The Politico on the White House’s “Theater of the Absurd:”
On Wednesday, the same day President Barack Obama ousted his humiliated Afghanistan commander, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs walked into the Oval Office with more grim news: The cap on the gushing oil in the Gulf had been dislodged.“What?” Obama replied incredulously. “Well, why did it do that?” A remotely operated vehicle had knocked the cap right off, he was told, leaving oil rushing out as furiously as ever.
“Let me get this straight,” Obama later told senior adviser David Axelrod. “A robot knocked off the Top Hat? Come on, guys. Are you kidding me?”
Welcome to what one exhausted adviser calls the “theater of the absurd,” where a White House is whipsawed by wild, almost unimaginable events that threaten to reshape the public perception of the Obama presidency at every turn. […]
“All you can do is smile at the absurdity of these things piling up,” said someone who spends much of the day with Obama. […]
[P]rivately, Obama advisers talk of being prisoners to uncontrollable events and deeply uncertain about how all of this will play out.
As Orrin Judd adds, “It is simply unacceptable for a president to portray himself as a victim of events rather than taking a leadership role in dealing with them,” but then, we’re all “learning the rules of an unengaged president,” as Mark Steyn writes.
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