The fact that people are seriously discussing the idea that the president of the United States has given up and is pining for retirement is unprecedented in my lifetime. I’m sure the during their last few months in office, most presidents begin mailing it in. But we are two and a half years from the end of the Obama presidency and the world order is collapsing while our borders are disintegrating. Without a strong hand at the helm of the ship of state, the aimless drift of American leadership is causing events to spiral out of control.
Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller penned a column for the Telegraph this weekend that states “Barack Obama has already checked out of his job.” But Lewis isn’t the only commentator who has wondered out loud about the president’s commitment to his job. Peggy Noonan wrote in her Wall Street Journal column earlier this month that Obama appears “above it all” and that his fancy dinners with celebrities and intellectuals as well as his endless rounds of golf present a frightening picture of a president detached from reality and “waiting for history to recognize his greatness.”
Jazz Shaw at Hot Air agrees with that assessment. Shaw points to Obama’s vision that he naively believed would be shared by everyone — “that everyone would, sooner or later, recognize the brilliance of his vision and the structural soundness of his solutions to the planet’s ills and things would truly change.” When they didn’t, Obama walked away.
Lewis, in his Telegraph column, lays out the evidence for Obama’s tanking it:
The fact that the press would find relevance in speculating on Obama’s post-White House residence – and identify California as the kind of scene the future ex-president would want to hang out in when he leaves office – is perhaps telling.
And, indeed, this comes on the heels of multiple reports from outlets such as The New York Times and Politico, detailing how Obama has increasingly been spending his time at trendy restaurants and fancy, late-night dinner parties with celebrities and various intellectuals.
Rubbing elbows with the rich and elite is fine enough. Unfortunately, the work suffers. The degree to which he is now phoning it in – sleepwalking perfunctorily through his second term – is astonishing.
And based on his recent handling of situations much more serious than a possible post-presidential move to sunny California, it seems as if “No Drama Obama” is no longer even worried about keeping up appearances; he doesn’t care enough to fake it.
Consider this: In recent days, a) Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down, apparently by Russian separatists in Ukraine, b) In the Gaza strip, the numbers killed continued to mount as Israelis and Palestinians exchange rocket fire, c) a huge influx of children fleeing Central American poverty and gang warfare swamped America’s southern border, creating a humanitarian crisis. And, oh yeah, d) Christians living in Mosul were given the choice to either convert to Islam or flee the area they have inhabited for nearly two thousand years.
You know what else has happened during this time? a) Obama played many rounds of golf, b) he attended numerous fund-raisers, c) he dined on barbecue in Texas and burgers in Delaware, and d) he almost appeared on the comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night television show in Hollywood.
I say “almost” because the White House finally relented. “We ultimately elected not to have the president do that interview over the course of this trip,” the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, conceded. “And that is at least in part related to the challenges of doing a comedy show in the midst of some of these other more serious matters that the president’s dealing with in the international scene.”
Giving more credence to the Obama check-out theory is that the president surely knows of the rumors and innuendo and has done absolutely nothing to tamp them down. A president who was still engaged and ready for battle would be incensed at charges that he had quit on his office. He would stride to the podium during one of the daily White House press gaggles and lay into the press for even suggesting he was less engaged than before.
Instead, we get pictures of a sleepy Obama talking to an ordinary citizen or a laughing Obama talking about the dead serious issue of the border crisis with Governor Perry. He doesn’t care what people think of him when he plays golf or goes on long vacations at ritzy estates.
A president going through the motions while the rest of the world is blowing up is inherently dangerous. The sycophants around him are only making it worse. They’re probably telling him everything is fine , he’s doing great, and there’s no reason to change.
What they need to do is conduct an intervention before it’s too late.
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