Another brilliant person who doesn’t understand Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day we had Victor Davis Hanson. Now we have Niall Ferguson as another brilliant and often insightful man who doesn’t seem to have a clue about Obama despite seven years of close observation.

It’s a failure of imagination, a line many otherwise smart people refuse to cross. But why? I don’t think it’s just fear of being called “racist,” either, because they’re certainly criticizing Obama and have been for a long time, and such criticism is often enough to trigger the “racist” charge. But apparently both Hanson and Ferguson would rather twist themselves into pretzels to say “fool, Obama’s nothing but a fool” rather than “knave.” Perhaps “knave” seems to them to be tinfoil hat territory, and that’s why they just won’t go there?

This really says it all in terms of what Ferguson is missing:

Those who know the Obama White House’s inner workings wonder why this president, who came into office with next to no experience of foreign policy, has made so little effort to hire strategic expertise.

I don’t know the “White House’s inner workings,” but I haven’t wondered. I noticed the phenomenon at the outset of Obama’s presidency, and Obama gave us the answer right off the bat, too. This was my first piece on the subject (September of 2009), featuring a quote from none other than commenter Artfldgr:

Why might Obama have a tendency to ignore experts, even those he has appointed? Arrogance and hubris on his part would certainly be one explanation, and not a bad one at that. But another phenomenon may be in play, best summed up by this comment made by “Artfldgr”…:

“Expertise has no place in power. It is irrelevant and an opposing force. so no one under the despot can have expertise except for the lowest proles who have no other options and no way to leverage their expertise except in the service of the power above.

…Power loves a servant, and an independent capable person is a power of opposition, not servant. So they move incompetents into place. The incompetents owe all they have, since they can’t do that well on their own. So their morals are easy to corrupt and they know whom they serve.”

Couple that with Obama’s arrogance/hubris, already in clear evidence in April of 2008, when I wrote this post quoting an ominous interview with Obama, and how could Ferguson have failed to notice these signals from Obama, clearly explaining why he didn’t think he needed experts (or, rather, that he was always the most expert expert in the crowd)?:

Ironically, this is an area””foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain.

It’s ironic because this is supposedly the place where experience is most needed to be Commander-in-Chief. Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world…

“I traveled to Pakistan when I was in college”“I knew what Sunni and Shia was [sic] before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee…

And then there was this famous Obama quote:

I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.

Instead of the experts Obama doesn’t think he needs, he surrounds himself with leftists, political operatives, and/or worshipers who agree with him, such as Jarrett:

He knows exactly how smart he is. .”‰.”‰. I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. .”‰.”‰. He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do. He would never be satisfied with what ordinary people do.

Tell me, what need would such a person, with such an opinion of himself, have for conventional “experts,” other than as window-dressing?

In February of 2010, I was still wondering why people don’t get it (in a post about how Obama’s closest advisors are almost all political advisors rather than experts on anything else).
More here (from before his first inauguration) and here, as well as here.

There’s more, but you get the picture. It wasn’t hard to see; it was easy.

In the Ferguson article, he explains that his initial assumption about Obama was that his strategy was to be unlike his predecessor Bush. Ferguson later jettisoned that idea and figured Obama was flailing because he lacked expert advisors. But Ferguson seems determined to ignore the fact that these people have been chosen by Obama over and over again; what’s operating is neither chance nor bad luck. And he ignores Obama’s repeated statements of hubris and arrogance. Ferguson—and so many others—don’t put this all together, nor do they see the overarching goals and patterns of the actual decisions that Obama (or Jarrett and Obama; take your pick) have made—that neither the decisions nor the policies are incoherent, and this is because the Obama administration’s goals are different than they seem, and different from the goals of Obama’s predecessors.

Now, here’s a hypothetical

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Ackler” poses the following hypothetical:

…[S]uppose that tomorrow Obama announced he was canceling the 2016 Election by executive order. Either he would stay in power indefinitely or he would voluntarily cede the Presidency to the anointed Hillary (or Biden, etc) on 1/20/2017. Furthermore, he suspends the 114th Congress immediately. For the remainder of his term, laws will come about through executive order.

