Quite some time ago I came to the point of having difficulty reading Obama’s speeches and interviews in full. I don’t mean cognitive difficulty; I understand them well enough. I mean a weariness at the overwhelming combination of factual errors, conceptual flaws, deceptive characterizations, and arrogant preenings that appear in nearly every sentence.
Critiquing his words thoroughly would be a full-time job, and what’s the point? On the right most people already get the picture, and on the left most people still think he’s a great sage.
So I confess I have not read Obama’s interview with Thomas L. Friedman in the Times today in its entirety. What I have read is all the commentary on memeorandum from both left and right, including generous and lengthy excerpts of Obama’s statements from the Friedman article itself.
That process is sobering enough, and I was stone-cold sober already. Most of what Obama said to Friedman conveys an attitude towards the geopolitical world that can only be described as delusional and dangerous. However, if you go to the blogs on the left that, according to memeorandum, have discussed the Friedman/Obama interview, you’ll see almost nothing but high praise coming from their readers.
A brilliant man, that Obama, the best president in their lifetimes.
Yesterday I wrote a post entitled “Peace Prize in Our Time” which discussed the mindset of the left:
The worldwide events of the last few years underscore how putting the “can’t we all just get along?” crowd in charge is one of the surest paths toward chaos and war… Heart of Darkness is not something they want to acknowledge, and so they believe they can wish it or will it or talk it away…
It seems like madness to me.
Although I wrote those words the day before Obama’s Friedman interview, the interview quite nicely illustrates what I said (whether Obama actually believes his own words or not is another question). His interview is a monument to the “can’t we all just get along?” principle, writ large on a world stage. It is indeed madness—a madness that’s been tried many times before, and found wanting—but a madness that apparently appeals to his constituents and has the added benefit of justifying his passivity in the face of evil:
Obama made clear that he is only going to involve America more deeply in places like the Middle East to the extent that the different communities there agree to an inclusive politics of no victor/no vanquished..
Madness, as I said.
Obama doesn’t use the word “evil” for ISIS; that’s not his style. His message is basically that he held back from destroying ISIS (an axis of the axis of evil if there ever was one) when it would have been relatively simple because he wanted to teach Maliki and Iraq a lesson that they should stand on their own two feet and that they should be more inclusive:
…[T]he Kurdish region is functional the way we would like to see. It is tolerant of other sects and other religions in a way that we would like to see elsewhere. So we do think it’s important to make sure that that space is protected, but, more broadly, what I’ve indicated is that I don’t want to be in the business of being the Iraqi air force. I don’t want to get in the business for that matter of being the Kurdish air force, in the absence of a commitment of the people on the ground to get their act together and do what’s necessary politically to start protecting themselves and to push back against ISIL.”
The reason, the president added, “that we did not just start taking a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as ISIL came in was because that would have taken the pressure off of [Prime Minister Nuri Kamal] al-Maliki.” That only would have encouraged, he said, Maliki and other Shiites to think: ” ”˜We don’t actually have to make compromises. We don’t have to make any decisions. We don’t have to go through the difficult process of figuring out what we’ve done wrong in the past. All we have to do is let the Americans bail us out again. And we can go about business as usual.’”
In other words, “I didn’t remove the cancerous tumor because I wanted the patient to learn to eat more fruits and vegetables before that.” Of course, if the tumor kills the patient, and then metastasizes to other parts of the world—well, too bad. The lesson is the most important thing.
Most liberals seem to have no difficulty whatsoever in applauding this stance. But California Senator Diane Feinstein appears to be one of the last holdouts of relative sanity on the liberal side:
Feinstein called for a broader military campaign against ISIL, not just the targeted missions authorized by the president.
“It takes an army to defeat an army, and I believe that we either confront ISIL now or we will be forced to deal with an even stronger enemy in the future. Inaction is no longer an option. I support actions by the administration to coordinate efforts with Iraq and other allies to use our military strength and targeting expertise to the fullest extent possible,” Feinstein said.
She’s a lonely voice among Democrats, as far as I can see.
If you can bear to read the entire Obama/Friedman interview, be my guest. But I’ll just close with an excerpt that features one of Obama’s signature outrageously inappropriate and profoundly hypocritical comparisons:
At the end of the day, the president mused, the biggest threat to America ”” the only force that can really weaken us ”” is us. We have so many things going for us right now as a country ”” from new energy resources to innovation to a growing economy ”” but, he said, we will never realize our full potential unless our two parties adopt the same outlook that we’re asking of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds or Israelis and Palestinians: No victor, no vanquished and work together.
“Our politics are dysfunctional,” said the president, and we should heed the terrible divisions in the Middle East as a “warning to us: societies don’t work if political factions take maximalist positions. And the more diverse the country is, the less it can afford to take maximalist positions.”
While he blamed the rise of the Republican far right for extinguishing so many potential compromises, Obama also acknowledged that gerrymandering, the Balkanization of the news media and uncontrolled money in politics ”” the guts of our political system today ”” are sapping our ability to face big challenges together, more than any foreign enemy. “Increasingly politicians are rewarded for taking the most extreme maximalist positions,” he said, “and sooner or later, that catches up with you.”
So this is uniter Obama, he of the 2004 convention speech. The persona that’s been revealed as a lie countless times, Obama being the single person most responsible for our “dysfunctional” and divisive politics, champion of the “maximalist positions,” he who can’t resist calling out Republicans on the right as responsible for his own failures to even attempt a compromise, the man who barely knows the meaning of the word “compromise” in his own dealings with the right.
