Apology, Obama-Style

Obviously, President Obama lost control of the narrative. He did not seem to know until a group of Senate Democrats marched into his office the other day to tell him at he had to do something. They knew that Obamacare was an albatross; it was going to drag them to defeat in next year’s elections.

By now everyone knows that Obama’s grand promise about keeping your insurance and your doctor was a lie. It did not matter whether you liked them and wanted to keep them. What mattered was whether the government liked them and wanted you to keep them.

It was more than a nuance.

While the Obamacare website kept crashing, insurance carriers were doing their job. They canceled millions of insurance policies. And that, dare we say, was only the beginning.

Many victims of government over-regulation went to the Obamacare exchanges and discovered, to their chagrin, that they were going to have to pay more to get a product that did not serve their needs. Of course, they were also going to lose their doctors. If they could not afford to comply, they would go uninsured.

And everyone else knows that most of those who have been signing up on the exchanges have been signing up for Medicaid. They were signing up for a free program and avoiding the policies that would cost them money.

In truth, many of the canceled policies were excellent. And many of the new policies had higher premiums, higher deductibles and higher copays. The CEO of Aetna said that the average premium would rise by 20% or more.

Last night on Megyn Kelly's show a cancer patient from South Carolina explained that he could not afford a new policy that would cost him $1,500 a month with a $13,500 deductible. He had decided that he would forgo insurance and pay the penalty.

Obamacare might well cost him his life.

Obama had tried to calm the fury by saying that those who lost their policies were losing substandard insurance and that the exchanges would offer them better coverage. Again, the people did not accept that the government knew what was best for them. After all, the president had promised that they could exercise their free choice. Now they knew that they were being deprived of their freedom.

The problem was so bad that the mainstream media could not cover it up. So, President Obama decided that he needed to get out in front of the story. In the course of a hastily convened interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd Obama offered something that resembled an apology.

But was it?

Here’s is the relevant portion of the transcript:

Chuck Todd: Do you think you owe these folks an apology for misleading them, even if you didn’t intentionally do it, but at this point they feel misled, and you have seen the anger that is out there.

Barack Obama: I regret very much that what we intended to do, which was to make sure that everybody is moving into better plans because they want them as opposed to because they are forced into it, but we weren’t as clear as we needed to be in terms of the changes that were taking place, and I want to do everything we can to make sure that people are finding themselves in a good position, in a better position than they were in before this law happened. And I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me and we’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and that we’re going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.

Take Obama’s expression of regret: “I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation….”

In a sincere apology an individual takes full responsibility for an error that was solely of his own making.

Obama was not taking responsibility. He was expressing his sympathy for those who had lost their insurance policies. It’s completely different. Expressing sympathy for your friends loss is not the same as expressing regret for your own behavior.

Obama continued to explain that millions of people found themselves in the “situation … based on assurances they got from me….”

As a rhetorical sleight of hand, it’s exceptionally good. Let us assume that Obama is using a rhetorical ellipsis.

Clearly, the assurances did not cause individuals to lose their insurance. Obama’s dishonest assurances might have persuaded people to vote for him. Once they voted for him and for a Democratic Congress the received the Affordable Care Act as a reward.

Thus, for having been tricked or lied to or defrauded by Obama they find themselves in a difficult situation.

This is as close as the president comes to admitting that his lies helped to produce the mess.

Note that Obama closes his statement with another expression of sympathy. He feels everyone’s pain and he wants to do everything he can to help people: “who find themselves in a tough position as a result of this.”

As a result of what, exactly? Again, Obama fails to accept that his lies and his administration produced the situation.

The president does not suggest that he did anything wrong or that he made a mistake. Obviously, he was not paying attention to Lanny Davis.

Return now to the beginning of the passage I quoted above. Obama defends himself on the grounds that what happened was not what he had intended. He wanted people to want to have shiny new policies. He did not want them to feel that they were being forced into the exchanges. And yet, somehow or other, reality intruded and took away their produces. They found themselves forced to go to the exchanges. This outcome had nothing to do with his intentions.

