Bret Stephens thinks so, anyway.
And if you look through the comments section to his article, you’ll notice how few of the commenters seem to have a clue what neocons actually stand for. No surprise there.
[ADDENDUM: Dr. Sanity has more to say about the matter.]
The always-fascinating Richard Fernandez muses on whether we are witnessing the dying of the Left:
Some months ago it became evident that blunders were piling on so fast, and they were of such enormity that they fed each other, like a patient facing multiple organ failure. The Left was self-medicating itself so catastrophically, and smashing up so many things so quickly that there simply wasn’t enough outrage in the world to even keep track of it. Like a vast wave toppling over, the very weight of its accumulated blunders has reduced everyone ”” including its cadres and the conservatives, almost to the role of spectators. I wondered in comments last August whether it was actually safe to asssume that the Left was “too big to fail” or whether its sheer size simply multiplied the destruction it brought to bear upon itself ”” and on others…
It is events in the United States that have really provoked the crisis. European socialism was fantasy viable only while the US successfully performed the role of global system administrator. With Barack Obama crashing subsystem after subsystem, the socialist appendages are powering down. Without free energy from the capitalist system they despise, socialism is indeed doomed. What no one anticipated was how quickly the end might come. It would be really interesting if the key problem in the next few years turned out to be not about how to defeat the left, but how to survive the maelstrom left by its sinking.
I’m not at all sure what will happen—which makes me no different from most people. We cannot foresee the future. But in the present, there are rumblings of discontent. The question is how deep they go.
I am a student of this sort of ideological change—it’s one of the main things I write about. And one thing I’ve learned is to have a healthy respect for how difficult it is for most people to abandon an entire philosophy, a way of looking at the world that is deeply entrenched and widely shared. For true believers, whatever failures the Obama administration has experienced can be chalked up to racist teabaggers, the rot of the capitalist system itself, his own personal failings, or sabotage by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and their like playing up to the gullible bitter clingers of America.
But I do think that Fernandez is onto something here, especially in his comments about the European socialist dream only being viable because it was backed by the US and its very different system. It’s something like the situation with pacifists—they can only exist if protected by a larger society willing to use force to protect itself and the pacifists too.
If the Left is failing, it may be a case of “be careful what you wish for” combined with “give them enough rope and they will hang themselves.” Every theory of government is only an abstraction until put into practice. Communism may have seemed like a good deal until its full flowering into tyranny was demonstrated; witness the many American Communists who thought they had an answer to the woes of capitalism demonstrated by the Depression, but dropped out of the Party after Stalin’s crimes were revealed.
Leftism may be demonstrating its own limitations by finally coming to power and needing to perform in the real world. Leftism had been on the outside looking in ever since the Reagan years. Clinton, the one Democratic president during that time, pulled back from a full liberal agenda because he realized there was no stomach for it in the America of the 90s. But during the Bush years, the distortions of the press as well as Bush’s own flaws combined to work liberals up to a fever pitch of protest and criticism, and the backlash from his administration created an environment in which for the first time since the Carter years liberals and the Left gained powerful control of the executive and both branches of the legislature.
This result has been that, ever since January, we’ve gotten to see what Leftists really want, because they concluded they had a mandate (and/or the power) to get it. So far, Americans haven’t been too happy with the sight. If this trend continues, and especially if much of the liberal agenda gets passed and has negative repercussions for the economy and our security, more Americans will grow a lot more unhappy.
Will this end up discrediting the Leftist agenda and approach as a whole? I think it would at least cause a temporary backlash. But people are fickle, and generations and memory are short. I’m afraid that all it might take for things to reverse, and for the Left to flourish again, would be a few terms of conservative power with its inevitable excesses and mistakes, as well as the fact that no government can solve the problems inherent in living.
Leftist thought is inherently seductive. It promises a utopia, or close to it, and its siren song sounds good to those who don’t study economics and history (and even to some who do). I fear that the lessons of history must be relearned over and over.
