I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there—all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism. . . .
Mr. Obama's economic thinking (or lack thereof) adds up to a kind of rudderless cowboyism combined with wishful thinking. You would think that in the two solid years of daily campaigning leading up to his election this nakedness would have been seen. . . .
On the foreign front he has been given much credit for his new policy on the Afghan war, and especially for the “rational” and “earnest” way he went about arriving at the decision to surge 30,000 new troops into battle. But here also were three months of presidential equivocation for all the world to see, only to end up essentially where he started out.
And here again was the lack of a larger framework of meaning. How is this surge of a piece with America's role in the world? . . .
I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world
With year one drawing to a close, the truth of the Obama presidency is laid bare: retrenchment abroad, and redistribution and the intrusive regulatory state at home. . . .
It is different today, there is a cold-bloodedness to American foreign policy. “Ideology is so yesterday,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed not long ago, giving voice to the new sentiment. . . .
History and its furies have their logic, and they have not bent to Mr. Obama's will.
Phi Beta Iota: Both gentlemen of the right make good points, but they are missing the larger point–Barack Obama, like Jimmy Carter, is a creation of the Trilateral Commission, and is “managed” by Zbigniew Brzezinski on the foreign policy side and byGoldman Sachs on the economic side. He is theater, nothing more, until he discovers that having been elected President, he actually has the power to break from the Trilateral Commission and be the President. Meanwhile, 12% of the Trilaterals have taken up political positions, Goldman Sachs continues to loot the US Treasury, and everyone pretends the Emperor's new clothes are sstunning, simply stunning, n'est pas, my dear?