To be clear: Obama has not declared martial law, utilized the military or threatened anyone who dissents. Nope. He just announced the above is happening and that’s that.

Yes, there would be an uproar. Immediate calls for impeachment throughout the right of the spectrum. My question is: what of liberals? I’m not thinking of the fire breathing Alinskyite academics/journalists/activist ”“ organizer types (who would cheer him on gleefully). I’m thinking of our ordinary “good German” liberal (“moderate”, ever so moderate!) neighbors and colleagues. How many would raise a fuss, would be shocked, scared and outraged? How many would simply shrug secure in the knowledge that the ends justify the means?

Whether you think Obama capable of such a thing and/or planning such a thing, or whatever you think he would do if it didn’t work out as planned for him, is irrelevant for the purposes of this post. The question is how people would react initially.

Ordinary people, that is, of the liberal and/or LIV persuasion. My guess is that there would be enough of them who would shrug or reluctantly approve, enough that the only real outcry would be among conservatives. Many liberals would justify or excuse Obama’s move by arguments that, after all, something had to be be done, because Congress has accomplished so little and Republicans are so negative and just plain mean.

As I’ve gotten older and older, I’ve come to observe that most people don’t understand the importance of process versus content. That is, the way something is done doesn’t bother them as long as it gets done (that is, if it’s something they want done). Ruthlessness is applauded as strength, tyranny as decisiveness and accomplishment. “After all, he made the trains run on time.”

Report: Iran convicts WaPo journalist Jason Rezaian

The New Neo Posted on by

Meet the new Iran, same as the old Iran:

Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian, imprisoned in Tehran for more than 14 months, has been convicted in an espionage trial that ended in August, Iranian state television reported.

News of a verdict in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court initially came early Sunday, but court spokesman Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei did not specify the judgment. In a state TV report late Sunday, Mohseni-Ejei said definitively that Rezaian, The Post’s correspondent in Tehran since 2012, was found guilty.

But many details remained unknown. Rezaian faced four charges ”” the most serious of which was espionage ”” and it was not immediately clear whether he was convicted of all charges. Rezaian and The Post have strongly denied the accusations, and his case has drawn wide-ranging denunciations including statements from the White House and media freedom groups.

Statements from the White House. That’ll do the trick.

Rezaian is a dual Iranian/American citizen born in this country to an Iranian father and an American mother, but he was tried in Iran as an Iranian. For a while, reports have been “floated” that the Iranians would be willing to exchange him for a couple of Iranian prisoners held in American jails for violating sanctions, but that hasn’t gone anywhere so far. Previous Americans held by Iran have been released after the payment of hundreds of thousands of dollars in “bail.”

The WaPo article, and the statement by the paper’s executive editor, manage to report on—and condemn—this latest development re Rezaian without once mentioning the missed opportunity of the Iran deal negotiations, where the Obama administration refused to even discuss matters such as Rezaian’s release. But this paragraph, which comes at the very end of the long WaPo article, hints at what is quite obvious:

With hard-liners under Khamenei, the country’s ultimate religious and political authority, firmly in control of key levers of power, the case served to underscore the relative impotence of the Rouhani government in judicial and national security matters.

That’s the end of the article. The paper decides not to draw the obvious conclusion, which is that Obama’s deal supposedly rests on the idea that the Rouhani government and other so-called “moderates” have some power to change things in Iran, which seems to be either a lie or a delusion.

Some advice for Marco Rubio

The New Neo Posted on by

I think some of it is good advice.

Kurt Schlichter wrote it, and it goes this:

I would be supporting you today except for the amnesty thing. There are a lot of Republicans like me. Here’s how you win us back.

First, quit the denial. You supported amnesty ”¦ stop what you are about to say. You are about to say, “But it wasn’t amnesty,” and saying that is going to set me off…

Say this: “I wanted to try and find a compromise to solve the illegal immigration problem. I was too trusting of Chuck Schumer and the Democrats – a mistake I won’t make again – and I let myself become a salesman for what was essentially amnesty. I was wrong.”