The reaction of no small number of pundits on the Left to the Polanski case is to recommend that we let bygones be bygones. After all, he’s a famous artist, has lived a long life, the offense occurred ages ago, the victim wants to drop it—and after all she was a 13-year old sexually active temptress at the time.
In answer to those who wonder what’s up with these people, I submit the following explanations for their point of view:
(1) moral relativism run amok. There are no objective standards of behavior. Who are we to judge, anyway?
(2) worship of the elite by the elite, or the would-be elite (see also this)
(3) the sexualization of children. You can see it everywhere: fashion, entertainment, and in any school in town. And yes, it’s a very slippery slope.
(4) the desire to be seen as a spiritually evolved human being, a forgiving sort who is far above the primitive desire of others for revenge and retribution rather than peace and love (it’s so Old Testament, you know)
(5) the end of the idea that society is a player in the game, an entity with an interest in setting standards for human behavior
[ADDENDUM: And why does this development somehow not surprise me? But thank goodness the rank and file liberals at HuffPo and Salon don’t happen to agree with their journalist “betters” that Polanski should be let off the hook.]
I’m not a Hillary Clinton fan. But I must say she has surprised me with the depth of her subservience to the Obama foreign policy vision, and her ability to compromise whatever integrity she might have had left as she goes about doing so.
Of course, maybe she never actually had a foreign policy vision of her own to begin with. Maybe her more muscular foreign policy statements during the campaign were just strategic political positioning. But if any of it actually was sincere, that’s all gone now.
Hillary was one of Obama’s very first Cabinet appointments, announced not long after his election. It seemed a transparently political appointment even at the time, a way to placate a strong rival while at the same time keep her from being a threat. It was a good example of the principle expressed in LBJ’s famous statement about J. Edgar Hoover: “I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than have him outside the tent pissing in.”
Although Hillary’s gender makes the colorful phrase a little difficult to picture, you get the idea: to co-opt a difficult person by having him/her on your side.
Understand that I’m not blaming Obama’s foreign policy debacles on Hillary’s influence; that responsibility is his alone. But Obama’s naming of Hillary as Secretary of State in the first place shows not only what a wholly political animal he is, but also his utter disdain for the need for expertise in the field. He also probably calculated that someone more experienced and knowledgeable in that arena than Hillary would be likely to give him more trouble and disagree with his policies even more, and that someone less politically ambitious than she would be more likely to resign in protest sooner.
In Obama’s eyes, Hillary may have had the perfect combination of qualities (ignorance and ambition) for the job. And so far, his faith in her ability to be his willing handmaiden no matter what abomination she’s forced to implement has been well rewarded.
Obama lack of interest in conventional expertise is reflected in his boundless confidence in his own knowledge of foreign affairs, despite his own extreme inexperience. I wrote the following about this flaw of Obama’s way back in April of 2008, noting the following extraordinarily juvenile, ignorant, and arrogant statement of his:
…[F]oreign 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. This I know…[W]hen I speak about having lived in Indonesia for four years, having family that is impoverished in small villages in Africa”“–knowing the leaders is not important–”“what I know is the people. . . .”
“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. . . .”
Although I am in complete agreement with Obama that experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world, neither is a trip to Pakistan as a college student nor several years spent as a child in Indonesia—and neither of those have anything whatsoever to do with understanding geopolitical realities, power plays, strategy, and diplomacy.
Obama could have made up for his deficits by appointing as Secretary of State a Democrat with a background in world affairs (of course, there was always the danger that it would be former president Jimmy Carter, so at least we dodged that particular bullet). Instead, Obama chose to appoint someone who was as devoid of experience in the field as Obama himself. He must have thought he neither needed nor wanted much help from a Secretary of State. And if he actually has gotten any from Hillary, my guess is that he’s ignored it.
What will Hillary do now? I can’t figure out her game plan, but my sense is that she feels she may have miscalculated in taking on this job. I don’t believe she bargained for her relative powerlessness as Secretary of State, or to what depths Obama would make her sink. Although she’s had a certain amount of experience with men humiliating her (Bill comes to mind), what’s going on now must sting.