Aside from the fact that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the truth of your intentions lies in what happens, not in what you would have wished to see happen.

If you sell a war as something that will be a cakewalk, and it goes badly, you cannot defend yourself by saying that such was not your intention. Nor do you suggest that your commanding generals were not themselves pulling the trigger or firing the missiles.

As I have pointed out, Obama is using behavioral economics. He wanted to nudge people in the direction of something that they would have been happy to accept once they discovered that it was better than what they had. Since they had no idea of how bad their insurance plans were the only way to persuade them to give them up was by using a lie.

But, something went wrong and many citizens believe that their new policies are fool’s gold. They are much worse than what they had before. Now, that they know they were defrauded, it seems to be too late to get back what they lost and what Obama promised they could keep.

Obama lied because he believed that people would not mind being lied to once they discovered that it was for the best. And he still believes that once the techies work out the glitches and people discover that it is all for the best, they will be happy to forgive him the necessary prevarication.

Obama feels badly that the rollout of Obamacare did not go better. He sympathizes with those who are suffering. He does not express any shame for having done anything wrong.

In the end he blames it all on the invisible techies who put together the website:

I've been burned already with -- a website -- well, more importantly, the American people have been burned by – a website that has been dysfunctional.

Many commentators have remarked his Freudian slip. It shows that, rather than accept responsibility, Obama feels personally offended by the website malfunction. He sees himself as one of the Americans who have burned by the site. So much for responsibility.

Obama's Tangled Web of Deceit

President Obama should brush up on Sir Walter Scott.

In Scott’s poem Marmion he would find a sentence that describes his current predicament:

Oh, what a tangled web we weave

When first we practice to deceive.

Obama lied to the American people about the consequences of Obamacare. He lied in order to manipulate their minds and to defraud them… all for their own good.

Having been caught in a lie, Obama is now doubling down on the deception.

His flunkies and satraps are valiantly trying to defend the new gloss on thes old lie, but former Clinton consigliore Lanny Davis is surely correct when he advises Obama to come clean, to admit his mistake, and to move on.

Peter Wehner provides an excellent account of the last few week of the Obama presidency. Some of us thought that the illusion of Obama's competence had dissipated during Obama’s first presidential debate with Mitt Romney. We were overly optimistic.

Now, it looks like America is learning the hard way that it has been duped and defrauded.

Wehner writes:

The last six weeks have been brutal ones for the Obama presidency. And I’m guessing that the damage that’s been inflicted will not be transitory. All the failures surrounding the Affordable Care Act–from the disastrous rollout of the federal health-care exchanges, to sticker shock surrounding premiums and deductibles, to the jolting realization that millions of people are now being forced out of health-care plans they like (with millions more to follow)–has likely left an indelible mark of incompetence on Mr. Obama. He looks like nothing so much as a community organizer who is totally overmatched by events.

That would be injurious enough. But now you can add to the mix the shattering of Mr. Obama’s credibility; the belief among a growing number of his fellow citizens that he cannot be trusted, that he will corrupt words in order to advance his ways. Those character defects would be troubling enough in, say, a state senator. They are much more problematic to find in an American president. It’s all very discouraging.

Mary McCarthy once said of the playwright Lillian Hellman, “[E]very word she writes is a lie, including `and’ and `the.’” Mr. Obama isn’t at that point yet. But he’s closer than he thinks. And unless he puts an end to his multiplying deceptions, Barack Obama’s presidency will not only lie in ruins; his reputation will as well.

Obama's Relationship with the Truth

For those who missed it, President Obama made the following statement on September 18:

You have never seen in the history of the United States the debt ceiling or the threat of not raising the debt being used to extort a president or a governing party and trying to force issues that have nothing to do with the budget and nothing to do with the debt.