Would that do it for you?

Or would he have to add (as the author of the piece insists) that all illegal immigrants must go home (although how that it to be accomplished is never quite specified, either by Trump or anyone else)? And—as Schlicter also suggests—would Rubio also have to pledge to build an actual physical wall rather than any sort of virtual one, or partly virtual one?

Would that do it for you?

Or will you never trust him, never ever ever, despite his obvious electoral pluses?

Hillary is still way ahead in the Democratic race

The New Neo Posted on by

For all her political wounds, Hillary Clinton is still miles ahead in the race for the Democratic nomination. I’ve never felt her standing to be seriously threatened by anything.

Quite literally, anything. Although Clinton is very different in personality from Barack Obama (or at least, presentation of personality, which is mostly what the public sees), she excites/inspires the same sort of devotion in many of her supporters, to wit: she could eat a puppy raw on the steps of the White House, and they would call her a gourmet.

Why? Why is this? Many people would answer that liberal and leftist Democrats are so eager to see the first female president (who of course must be a Democratic in order to be counted as a female) that they are willing to ignore all of Clinton’s negatives. That’s certainly a huge part of it; huge. But I think there some other factors that are not insignificant, either.

Fame. Hillary Clinton has been a public figure—and a major one at that—for nearly a quarter of a century. Her name recognition is through the roof.

And for most if not all of those years she has been hyped as many things, but the main one is “smart.” Actually, “brilliant.” Like Obama. We don’t have to consider whether she (or he) is actually all that head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest smart. What matters is that it is what we’ve been told for umpteen million years, and a great many Democrats believe it’s absolutely true.

Hillary was always adept at political coverup and evasion. But she used to think a number of things before she watched Obama’s presidency. She used to think she had to present herself as somewhat of a centrist in order to keep the American people in her corner. No more. She used to think she had to answer at least some questions in order to keep the press at bay. No more. She used to think a certain modicum of traditional foreign policy hawkishness was in order. No more.

Also, for many Democrats Clinton’s very name conjures up a happy time for them, the Clinton years. The Lewinsky scandal meant nothing to them except as a demonstration of how mean and underhanded Republicans can be in their attempts to “get” a sitting Democratic president, and Hillary’s election would be a wonderful FU to the nasty old GOP.

Last but far from least, Democrats have got nobody else—and they know it.

Happy post-modern, Indigenous Peoples, Columbus Day

The New Neo Posted on by

There, did I cover enough bases? Did I get it right (I mean left)?

Like many things, Columbus Day has evolved. And here’s a discussion of the postmodern Columbus Day (from Dr. Sanity, circa 2009).

As for me, since I live up in New England and the weather has been good, I’ll should just play it safe and call it Leafpeepers Day. They’re out in force now (both the leaves and the human peepers).

I plan to take an official leafpeeping drive some weekday this week in order to try to avoid the worst of the vehicular congestion over the holiday itself.

Here are some photos I’ve taken during previous New England falls. The first isn’t a leaf, it’s a berry in its fall raiment. But let’s not get technical:

100_2449-001

The most spectacular colors are always the reds, which come first:

100_2437-001

In the mist:

100_2442-002

Fini:

100_2483-001

The very extraordinary Anthony Dowell

The New Neo Posted on by

Anthony Dowell was a British dancer of rare qualities. I write “was” because, although he’s still alive, he’s in his seventies. But those who saw him in his heyday—and that includes me—remember.

Dowell wasn’t known for bravura technique, although his technique was certainly strong enough. He was never showy, unless it’s “showy” to demonstrate elegance and lyricism with every move. His line was simple, clean, and uncluttered, and his musicality was never rushed or hurried.