Hillary appears to be caught in a trap of Obama’s devising. She can’t become a rogue Secretary, defying the President—at least, if she did so, she wouldn’t last long in the post. The real question is why she would want to continue in it under the present circumstances. It’s hard to see how her current state could lead her to a presidency of her own some day; the window of opportunity for that seems to have passed. But if she quit, where would she go and what would she do?
Hillary’s old Senate seat is not up for grabs, unfortunately for her, and being out of power (even if her power right now is illusory) is not her cup of tea. The New York governorship might be available if she quit and challenged Paterson, but somehow I don’t think she has much interest in that job. Moreover, if she were to abandon her present post so soon, her own party would probably turn on her as having been a traitor to the Obama administration because of her personal ambition.
The only chance I see for Hillary to free herself from Obama’s web is to bide her time. If Obama weakens more and more, and his unpopularity rises even with Democrats, quitting at that point could make her a heroine and position her for a primary challenge against him in 2012, as well as allowing her to claim experience in foreign affairs from her stint as Secretary. But if that’s her intent, before that moment comes she will have to swallow more and more pride and do more and more of Obama’s distasteful bidding, which will further weaken her. And that may be part of the web that Obama has intentionally spun for her.
Michael Totten makes a rare detour from Middle Eastern venues to write an insightful piece about US sanctions on Honduras. Totten points out what the Obama administration seems not to have even considered—the consequences of its threats:
Sanctions are supposed to be temporary. Targeted countries are always told what they can do to restore the status quo ante. Iran, for instance, can dismantle its nuclear-weapons program. Syria can cease and desist its support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Saddam Hussein, while he still ruled Iraq, had the option of admitting weapons inspectors.
Honduras, though, will have no way out if the interim government doesn’t return Zelaya to power before his term ends in January. Because the Honduran constitution prohibits him and every other president from serving more than one term, it won’t be legally possible for Honduras to do what’s demanded of it after the end of this year. Unlike Iraq, Iran, and Syria, it will be isolated and trapped under sanctions indefinitely.
Whoops! I can only conclude that Obama and his advisers didn’t think ahead. Or, if they did, they assumed the following:
(1) Honduras would knuckle under to their bullying, and/or (2) a threat is just a threat: empty. If they haven’t kept so many other of their promises, how many people would notice if they didn’t keep this one? At some future date after the election, they’d just pull an Emily Litella, lift the sanctions, and say “never mind”; and/or (3) so what if the sanctions continue indefinitely? Who cares about the people of Honduras and their problems?
…but Kate Harding has saved me the trouble by writing essentially what I was thinking, and probably doing a better job of it than I would have.
I will add that the attitudes of those who would whitewash Polanski’s sorry crime and make excuses for him are not only wrong, but an example of the precipitous decline of what used to be known as Western Civilization.
A couple of legal points: it doesn’t matter what the victim wants at this point. It never does, except in the sentencing phase at the judge’s discretion, because one of the differences between civil and criminal law is that criminal acts are considered a crime against society as a whole.
There is also no proper legal sentence for a crime except the one handed out by the courts. “He’s suffered enough in other ways” is hogwash. If the court decides to take this into consideration and be lenient in the sentencing phase, fine. But that’s the court’s prerogative.
There are many sorts of judgments and many kinds of offenses. A victim can choose to forgive his/her perpetrator, but that’s on a personal level.
And a perpetrator can receive forgiveness from God, either in this life or the next; that’s between that person and the deity. But that’s divine law and divine justice. We happen to reside on earth, where justice is administered (albeit imperfectly) by our legal system. And that’s the system that Polanski had managed to evade for so long, and which may have finally caught up with him.
The wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine.
Watch this; it’s spooky-scary.
Obama’s fixed smile is described thusly (the nearly-fixed head position, which in my opinon is even more revealing, is not specifically mentioned):
Ladies and gentlemen, your President is a robot. Or a wax sculpture. Maybe a cardboard cutout. All I know is no human being has a photo smile this amazingly consistent.