Most readers of this blog know better than to believe that Obama is on intimate terms with the truth. For those unhappy few who still cling to their faith in him the analysis of this statement ought to be sobering, at the least.

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler examined the facts and concluded that Obama's remark was untrue. He gave Obama 4 Pinocchios for his performance.

I will spare you the details. Anyone who still believes that the current situation is unprecedented will be happy to have been corrected.

  

Obama's Ideologically-Driven Foreign Policy

President Obama has united the nation. From one end of the political spectrum to the other there is general agreement that his handling of the crisis in Syria has been singularly inept and incompetent.

Yesterday, Obama’s two first Secretaries of Defense openly derided his crisis management.

Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, a Republican and a Democrat saw clearly that their former boss had made a complete mess of the situation.

George Friedman of Stratfor recently analyzed where the Obama administration had gone wrong. Driven by ideology the administration could not develop and implement a strategy.

Friedman explained the incoherence and absurdity of the Obama threats to bomb Syria:

When President Barack Obama threatened military action in retaliation for what he claimed was the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government, he intended a limited strike that would not destroy the weapons. Destroying them all from the air would require widespread air attacks over an extensive period of time, and would risk releasing the chemicals into the atmosphere. The action also was not intended to destroy Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime. That, too, would be difficult to do from the air, and would risk creating a power vacuum that the United States was unwilling to manage. Instead, the intention was to signal to the Syrian government that the United States was displeased.

The threat of war is useful only when the threat is real and significant. This threat, however, was intended to be insignificant. Something would be destroyed, but it would not be the chemical weapons or the regime. As a gesture, therefore, what it signaled was not that it was dangerous to incur American displeasure, but rather that American displeasure did not carry significant consequences. The United States is enormously powerful militarily and its threats to make war ought to be daunting, but instead, the president chose to frame the threat such that it would be safe to disregard it.

Friedman did not mention that new UN Ambassador Samantha Power is most clearly associated with the view that American foreign policy should serve humanitarian and human rights, but not our national interest. Perhaps she is merely a symptom, but her thought is obviously influential.

Friedman explains the ideological basis for the policy:

All American administrations have a tendency to think ideologically, and there is an ideological bent heavily represented in the Obama administration that feels that U.S. military power ought to be used to prevent genocide. This feeling dates back to World War II and the Holocaust, and became particularly intense over Rwanda and Bosnia, where many believe the United States could have averted mass murder. Many advocates of American intervention in humanitarian operations would oppose the use of military force in other circumstances, but regard its use as a moral imperative to stop mass murder.

Developing a strategy based on an ideology is difficult under any circumstances. When you have an inexperienced foreign policy team led by a president who knows far less than he thinks he knows you cannot but fail.

Friedman wrote:

The alignment of moral principles with national strategy is not easy under the best of circumstances. Ideologies tend to be more seductive in generalized terms, but not so coherent in specific cases. This is true throughout the political spectrum. But it is particularly intense in the Obama administration, where the ideas of humanitarian intervention, absolutism in human rights, and opposition to weapons of mass destruction collide with a strategy of limiting U.S. involvement -- particularly military involvement -- in the world. The ideologies wind up demanding judgments and actions that the strategy rejects.

The result is what we have seen over the past month with regard to Syria: A constant tension between ideology and strategy that caused the Obama administration to search for ways to do contradictory things. This is not a new phenomenon in the United States, and this case will not reduces its objective power. But it does create a sense of uncertainty about what precisely the United States intends. When that happens in a minor country, this is not problematic. In the leading power, it can be dangerous.

As everyone knows, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has emerged as the winner:

The most important outcome globally is that the Russians sat with the Americans as equals for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, the Russians sat as mentors, positioning themselves as appearing to instruct the immature Americans in crisis management. To that end, Putin's op-ed in The New York Times was brilliant.