In this variation for Siegfried (otherwise known as “the Prince”) from Act I of “Swan Lake,” the choreography has never appealed to me. It’s painfully slow—and I mean painfully, because it requires tremendous concentration, control, and strength to create a legato line that’s so drawn out in time. The dancer can’t hide under flash; he is completely exposed, and nothing can be jerky or harsh. Dowell turns it into a tour de force of style and acting; his every movement expresses some understated emotion with the utmost refinement and introspection. Dowell dances as though for himself alone, lost in thought, and he manages to express the yearning and vague enuii the prince feels as he is on the brink of something, although he knows not what. We know he is about to meet his tragic destiny—as was Romeo before the ball, poised on the edge of a similar moment:

…my mind misgives
Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night’s revels, and expire the term
Of a despisé¨d life closed in my breast
By some vile forfeit of untimely death.
But he that hath the steerage of my course,
Direct my sail. On, lusty gentlemen.

Next is a recent clip of Dowell coaching Royal Ballet dancers in the same ballet. This section they are rehearsing is at the very end of the ballet, where the Prince and the Swan Queen fight the magician’s power and choose to commit suicide together (I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t know, if you know anything about Swan Lake at all). Dowell’s coaching isn’t about the steps, it’s about the emotion, the timing, the phrasing, the mime, the emphasis, the connection between the two characters. There’s not a moment that’s careless or thoughtless; every motion expresses something. Here Dowell works just as hard as the dancers, maybe harder, to create a great work of art, and I think you’ll agree that he succeeds. It’s one of the finest examples of coaching I’ve ever seen:

And here is Dowell in his prime, dancing this same section with the great Natalia Makarova. You can see the moves he talked about years later when coaching—how he hangs onto his lover, how he almost never lets her out of his sight, how they pull at each others’ hands. The boat at the end represents their ascension to heaven, by the way; it doesn’t mean they survived and took a ride on the swan boats at Boston’s Public Garden:

Editorials and foreign policy: what a difference four years makes (not exactly)

The New Neo Posted on by

The NY Times is having one of its rare intermittent lapses into (relatively mild) sanity. Don’t worry; it’s unlikely to last long. But, like it or hate it, the Times still moves a great many liberal Democrats, who still consider it the paper of record:

The Obama administration’s $500 million initiative to train and arm so-called moderate rebels to take on the Islamic State never seemed promising when it was rolled out last year. Having acknowledged that this plan has failed ”” largely because Syrian opposition groups are more interested in taking on President Bashar al-Assad ”” the White House on Friday unveiled a plan that is even more incoherent and fraught with risk.

The Pentagon will stop putting rebel fighters through training in neighboring countries, a program that was designed to ensure that fighters were properly vetted before they could get their hands on American weapons and ammunition. The new plan will simply funnel weapons through rebel leaders who are already in the fight and appear to be making some headway.

The initial plan was dubious. The new one is hallucinatory, and it is being rolled out as the war enters a more perilous phase now that Russia has significantly stepped up its military support of Mr. Assad’s forces.

From “dubious” to “hallucinatory”; those are pretty strong words for the Times re Obama. Why now? What about Syria has got the Times’ goat, as compared to the thousands of other dubious and hallucinatory (and worse) things this administration has done?

Note how the Times just sneaks in a word or two about that pesky Russia stuff right at the very end there. I wonder whether the editors remember their own words from just four and half years ago:

Two decades after the end of the cold war, Mitt Romney still considers Russia to be America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.” His comments display either a shocking lack of knowledge about international affairs or just craven politics. Either way, they are reckless and unworthy of a major presidential contender.

The Times gets to throw around a lot of words and a lot of adjectives; that’s what the Times is good at. But when does the Times have to answer for its own dubious, hallucinatory, reckless, and unworthy editorial stances? Some of you might say they already have gotten their comeuppance, in their sinking revenues. Ah, but but I think you might misunderstand their aim. They’re business people and would like to make some money, to be sure; but far more important is the way they serve the liberal/leftist cause as its principal and hoary propaganda organ.

