It’s that day again

[aadler]

 
Eleven years on, I have to say that I wish we had accomplished more.

Iraq and Afghanistan are sliding back into Islamic anarchy, as American will dwindles. (Not that of the soldiers, no, not the people doing the fighting; the loss of determination is almost completely limited to politicians and others who stay safely home.) Egypt and Libya are lost to the Muslim Brotherhood, Syria is sure to be the next on the block, and Iran is right around the corner from nuclear weaponry. Weakness, apathy, and arrogant disregard — all from the White House — have set the stage for another round of terrible wars. And, when they begin, we won’t be ready, because we never are. America always yearns for peace, carries it to an unrealistic extreme, and as a result we always have to catch up to events we might have headed off.

In the time since I joined the Army, I’ve done three theater deployments and a support tour at Guantanamo, along with volunteering for every school and training and extra duty for which I could qualify. It wasn’t enough. I wanted to do more, and I tried to do more, because I knew I hadn’t done enough. And now, just as the need is about to increase, I’m approaching the point of involuntary retirement, and will no longer be allowed to contribute.

Things are about to get bad, and I’m convinced it didn’t have to happen. And, though there are many things that could have been done better, I pretty much blame Obama for the state of things now.

Maybe next time we can elect someone who, instead of focusing on the rise of the oceans, will just do his damn JOB.

Comments

[lostboy-lj.livejournal.com]

Today, the American consolate in Benghazi was set ablaze leaving one dead and several injured, and the American embassy in Cairo was attacked by a mob. Our government's response so far has been to offer a vague apology regarding our "abuse" of free speech.

Israel is poised to attack Iran, but the U.S. president turned down an offer for a pow-wow with their Prime Minister, citing scheduling conflicts. He is booked for a David Letterman appearance, thankfully. Meanwhile, the new Egyptian government is setting up meetings with Iran. There's a lot of baggage between those two entities, but they have several shared interests and they seem to think a moment of import is at hand. Perhaps you could say the same about Obama and Letterman, but their "moment of import" will probably involve a joke about the new White House-branded micro-brew, and perhaps a few more toothless bites on that Root of All Evil, "Bain Capital."

The Arab Spring is turning into the Long Arab Winter before our eyes. It's tragic, but not very surprising. Israel is telegraphing a strike so obviously that a blind man could see it from space. With Syria in full meltdown, Egypt in the hands of Islamists, Iraq a factionalized mess and the world in the grips of a global recession, the odds of another world war are getting juicier by the nanosecond... but Nero is fiddling.

[aadler]

It’s almost as if the man is deliberately trying to make his mark on history as the WORST president America has ever had. He’s not there yet — Buchanan set a pretty low bar, and there are some other strong contenders — but he’s already surpassed Carter.

On November 5, 2008, I posted:

America has chosen its next president.

And our enemies rejoice.

I see no reason to alter that opinion, except to add that their rejoicing has proven well-founded.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Yes -- Obama has sown the seeds of several bloody wars, seeds which his successors will be forced to reap.

[aadler]

We can be sure, however, that he will go to his grave still insisting that it’s all Bush’s fault.

[lostboy-lj.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's deliberate. He has deliberately made some bad moves these past few years, but I think it's mainly due to a political inexperience, an immature postmodern worldview that pretends there are no such thing as unintended consequences (for instance, I think he actually believes some of the class-warfare crap he's been selling) and that he's generally disposed to view American interests as secondary to his ideological ones. From what I can tell, he's also got a bad temper, poor work habits and no curiosity about concepts outside of his "social justice" wheelhouse -- remember when he mispronounced "Navy corpsmen" as "corpse-men" at the National Prayer Breakfast? He also seems to have massive command-and-control problems, isolates himself in his inner circle and -- the worst sin of all -- believes his own press.

The reasons for those failures are open to debate. I've been thinking about it a bit, lately. In reading his books, "The Audacity of Hope" and "Dreams From My Father", more than once the "N-word" sprang to mind... that N-word being "Narcissist", Mr. Toure. Here is a man who wrote, not one, but two memoirs before he was forty-five years old, and found plenty of enablers among the press, Hollywood and Norwegian Socialists.

