by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO-The Corner
Consider our dog days of August: An American journalist savagely beheaded on tape, with more promised to come. The Islamic State rampage. The Gaza war and Hamas’s serial truce violations — and the new neutral U.S. stance with implied disruptions in military support for Israel. The implosion of Iraq, the bloodletting in Syria. Iran full speed ahead on enrichment as the world’s attention turns elsewhere. Putin and Ukraine on the edge of war. Libya bombed again. Egypt in turmoil. Christians being wiped away in the Middle East. Ebola spreading in Africa. China squaring off with Japan. Germany angry at being tapped while tapping others. What exactly happened to Private Bergdahl or the five terrorists who were freed for his freedom?
At least there is calm at home?
Hardly: food, gas, and electricity prices are at near all-time highs; a stagnant economy in “recovery” that for most people outside of Wall Street remains recessionary; government soon to be run by executive orders; the end of any idea of national sovereignty or a southern border; the Ferguson riots and racial explosions revealing an America more divided than at any time since the 1970s; the buffoonish Missouri governor Nixon playing the Katrina role of a now imprisoned Ray Nagin. The alphabet soup of unresolved IRS, VA, NSA, and AP scandals; revolutionary, extra-legal justice meted out to Rick Perry; Benghazi coming back into the news; the little reported on drip-by-drip practical dissolution of Obamacare.
1979–80 seem calm in comparison.
The chaos arises from a variety of causes, but one common denominator is that President Obama has not a clue how to deal with these crises.
So wisely he stays among the 1 percent at Martha’s Vineyard and golfs, given that he has recognized that the more that he is out of the public eye, the less he is emptily sermonizing with “make no mistake about it” and “let me be perfectly clear.” And thus the less the public is bothered by his abstract presidency, given the less it must experience it in the concrete. Polls reveal that the less the public sees or hears their iconic president, the less they are bothered by him.
Party like it’s 1974!
“Rules for Radicals” at work –
look over here
ignore these other spinning plates over there
nothing happening behind the curtain
nothing to see here, move along
where should we focus?
More and more the Obama agenda is becoming clear. The U.S. Constitution was and is all about sustaining white priveledge according to those who pledge allegiance to Obama. Yes his administration is incompetent but it does have an overall view of the Country and its place in the modern world as just another State. Nothing has made America exceptional other than its hubris in thinking it was special to begin with. Listen, technology has brought the world under a microscope and it clearly shows the human species needs a foundation of faith/belief system or we will perish. Humanity more than ever before in its history needs the U.S. to navigate the dangerous waters ahead. Our moral compass is not fully functional and that spells trouble for not just us but everbody else on the planet. Obama is the marker for us. Ferguson is the marker for us. For all we know a regular cop (nothing but accommodations on his record) just doing his job gets involved with a thug and has the crap scared out of him along with being physically assaulted and he unloads his weapon on this 6′ 4″, 292 pound “teen”. This cop’s life has changed but not just because he has to live with shooting dead another human being but because he is now going to have to leave his “world” due to the spotlight that’s been put on this event by who else? Obama’s administration. Obama is a marker for us and the world. Are we going to rise to the challenge of the tech age and assert our constitutional law and morality of judeo christian faith or will we be pulled along by the ebb and flow of the “victimized” masses. One side note. I don’t think Obama really cares about this agenda if he isn’t out front leading. We’ll see but my guess is this guy is a pure narcissist and anything that keeps him in the fore is what will move him.
You win the internets today. God Bless.
Can anyone see if Jimmy Carter is available….please..
Gaza/Hamas and Ferguson, MO. Both had human-shields.
No matter how upset some of the citizens of Ferguson were, though they had no facts, their actions “to march at night” enabled both outsider & local thugs to attack and destroy parts of their community.
Who is going to pay for it all?
The community: some will move away, others close businesses, relationships may unravel. And of course, you and I thru our federal taxes will cover the costs of the multiple investigations, the additional civilian and military forces to ensure public safety.
sideline: does anyone know if there is a photo of Michael Brown smiling…the photos i’ve seen on the news…neutral to scary…
Obama is suffering from predictable overexposure. It is probably a good thing that he has never read Machiavelli, but even if he had his malignant narcissism would likely have driven him to seek the maximum possible public exposure.
It will be fortunate if events have cowed Obama. Likely he will recover, and that same narcissism, now wounded, will lead him to force himself once more upon his reluctant public both at home and abroad.
It is to be hoped that we have seen all that we shall see of this malignant buffoon. I fear, however, that that is wishful thinking.
I heard you speak to these points recently on radio, and the “abstract president” thing really stuck with me. It is a very astute definition of what we have now, where the guilty liberal can still assure their conscience in supporting him in spite of all the continually mounting (mountains) of evidence of incompetence, because after all he’s just sort of over there, the 1st black president and all that, and all this other stuff he just reads about in the newspaper like we do.
A generality: we have PART of a people group ( the government’s idea of groupings on its forms, not mine) who have a lot of pride with a tendency toward inter community violence and outer community racially driven violence who cannot quite understand why someone from 10,000 miles away can come to the U.S. with only the clothes on their backs but within 10 years are sending their kids to college who will soon own everything and provide most of the professional services in the first group’s neighborhood. There may some value in having pride in one’s country (check present and past history), but pride in being from some continent distant in mileage and time with shifting borders and wars makes no sense at all. As few of us can guarantee exactly who was in our past bloodline, racial pride also makes no sense. After noting that certain biblical statements may be true or false, its statement on pride rides on hard rails straight as an arrow in this case.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Obama cant play fiddle but can putt. WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE ?
Compare Obama’s rise to Hitlers rise, The masses yearning to be lead. Along comes an electrifying speaker, uniting the nation against such and such evil (the enemy was within, in the unquestioning,guilible mind). The leadership wreaked havoc, and yet the willfully blind or corrupted followers kept marching in line, further enabling the megalomaniac’s wide range of destruction. The difference being at the final curtain call, one is on his way to make ten’s of millions in speaking fee’s from the deranged masses. Stockholm syndrome