Perhaps Obama was merely getting ready for Halloween a few weeks early, and was wearing his favorite costume: an Obama mask.
And lest you think all of this is sort of trivial, I submit that it is not. Obama is easily the most controlled president I’ve ever seen in terms of his personal style. Although supposedly cool, there is no looseness there, no moment when you think you see a glimpse into the true man in a relaxed state when he has let down his guard.
In general, politicians who would be president must exercise more public control over themselves than ordinary people. But Obama is in a class by himself in this regard; his control is more complete and therefore more eerie. Even gestures that might appear to be spontaneous (witness these) are, IMHO, carefully planned to appeal to a certain audience that “gets” it.
Some people are just naturally subdued, and I think that description fits Obama as well. But there’s much more than that going on with the demeanor of our current president. Anyone who attempts this complete a level of control is hiding something. In Obama’s case, I believe it is his essential far-Leftist self: who he is and what he means to do.
That’s the Obama mask he wears, and he cannot take it off without revealing more than he wishes us to know right now. Maybe some day.
And now let me go all literary on you and quote T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock:”
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
[NOTE: One of the very few people who seems to know Obama—if “know” is defined as having had a great many dealings with him before he ran for office—is Richard Epstein, a law professor at University of Chicago. The following excerpts are from an interview Epstein gave in early April of 2009 (and remember, this is from a guy who has known him personally for quite some time):
Obama has the world’s most perfect human disposition. He can sit in a room with you, he can listen to you, and he can talk to you, and you really get the sense of a man who is in complete self control.
But, that’s the very feature that makes him so hard to read. He is so much in self control, that if he doesn’t want you to know in a conversation what he is thinking, you can be there for 30 minutes and never be able to figure out what he believes. You can only have him question you about what you believe. He keeps all of his thoughts to himself.
Robinson: So, he is like Leonard Nimoy, like Spock, the Vulcan in Star Trek.
Epstein: He basically knows how to keep that shield over his face.
Epstein also expresses little doubt about one of the questions that keeps coming up in discussions of Obama: is he an ideologue, or just a follower and/or a narcissist? From the interview:
Robinson: You are quoted in the Boston Globe, “I like Obama but I reject the suggestion that he is an intellectual. He is an activist merely mimicking the mannerisms of an intellectual.” How good is Obama’s mind?
Epstein: His mind is pretty good, but it is a clever “means-ends” mind. He has never written a scholarly article in his entire life…
His positions are not close to the middle, and so he sees no reason to compromise with Republicans unless and until they can mount a veto threat in the Senate. He is very, very dogmatic about his substantive positions. He knows what he believes and he knows why he believes it, and it is extremely difficult for people on the outside to change his mind.
]
[ADDENDUM: Stuart Schneiderman of “Had Enough Therapy?” adds some further reflections on Obama’s mask.]
Obama has an interesting take on the idea of victory. Watch (and by the way, kudos to the journalist asking the question):
To hear this question and then go immediately to a sports metaphor is surpassingly strange, and deeply revealing on Obama’s part. He simply does not think in terms of military or geopolitical victory.
Repeat this question to 100 people on the street, and I would bet that almost all would at least understand that it’s about victory in a war or quasi-war (either a cold or hot war, but a war) and not sport. All Obama had to do to reject the premise of the question and show that he at least comprehended its basis was to say “we’re not at war with Iran, so I don’t want to talk about victory.” You could then either agree or disagree.
Obama is free to reject the concept of war (and therefore victory) over Iran, and I’m free to think it’s dangerous of him to do so.
To be clear: the subject matter here is the development of nuclear weapons by Iran. Iran is indisputably a country that by its own admission has been our sworn and determined enemy for thirty years, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike, and has sponsored terrorism around the world aimed at our friends. Iran repeatedly calls us the Great Satan, and the war that it has waged all these long years has been global, and both cold and hot (the latter through surrogates).