I think the world's worst actors (Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Pakistan, North Korea, etc.) don't see him as an ally, just as a light touch who can be easily bent to their whims because he is confused about how the world actually works and can't marshal action when it conflicts with his illusion of how it works.

Yep, that all adds up to a bad president, but bad in a Carter or Woodrow Wilson kind of way, not in a Buchanan or Harrison kind of way. Maybe the political epitaph will read, "At best, Hamlet, at worst, Macbeth."

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

I believe you're right. A lot of people think he's doing this stuff deliberately, but I think it's mostly incompetence. And worse, the largely ignorant electorate is going to put him back into office, watch and see.

[aadler]

I personally believe it’s a malignant combination of incompetence and deliberate intent.

I do not, however, believe he’ll be re-elected. It astonishes me that he still has any significant following at all; he was elected on promise, and every aspect of that promise has dismally and prominently failed. Some who supported him last time will vote for his opponent; many will simply stay home; even those who stay the course won’t have the same enthusiasm for driving get-out-the-vote efforts.

No, I’m far more concerned with the possibility of him declaring a national emergency (on any number of pretexts) if he loses, and using the extraordinary powers already granted him by a witless Congress to keep himself in office against the will of the people. Because, of course, he knows better than us, and he has a moral duty to lead us to the imminent utopia we’re too ignorant to see.

I don’t predict this. I don’t even see it as especially likely. It should be too preposterous even to consider, though … and unfortunately, with this man’s stated beliefs and past performance, it isn’t preposterous at all.

[lostboy-lj.livejournal.com]

I personally believe it’s a malignant combination of incompetence and deliberate intent.

You might be right. It's possible there's a quadrant of my brain that does not want to accept the possibility of a genuine fifth column in the White House. I'm not the sort of person who ignores ugly realities, but the notion that all the bad moves the president's made were actually designed to hurt the nation feels a little too conspiracy-theory for me.

Maybe it's more the case that he misunderstands the nature of the republic (he wouldn't be the first). It's obvious he's read too much Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, but it's also pretty obvious that he hasn't read enough James Madison, Al Hamilton or Adams (pick an Adams, any Adams). Or, if he read them, he only did so for the chance to apply a postmodern, hard-left critique, and get a pat on the skull from like-minded profs.

It's a common mental deficit these days among college grads - the pretense of having honestly explored and then rejected certain ideas that in reality you were never given a fair accounting of, never intended to seriously consider, and dismissed out of hand. And you can't rule out the Pavlovian feedback loop that goes on in a liberal arts program. Like the rat that gets the pellet when it presses a certain lever, the the student who regurgitates the "correct" reading of various political and social philosophers will go much further, much faster than those who deviate from it.

My guess is President Obama found himself diving deep into that deep end of the ideological pool during his college years, and never had reality (jobs, businesses, military service) to come and slap him in the face later on. He just sort of "ascended" from college to the Senate to the Presidency. He's a president with an interesting background, but no foreground (and, increasingly, no middle ground).

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

Very good analysis. Obama's not stupid, or crazy, or even evil; he's just ideologically mind warped.

[lostboy-lj.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but here's my question: at what point does "mind-warped" become "the status quo"? I think the trend started in the 80's (when left-wing radicals from the 70's became tenured professors), and cranked into full gear in the 90's. By the time generation-X (my generation) was coming into full flower, the radicalism of the 70's had reached an "Aesop's Fables" level of authority in pop culture. For instance, by 1992 the gun-toting, misogynistic, separatist-for-rent who called himself Malcolm X had been transformed into a fair and high-minded civil rights leader, on equal footing with MLK.

That's why I have trouble calling President Obama a "radical." As far as I'm concerned, he's not a radical. His worst ideas represent what approx 25% of the national population considers to be reality -- not a majority, but still a big enough chunk to make you wonder what kind of room you're standing in.

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

Maybe, then, conservatives will be the "radicals" of the future? Or maybe not, since it seems likely moderates will increasingly become the nation's minority group, politically speaking.