This should not be seen merely as imagery: The image of the Russians forcing the Americans to back down resonates all along the Russian periphery. In the former Soviet satellites, the complete disarray in Europe on this and most other issues, the vacillation of the United States, and the symbolism of Kerry and Lavrov negotiating as equals will shape behavior for quite awhile.

Saving Obama's Credibility

There are no good choices. President Obama has muddled his way into an impasse and now he is calling on Congress to bail him out. We are told that it’s for the good of the country.

A president who does not especially identify as leader of the nation, a president who has already eaten his words about the “red line” in Syria, a president who abrogates responsibility for his own words by saying that it’s not his credibility, but the world’s that is on the line… this president needs Congress to save him.

One fears that that ship has already sailed.

Ross Douthat framed the issue well this morning in The New York Times:

When the House and Senate vote on whether to authorize strikes on Bashar al-Assad, they’ll be choosing between two potentially disastrous paths: either endorse a quasi-war that many constituents oppose and that this White House seems incapable of justifying on the merits, or vote to basically finish off the current American president as a credible actor on the world stage.

But, why does Douthat still believe that Obama is a credible actor on the world stage?
The situation as it unfolds today shows a world in which the American president is not a credible leader.

While Obama dawdles and Congress deliberates the RussianNavy is steaming toward the Eastern Mediterranean. This morning we learn thatthe Chinese Navy is sending its own naval vessels and marines to “observe” the action.

Russia and China have taken the measure of President Obama as world leader and have found him lacking. They are making their moves.

Douthat seems to believe that a Congressional vote, followed by a few Tomahawk missiles is going to save the president’s credibility. As I have pointed out, there is no real credibility left to save.

President Obama himself said it loudly and clearly. His credibility is not on the line in Syria. Why should Congress defend the president’s credibility when he does not seem to understand the concept?

The American people voted for it. Now they will have to live with the consequences of their vote.

To state the obvious, the Obama foreign policy team is a sad bunch of poseurs and amateurs. Russia and China have taken the measure of a foreign policy team consisting of John Kerry, Susan Rice, Chuck Hagel and Samantha Power. They see an America that yearns to retreat from the world stage, that finds the burden of leadership too onerous.

Douthat offered some historical analogies:

The historical models would be our 1986 strike on Muammar el-Qaddafi or Operation Desert Fox against Saddam Hussein in 1998; each campaign had a limited purpose that didn’t open into wider war.

Unfortunately, Douthat has failed to mention the best historical analogy: Bill Clinton’s bombing runs against Afghanistan and Somalia in 1998. It confirmed what the terrorists had believed: that a decadent president did not have the stomach for a confrontation with Islamic terrorism.

Regardless of what Congress does and regardless of what Obama finally does, the game is over. It’s time to start assessing the damage that has befallen America and the world. It’s time for America do start asking itself how it elected so feckless and detached and inexperienced a man to the presidency.

Even if Congress votes yes, and even if Obama responds, the world will not be fooled by a little macho posturing.

Douthat argued his best case for Obama:

It is to President Obama’s great discredit that he has staked this credibility on a vote whose outcome he failed to game out in advance. But if he loses that vote, the national interest as well as his political interests will take a tangible hit: for the next three years, American foreign policy will be in the hands of a president whose promises will ring consistently hollow, and whose ability to make good on his strategic commitments will be very much in doubt.

Douthat is saying that Obama likes to shoot his mouth off. He likes to posture and bluster, but does not conduct policy. Congress does not have the power to make him into a leader.

Roger Kimball explained in excruciating detail why the Obama presidency lacks anything that even resembles credibility. It will take a lot more than a missile strike to restore American credibility.

In Kimball’s words:

Here’s the thing: from a certain distance and in a certain light Obama looks like an Important Person, the president of the United States, leader of the free (or at least formerly free) world, just as John Kerry looks (well, sort of looks) like something more than an insufferable prig and blowhard.