Iran’s present intent regarding the development of nuclear weaponry is a skirmish in that long-lasting ongoing conflict, a cold and sometimes hot war that threatens to become much more hot. But whatever you call it, it sure ain’t football—and no one is suggesting it might be. But it suits Obama’s purposes to suggest that they are.
[ADDENDUM: Meanwhile, in other news, Iran seeks victory.]
I don’t usually post a series of links. But lately news has come so fast and furious, and so much of it seems important to know about, that it can’t all be discussed at length. At least, not by me.
So, thanks to many commenters who have provided the following, which I do hereby list:
What’s in that amnesty bill?. This might be a good video to forward, if you’re into that.
India seems to be another friendly nation that Obama has snubbed while earnestly sucking up to enemies.
Obama’s been so busy doing things like appearing on the Letterman show that he’s only had time to speak to Afghanistan operations General McChrystal once in the seventy days since he appointed him as part of a supposed offensive there. But we should not be surprised; after all, Obama the Senator was chair of a subcommittee that would have had oversight of NATO involvement in the Afghan War, and he couldn’t be bothered to hold a single hearing. So I guess you might say that talking to McChrystal once is a kind of progress.
Climate change and that hockey stick.
Why does Obama keep snubbing the British? This article asks the question, but it doesn’t quite answer it. Personally, I think his behavior just one more example of the Obama Doctrine, which is to snub friends and kiss up to enemies. But those of us who question it are just “silly,” according to Robert Gibbs (“silly” has long been one of Obama’s favorite words for questions he doesn’t want to answer and opposition he doesn’t want to credit).
Last but never least, another fine essay from Victor Davis Hanson.
[ADDENDUM: Here’s another important cost-saving move by Obama. Offensive.]
A man, no plan, a war, Afghanistan.
That may not be a proper palindrome, but it describes the relation between President Obama and the Afghan War:
According to McClatchy, some members of McChrystal’s staff said they don’t understand why Obama called Afghanistan a “war of necessity” but still hasn’t given them the resources they need to do what is necessary.
Good question. We should all be asking the same thing.
Amir Taheri devotes a NY Post column to it, in a piece entitled: “Obama’s plan? What plan?”
The subtitle of Taneri’s column is “Despite his claims, the president has no Afghan strategy.” Taheri goes on to say that Obama repeatedly promised during his campaign that:
…he’d unveil a new “stronger, smarter and comprehensive [Afghan war] strategy.”
In March, in one of those solemn-looking occasions in which he excels, Obama said that the new strategy, which he did not elaborate, was already in place. He speeded up the troop buildup ordered by the Bush administration, and a few weeks later named a new commander for Afghanistan.
That commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, lost no time in revealing that the Obama administration had no specific strategy and that his first task was to work one out. By the end of August, he’d drafted a “new strategy” and submitted it to the Pentagon in the form of a 66-page report that included specific steps for moving ahead, as well as a request for still more troops.
Then, nothing happened ”” until someone leaked the report.
One can only imagine the general’s surprise when President Obama, asked to comment on the leaked report, said he wouldn’t allow himself to be rushed into sending more troops, as requested by McChrystal, pending the development of a “new strategy.”
One might say, Wait a minute! We thought you had a strategy before you were elected, when you castigated Bush’s performance in Afghanistan ”” or at least in March, when you announced “the new, smarter strategy,” or in June, when you appointed a commander to “carry out the new strategy.”
What of McChrystal’s proposed “new strategy” spelled out in his report? No, the president says he’s still looking for a strategy.
I submit that Obama has a strategy. It’s just not the one listeners might have thought he meant when he made all those declarations about winning the war—which even at the time they were made should have been seen as what they obviously were: so much campaign puffery.
What is this strategy? It’s one Obama uses for many issues, not just Afghanistan. It goes something like this:
(1) say whatever you think will get you votes, even if you don’t mean it
(2) do something opposite when the original stance becomes politically inexpedient and/or unecessary
(3) don’t acknowledge the contradiction or even attempt to explain it
(4) if somehow you are forced to break rule three and acknowledge your reversal, blame it on someone else—preferably George Bush, Republicans in general, and/or those crazy Tea Party attendees.
