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-press-review-on-middle-east-violence-against-us-embassies-a-855835.html
Spelling correction:
Were Obama and Hillary naive? In North Africa and Egypt, Salafists and al-Qaida are exploiting the image of American weakness projecting by an apologizing president.
More from der spiegel, quoting Die Welt
“Obama was naive to believe that one only needed to adopt a new tone and show more respect in order to dispel deep-seated reservations about the free world.”
“But Washington has provided the image of a distracted superpower in the process of decline to the societies there. This image of weakness is being exploited by Salafists and al-Qaida, who are active in North Africa from Somalia to Mali.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-press-review-on-middle-east-violence-against-us-embassies-a-855835.html
The URL for the English language edition of der spiegel is below.
This der spiegel article quotes five German newspapers: the Bild, the Handelsblatt, Die Tageszeitung, die Welt, and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
All warn this is bad news for America and Middle Eastern stability. Obama’s policy is in tatters. US prestige is worse than when Bush was in office. Weak, effete, apologetic behavior is seen as a sign of weakness in Arab culture.
die Welt: “One thing is clear: If jihadists believe they can attack American installations and kill an ambassador on the anniversary of Sept. 11, then America’s deterrent power has declined considerably. For a superpower, it is not enough just to want to be loved. You have to scare the bad guys to keep them in check.”
COMPLETE ARTICLE BELOW-
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-press-review-on-middle-east-violence-against-us-embassies-a-855835.html
Confucius (Analects, Chapter 13, verse 3) advice to Obama
“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is that in the words he uses there may be nothing incorrect.”
“Is there a better illustration of the aroma of unreality…”
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JOHNNY APPLESEED GOES TO FOGGY BOTTOM
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Ambassador Chris Stevens had no business being assigned to Libya. He was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He paid a heavy price.
There was something lightweight about Amb. Stevens, in the same way there is something lightweight about VP candidate Paul Ryan. They both exemplify a kind of goody two-shoes, Johnny Appleseedish, not quite grown up persona that makes it difficult for me to take them seriously.
Stevens supposedly “loved” Arab culture. That any mature, Western man could make such a statement except in a jocular way was my first indication that Stevens had to be looked at in a little more depth. The results of my investigations have not been pretty.
Supposedly, the ambassador was “fluent in Arabic.” Highly doubtful. As far as I can figure out, his formal training/education did not require knowledge of this language. His undergraduate major was “history” and then he went to law school.
His first contact with the “Moslem” world was as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco “teaching English” following his graduation from college. That statement and those facts are open to major interpretations and misinterpretations.
First of all, the Peace Corps is not what it used to be. I won’t go into details here, but I will say that teaching English in Morocco via the Peace Corps has long been known as, well, as a program of ill-repute (to put it kindly). What on earth was Stevens doing there?
Many US ambassadors have a page on YouTube in which they introduce themselves and then blast away in the language of their assigned country. Stevens comes out with a badly pronounced “Salam Alaykum” and then proceeds to speak in English. Why not Arabic? (because he’s not fluent is why…not even close).
Something else I found suspicious. Supposedly he “loved” Arab culture so much he used to go out at night and sip tea with “merchants” at the local suq. Anybody that knows the Middle East in depth knows that this kind of behavior is totally unbecoming an “ambassador”. No other ambassador would dream of doing such a thing. He might get away with it in Paris or Zurich or Warsaw. In Damascus or Amman or Riyadh? Forget it.
Some Roman emperors and certain Moslem Caliphs were known to “roam the streets” at night to be with the “ people”. Most eventually disappeared on one of their rounds, never to be heard from again.
Stevens didn’t deserve what he got. But the poor guy was delusional about the Middle East. He never should have been sent there or accepted the job.
I don’t think the electorate are tolerating, or becoming intolerant to neglect. The prospect of electing someone in their favor is to relieve their work as activists. They want to relax while the right person in office.
Basically unless Obama directly attacks something people care about, those that voted for him will not do anything. They ride on a suspension of belief, faith, that he is doing what they want. The people that recognize the problems, like you Roger, usually don’t have the gumption to call upon the uninformed and sometimes unwilling to know electorate to act against their supposed choice in leadership because the alternative in a two party system scares them much more than inaction.
A President can essentially ignore something while it decays, and so long as he doesn’t mention it, it will continue to decay into something no longer fulfilling its intention. That includes statements within ideology. It appears personal between people within a smaller isolated issue, and not an infringement on the greater ego of a political ideology so it no longer feels like everyone’s business.