July 20, 2014
Many observers have reacted with surprise at Barack Obama's shallow, morally vacant public reaction to the downing of that Malaysian passenger jet over Ukraine. He spent a mere thirty eight seconds on the atrocity, before going right back to his perpetual campaign mode. As my wife acidly observed, it's the only thing he's good at, apart from wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on himself and his amazingly shameless family.
Many people, even some on the Left,
have drawn parallels to President Reagan's exemplary reaction to the
downing of KAL 007 by a Soviet fighter jet in 1983. These parallels
have not benefited Obama, as President Reagan spoke directly to the
American people on live television, not through administration
mouthpieces, and he used the language of moral clarity. The
destruction of the jet and the hundreds of lives aboard it was a
moral atrocity, and President Reagan called it just that. He even
played some of the intercepted communications between the Soviet
fighter pilot and his commanders, which showed that the pilot had
been close enough to identify the plane, which had accidentally
strayed into Soviet airspace, as a civilian plane. President Obama,
in an instructive contrast, spoke as a man who is asked to comment on
an article of which he has read only the headline. His demeanor and
lack of grasp reminded many that this is a President who skips his
security briefings. I can't help thinking that this is a life-long
pattern for him. I wish we could get his college records released to
the public. I'd like to see those attendance records...
I wasn't a bit surprised by B.O.'s
demeanor, because I detected a creepy other-worldliness about this
man years ago. I really think that he sees other people as a
different, lower species for which he has no fellow feeling. I'm not
interested in what state or country he was born in (nothing was ever
going to come of that anyway) – I want to know what planet he was
born on.
Increasingly he surrounds himself with
Valerie Jarrett-like sycophants who praise him, reassure him of his
brilliance, and do everything but fan him with palm fronds.
He does not learn, for he believes he
does not need to. He believes that if his ideas don't work at first,
it's all right – reality will correct itself eventually. I'm
betting he still thinks Cash for Clunkers, that willful destruction
of the only cars many of the poor can afford, was a good and
successful idea.
He is done a disservice by the Love Canal Media, which defends him even when he attacks and spies on them.
He does not feel himself bound by the Constitution, because that was written before he was born, so what good can it be?
In many ways, Barack Obama is a George McClellan-like figure. He is a man who attained too much success too easily, and was never steeled by the necessity of coping with failure. His progress through Columbia and Harvard was greased (I am convinced) by that spoiler of character, Affirmative Action. His teaching post at the University of Chicago was a narrow-focus, cream-puff Affirmative Action hiring, given to him because the law faculty had few or no black members. (That's still better that the University of Chicago Hospital's promotion of Michelle Obama, which was simply a bribe.)
Barack Obama is a man who demands credit for climbing mountains throughout his life, when what he was actually doing was standing on an escalator.