But take a closer look. You see that they are both completely out of their depth. Obama jets around on Air Force One. He spends tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money on an African adventure for himself and his family while closing the White House to school tours because of the sequester. He swaggers just like he’s a big deal, but here’s the rub: the least-experienced president in the the history of the republic, the man whom nobody knew, the guy whose college transcripts we can’t see,  whose legislative record was one long evasive “Present,” whose repellent racialist pandering has set race relations back decades in this country, whose Alinskyite demonize-your-opponents radicalism has further poisoned the character of American politics: this mountebank has succeeded mightily in fulfilling his promise of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” making us poorer, less secure, less free, and less influential than we were when he came to office. 

You might not like the picture, but it’s exactly what the Russians and the Chinese see. It’s why they are moving their ships and marines toward the coast of Syria.

Syria, Seriously

The count: 100,000 people dead. 2,000,000 refugees. 4,500,000 displaced from their homes.

Such is Syria today. Reported by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, it has been called “the greatest tragedy of the century.”

The Daily Mail has the story and the frightening pictures. The situation in Syria has deteriorated to the point where no possible outcome will look good.

But, don’t worry, the world is in the best of hands.

Now, in what Charles Rangel said was “unheard of” President Obama is going to be spurred into action because he has gotten caught in his own rhetoric.

Or better, he yielded to pressure by a faction within his administration that believes America has a moral responsibility to punish genocide.

George Friedman explains:

This time, with major foreign partners demanding action, the president felt he had no choice. A significant faction pressed him on this in his foreign policy apparatus. There were those, like National Security Adviser Susan Rice, who favored the use of military force in the events of war crimes and human rights violations on a major scale. One would have thought that she would have supported the war in Iraq against Saddam Hussein, the epitome of war crimes and human rights violations, but she didn't, and that's another matter. The point is that, leaving Iraq, this faction felt that the United States failed to carry out its moral obligations in Rwanda, and applauded the intervention in Kosovo.

Many foreign policy gurus now believe that if Obama fails to act America’s credibility will be significantly diminished.

Eliot Cohen made the argument this morning in the Wall Street Journal:

For better or for worse, the credibility not only of this president, but of America as a global power and a guarantor of international order, is on the line. If the U.S.—after its president said two years ago that Assad must go and then, a year later, drew a red line at Syria's use of chemical weapons—now does nothing, profound conclusions will be drawn by a China ready to bully its neighbors, by a North Korea whose scruples are already minimal, and by an Iran that has already killed many Americans in a covert war waged against us in Iraq and Afghanistan.

America's friends will realize that its word means nothing. As a result, they will either abandon us, or arm themselves with nuclear weapons. And these countries will be increasingly willing to wield them in a world in which they have no great ally who may be counted upon to stand by them in an hour of need.

Cohen knows that we have gotten to this pass because we have an “inept and inconstant president.” And yet, he wants to grant more authority to an “inept and inconstant president.”

Besides, what makes him think that American credibility has not already been completely compromised?

Obama has been blustering about Syria for over two years now. He has done nothing to back up his rhetoric. Do you believe that he can restore his and the nation’s credibility by a few days bombing the Assad regime? How will Obama and America look if the casualties include a large number of human shields?

Nothing about administration policy seems to have changed. The proposed bombings look more like posturing than policy. The administration continues to show the world that it has no idea what it is doing in Syria.

The whole world knows it.

In fact, Max Boot points out, Obama’s decision to ask for Congressional authorization while saying that he does not need it, damaged whatever credibility he had left:

It is hard to exaggerate the damage to American standing and credibility in the world that President Obama did with his about-face on Syria: In the space of a few hours on Friday he went from signaling that military strikes on Syria were imminent after pro forma “consultations” with Congress to deciding that he would ask Congress to approve the strikes, even though he admitted that such authorization was not needed for him to act.

Why did he do it? Kimberly Strassel suggests that it’s all about politics. While Republicans are fretting about credibility and national security, the president has been shifting the blame on to Republicans. Never let it be said that he is not very, very good at this.