[ADDENDUM: The wrongness and inconsistency in Obama’s Afghan policy was all quite clear back in July of 2008, when I wrote this post.
And don’t forget that Obama could not have been more incorrect about the surge, not only at the very beginning but repeatedly, even after it had clearly succeeded. How could anyone—even a liberal Democrat—have faith in his judgment on military matters?]
…because now the Grey Lady will have to sully its aristocratic little non-liberal non-partisan hands by actually glancing at Fox News now and then, and perhaps even at right wing blogs on occasion.
The horror, the horror! And the nameless editor newly assigned to this distasteful task has entered the Times version of the witness protection program.
Read the entire piece by Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt if you want to see the Times editors’ continuing efforts at meaningless and transparent excuse-making, as well as an excellent demonstration of their profound cluelessness and boundless contempt for the reading public. But to me, the funniest part of Hoyt’s piece (that’s both funny/ha-ha, funny/strange, and funny/sad) is this:
Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was “slow off the mark,” and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”
Back during the campaign, Obama was fond of saying things like this during speeches, to thunderous applause, “Last point, Guantanamo. That’s easy. Close down Guantanamo.”
Like so many things Obama thought in his pre-election arrogance, it hasn’t turned out quite that simple after all. As Byron York wrote back in May:
Now, things have changed. Obama has issued an executive order that Guantanamo will be shut down no later than Jan 22, 2010. He has tried to charm and persuade our allies to accept some prisoners””and has gotten virtually nowhere. He still hasn’t settled on which procedures will be used to dispose of the cases involving the most hardened al Qaeda detainees. And now, the Senate has voted””by a 90-to-6 margin””to deny Obama the $80 million he sought to pay for closing down Guantanamo.
That’s quite a vote of no-confidence coming even from his own party.
But the WaPo now reports on some of the shocking details of how the Obama administration went against advice by insisting on giving a closing date for the prison before it had devised any sort of plan on how this might be accomplished.
It becomes clear from the article that the issue was handled by rank amateurs who lacked even rudimentary common sense, much less expertise. In addition to Obama himself, the main actor seems to have been White House counsel Greg Craig, a lawyer who seems to have lacked a basic understanding of the issues that would need to be resolved before a Guantanomo closing could be effected, such as:
To empty the prison, the administration will need to find facilities to house 50 to 60 prisoners who cannot be released and who cannot be tried because of legal impediments, according to an administration official. The administration must also win congressional funding for the closure process, find host countries for detainees cleared for release, and transfer dozens of inmates to federal and military courts for prosecution.
To assume that doing all of this would be easy or quick was always absurd. But it was especially arrogant considering that Craig was explicitly warned early on about the problems by a bipartisan group:
Before the election, Craig met privately with a group of top national security lawyers who had served in Democratic and Republican administrations to discuss Guantanamo Bay. During the transition, he met with members of the outgoing administration, some of whom warned him against issuing a deadline to close the facility without first finding alternative locations for the prisoners.
But as so often seems to be the case with the Obama administration, Craig and his boss fell victim to a toxic brew of hubris, ignorance, impatience, and the overriding need to negate anything George Bush had done. Another now-familiar element of the mix was an almost uncanny ability to deeply offend allies:
After the congressional setbacks, Craig orchestrated the release of four of the Uighurs, flying with them and a State Department official from Guantanamo Bay to Bermuda, a self-governing British territory whose international relations are administered by Britain.
The transfer produced a diplomatic rift. British and U.S. officials said the Obama administration gave Britain two hours’ notice that the Uighurs were being sent to Bermuda. “They essentially snuck them in, and we were furious,” said a senior British official.
The move also caused friction between Britain and China, which seeks the Uighurs for waging an insurgency against the Chinese government.
Much more of this and Europe will be yearning for a return of that stupid cowboy, George Bush.
[NOTE: It occurs to me that Britain’s release of the Lockerbie bomber may have been a bit of payback for the Ulghurs.]