Two presidents in one! John Podhoretz at Commentary: “Obama’s Presidency Hangs by a Thread:”
Japan may be on the verge of an unprecedented catastrophe. Saudi Arabia is all but colonizing Bahrain. Qaddafi is close to retaking Libya, with bloodbath to follow. And, as Jim Geraghty notes, the president of the United States is going on ESPN to talk about the NCAA and delivering speeches today on his rather dull plan to replace No Child Left Behind with No Teenager Left Behind, or something like that.
It’s hard to overstate how poorly Barack Obama is doing in the face of these crises — and I don’t even mean how he’s doing substantively, which is a scandal in itself. I mean how he’s doing politically. Recall how much hay Michael Moore made of the fact that George W. Bush read My Pet Goat for nine minutes in that Florida classroom on 9/11 after being informed that the first plane had struck.
We’re going on four weeks now, or more, that Barack Obama has been reading My Pet Goat.
He is largely notable by his absence, which is itself the result not only of not knowing what to do but also apparently believing it is better for the world if he remains a minor player as a bloodbath approaches in the Middle East and something more ominous seems to be approaching in Japan. When he talks, as he did in Friday’s press conference, he only makes matters more confusing; there is little reassurance that there is a hand anywhere near the tiller.
To which, Jeff Goldstein might respond, so?
He’s done what he [was] designed to do — from the earliest stages of his education on through his studies at Columbia, his tenure as a community organizer, his tutelage under the erstwhile Weatherman, his time in Rev Wright’s church, and his final polishing acts at Harvard, Chicago, and short stints in state and federal government: fundamentally change the US into another Europeanized socialist state run almost entirely by a professional political class and their bureaucratic enforcers.
And he knows the current GOP lacks the political will to roll back those very things he and his fellow travelers have implemented to put the final institutional nails in the republic’s classically liberal coffin.
So, sh*t. Why not just play golf and eat burgers? The f*ck you bitter clingers gonna do about it?
Not much based on the current GOP presidential line-up, which Steve Green compares to the Democrats in 1992 — before Bill Clinton arrived. (Remember the milquetoast line-up of Paul Tsongas and Bob Kerrey?)
Anyone on the right with Clinton’s charisma want to get into the game sometime between now and January?
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