As Obama Offers "Don't Do Stupid Shit" Theory of Foreign Policy, His Dwindling Band of Disciple-Defenders Offer "Shit Happens" Theory of Geopolitics

Echoing Norma Desmond, Obama's SuperFans insist, "Obama is big. It's the United States that has gotten small."

Nobody's Fault
Liberals make excuses for Obama
BY NOEMIE EMERY

All of a sudden, people have noticed that we are in trouble, and many are saying it isn't the president's fault. All the bad news, from Iraq to Ukraine, from Libya and Syria to the Mexican border, just seems to have happened: Obama was standing there, golfing or shaking hands with donors, and, like a burst of bad weather, the winds blew, the skies opened, and things went to hell. Mysterious forces conspired against him, terrible setbacks occurred for no reason, and we were left with effects without a cause...

Of course, Obama's defenders note that he is currently beleaguered by something that no US president has ever contended with in all of US history: A divided Congress.

She looks at the minor little bother confronting Truman after WWII, to wit, the expansionist Soviet Empire, and notes that previous presidents have in fact faced "nuance-drenched problems," as one liberal defender of Obama calls his difficulties.

Here she gets to the heart of it:

...

When Republicans fail, it's always their fault, but when things fall apart under Democrats, larger forces are always at work. In the first volume of his work, Reagan biographer Steven F. Hayward took a stroll with us down memory lane to the last time this happened, under one James Earl Carter: "The job of President is too difficult for any single person because of the complexity of the problems and the size of government," pronounced the historian Barbara Tuchman. "As the country goes to the polls in the 47th national election, the Presidency as an institution is in serious trouble," wrote the columnist Joseph Kraft...

If liberals felt compelled to protect a peanut farmer from Georgia, what must they feel for an Ivy League-trained exotic from Hyde Park, a man of the world and messiah, a speaker and writer, but never a doer; themselves, in short, to the ultimate power; themselves as they dreamed they could be? And that is the problem: If he fails, then they fail, and that cannot happen. So the fault is in the stars, in the cards, in unfair expectations--anywhere but where it should be.

And why does the God fail?

Because he's not a god, of course.

I found this interesting:

His supporters argue that his approach has been consistent with his strategy of returning the United States -- after post-Sept. 11 wars -- to a foreign policy built around economic engagement rather than military intervention. The question, though, is whether he is contradicting the pledge embraced in his 2009 Nobel Prize lecture: "to face the world as it is," not as he would like it to be.

"He thought he could change the tenor more easily than he could, and I think he thought the world would be more responsive to his desires than the world has proven to be," said Jon B. Alterman, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

This explains Obama's failures as well as anything else: He speaks his platitudes with the zest of a man who thinks his audience is hearing all this for the first time, and he thinks his Magic Words can move mountains.

And he has no Plan B for when this fails.

And this fails always.

And would-be gods are narcissistic things, and cannot admit their failures.

posted by Ace at 04:18 PM

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