That, they have done quite nicely. And, despite temporary glitches such as today’s editorial criticizing Obama, that status is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

A very ominous sign

The New Neo Posted on by

Suicide terrorists have killed at least 86 (probably more) at a Turkish peace rally in Ankara:

The explosion, which caused chaos and bloodshed, took place during a peace march involving, among others, the pro-Kurdish HDP, or People’s Democratic Party.

The casualties, reported by the interior ministry, consisted primarily of people gathered outside the main train station to attend a lunchtime demonstration to call for an end to the renewed conflict between the Kurdish PKK organization and the Turkish government.

Candidates for the perpetrators are Kurdish separatists or ISIS. I’d place my money on ISIS.

The prime miniester of Turkey had this to say:

Davutoglu called for three days of national mourning and urged the country to fight terrorism.

“This is an attack that does not target a specific group; it is an attack on the entire nation and (an) attack on our unity. Turkey is a country that has managed to maintain peace in the region,” he said.

Why would ISIS strike in Turkey now? Here’s one theory:

Turkey has avoided conflict with ISIS, perhaps in exchange for the release earlier this year of dozens of Turkish hostages seized in the Iraqi city of Mosul…

However, Turkey recently changed its stance and allowed the U.S. to launch strikes on ISIS from the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey.

The setting of the mass murder—a peace rally—is particularly ironic. These bombers spit on peace. Immediately, a phrase from this speech by an American patriot (in a different cause) came to mind:

Gentlemen may cry, peace, peace – but there is no peace. The war is actually begun.

And quite some time ago.

Obama showed the way to executive tyranny, and Hillary plans to follow

The New Neo Posted on by

I wrote about this topic yesterday in discussing the Matt Yglesias piece about Hillary Clinton’s ruthless use of power. Today proves that Yglesias is not alone. In fact, his praise for the idea of a president “liberally” using executive action to get around Congressional opposition was a bit tame and restrained compared to this about the coming Hillary dictatorship written by Jonathan Allen.

Obama’s been boiling the American frog for six and a half years now, slowly but surely, and the public has gotten nice and cooked. Now it’s ready for more of the same, please, and ready to applaud it. Ends justify means; doesn’t everybody know that? After all, those obstinate nasty Republicans won’t do what the Democratic president wants, just because they’re the majority in Congress. How dare they!:

Sure, there are some Democrats who chew their nails when thinking about Clinton’s Machiavellian side, but most are nonetheless glad to see signs that she’s not going to get rolled by a Republican Congress. The scope of what she’s promising to do by herself is unprecedented from a top candidate for the presidency.

The view from inside the campaign, said one official, is that it’s important to be specific about how Clinton would use the unilateral powers of the presidency “because of the level of frustration” Democrats have felt when Obama’s priorities have been blocked by Republicans in Congress. Even if Democrats are able to elect one of their own as president in 2016, he or she is all but assured of facing a Congress in which one or two of the chambers are controlled by Republicans.

It used to be that when the American people expressed their wishes for a certain party to control Congress, and a president was from a different party, that president took it to mean that he had to work with Congress. Clinton’s husband Bill—remember him?—sometimes actually seemed to understand that principle. Little did he know that it was okay to do away with it. But Obama has shown the Democrats how. This is the way it is now, according to Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden:

“I think Democrats are definitely in a more feisty mood than they’ve been in the past, so they’re willing to take on more fights with the Republicans,” Tanden said. “I don’t think they’re concerned that doing an executive action offends the other side.”

It’s not about offending the “other side.” It’s about respecting the Constitution as well as the will of the American people.

The Democrats don’t need an enabling act; they’ll do it without one. There used to be a consensus between the parties that certain lines were not to be crossed, because the foundation of the republic rested on them and no one wanted to undermine what was one of the best governments on earth (or, as Churchill might say, the worst government on earth except for all the others). But that political social contract is now officially over.

[NOTE: I realize that presidents have long used executive actions for many things. But—and correct me if I’m wrong—until Obama, they did not habitually use them to accomplish aims that a majority Congress [addition: of the opposing party] had explicitly rejected, in arenas that were usually considered under Congressional control.]