Left wingers becoming tenured professors; that's without a doubt a major event in what's happened to the country. But at this point I'm not so much concerned with how it happened, or what the terms should be, so much as: How do we turn it around? It seems liberals having been doing a pretty good job of institutionalizing their beliefs to the extent that many people think there's no other way to do things. Just think of how all we have to do to be decried as hating racists is to voice an opposing view to any Obama policy, and you can see how far we have to go.

[lostboy-lj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, moderates are being squeezed out by the wingers on both sides right now, which happened the last few times the world economy tanked, too. When the chips are down, history says that people tend to flock to personality cults (like the '08 Obama campaign) and to authoritarians who make sunny promises about the future, and then issue rants against everyone's favorite scapegoats when the world continues to rocket straight to Hell. For instance, in the bottomless debt-pit of Greece, the fastest growing parties are the Nazis and the Communists. Just like the consulate being attacked on 9/11 in Libya, it's sad but entirely predictable.

I guess that's why I think the "why" is important, especially to people who don't seem to have a clue as to how we got here. Is it going to stop the same bad ideas from taking root again somewhere down the line? Well, no, probably not in a free society (the only kind I want to live in). But if enough people know the cause of a problem, I think we'll be able to defend against it better the next time it comes around.

[aadler]

What you named as an alternative explanation was actually the one I was attempting to express. I don’t at all believe that Obama is a ‘Manchurian candidate’ planted by hostile powers to bring us down; I believe he is sincerely following his ideology, and that ideology — reinforced by the influences you name — has him believing that America is a fundamentally flawed nation that needs to be transformed (‘into his image’) in order to achieve redemption. That was what I meant by malignant intent: a deliberate desire to bring America down to a lower level in the world, with him operating not as an agent of a foreign power or even of a revolutionary cabal, but by his own position of self-appointed redeemer.

Arrogance, intolerance, narcissism, perhaps even megalomania (too early to tell on that one) … but I would be willing to bet that, through it all, he genuinely believes he loves his country and is doing everything he does ‘for our own good’.

Funny how those who overtly or not-so-secretly despise religion, seem not to recognize the quasi-religious attributes of their own holy crusades.

[lostboy-lj.livejournal.com]

Understood.

Funny how those who overtly or not-so-secretly despise religion, seem not to recognize the quasi-religious attributes of their own holy crusades.

Have you ever read Eric Voegelin's "The New Science of Politics"? It's a great book written by a witness to a dark history, and I think it explains a lot of what we are seeing in our current politics.

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

The combination does seem the most likely scenario.

While I'm just as astonished as you are (just as I'm shocked that they can still find 10% of the electorate that likes Congress), I've completely lost faith in the memory of the average voter, or their ability to research or use common sense. After all, they elected him in the first place despite plenty of evidence about what he wanted to do. I honestly think, out of ignorance and apathy, we're going to put him back into office again. Am I being pessimistic? You betcha. I pray I'm wrong.

And if I am wrong ... yeah, Congress has been handing the Executive branch more and more power as time goes by, and Obama thinks we're all children -- I could absolutely see him refusing to give it up.

[yamamanama.livejournal.com]

As much disdain as I have for Venezuela, how can you put them amongst the worst? Have you forgotten Burma, Ceylon, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Sudan, Mali, South Sudan.

[lostboy-lj.livejournal.com]

Depends on your criteria for "worst." You didn't ask me for mine (and I assume you don't care), but in foreign policy terms "worst actors" generally means those who are unstable players on the world stage who can shift power dynamics towards authoritarians and cause regional trouble with a good chance of global spillover. Notice I didn't mention China either. Though they manipulate puppet states, bet both sides of every race and generally suck on human rights, they are still a relatively stable nation who actually wants continuity... for now, at least. That may change soon, given the 24 million extra men that resulted from their discontinued birth control policy.

You include Mali and Turkenistan in the "worst actors" group? Fine, but last time I checked they aren't spending billions on a Russian-supplied military buildup like Venezuela, or developing battlefield nukes (you know, the kind of briefcase-sized warhead designed to potentially nuke invading columns of Indian tanks on their own soil) like Pakistan.

So, I suppose the answer to your question is "No", I haven't forgotten that the world has no shortage of terrible places run by tyrannical regimes (and, given human nature, it never will). Some of those regimes are simply more externally dangerous than others.