It may be lose/lose on the world stage. It looks like it’s going to be lose/lose in Syria. But, Obama might well make it win/win on the American political scene.

Strassel writes:

Americans do not want to think that the president is making grave decisions about military action and U.S. standing on the basis of political calculation. Yet Mr. Obama has treated Syria as a political problem from the start, viewing it almost solely as a liability to the administration's public-opinion polling, its presidential electioneering and its rival domestic priorities. Viewing Mr. Obama's punt to Congress as anything but political is almost impossible. And yet the president again lectures Congress to rise above the "partisan" politics that he has, with great calculation, dumped on them.

Strassel calls it pure cynicism:

The commander in chief is in a box. His desperation to avoid military entanglement in Syria last year—in the run-up to the presidential election—inspired Mr. Obama to fumble out his "red line" warning to Bashar Assad on chemical-weapons use. The statement was a green light to the dictator to commit every atrocity up to that line and—when he received no pushback—to cross it.

Now trapped by his own declaration, Mr. Obama is reverting to the same strategy he has used in countless domestic brawls—that is, to lay responsibility for any action, or failure of action, on Congress. The decision was made easier by the fact that Congress itself was demanding a say.

She continues:

With the authorization Mr. Obama has sent to Congress, he is forcing Republicans to choose between an inconstant strategy and a "no" vote that harms American interests. When did a U.S. commander in chief last so cynically play politics with American credibility?

Republicans are boxed in:

Should Congress oppose authorizing action against Syria, he can lay America's failure to honor his promises on the legislative branch. Obama aides insist that even if Congress votes no, the president may still act—though they would say that. The idea that Mr. Obama, having lacked the will to act on his own, would proceed in the face of congressional opposition is near-fantasy.

Mr. Obama must figure that if he gets authorization, he nets two political wins. He provides himself cover for taking action, while simultaneously presenting Congress's vote as affirmation of his flawed plan to lob a few missiles and call it a day. When that pinprick bombing has no discernible effect on Assad's murderous campaign, Mr. Obama will note that this was Congress's will. As he said in his Saturday speech, "all of us should be accountable" for Mr. Obama's actions.

Strassel believes that Republicans should put the national interest first.

The challenge for Republicans is to do just that, to remember (no matter how painful) that this is not a vote about the president or his machinations. The only question before Republicans is this: Will they send a message to the world's despots that America will not tolerate the use of weapons of mass destruction? If they will not send that message, they risk complicity in this president's failed foreign policy.

The argument seems to be working. Sen. McCain and Speaker Boehner will vote for the president’s resolution.

As for what America will and will not tolerate, the answer lies in the statistics on Syrian refugees. We have tolerated 100,000 deaths, 2,000,000 refugees and 4,500,00 displaced persons.

A few cruise missiles will not be sending a new message. And they will not make Barack Obama a competent or credible leader.

Foreign Policy Follies

In principle, Barack Obama is not an amateur on the world stage. Having been president for well over four years, he is now, we might say, a seasoned player. In his case it means that he is reaping what he sowed.

Yesterday, the British House of Commons decided that it did not want to line up behind Obama as he conducts his police action in Syria. The American press immediately denounced the faithless British and declared that Prime Minister Cameron had suffered a grievous defeat.

In truth, the vote was a rebuke to President Obama. Nile Gardiner explained that, in the conduct of foreign policy, Obama has been making George Bush look good. Would that not be a crushing irony?

When your allies refuse to follow your lead, it means that they do not trust your leadership.

Gardiner explained it:

There can be no doubt that David Cameron’s defeat in the House of Commons was a huge blow to President Obama, and has dominated the US news networks this morning. The absence of Britain in any American-led military action significantly weakens Obama’s position on the world stage, and dramatically undercuts the Obama administration. The vote reflected not only a lack of confidence in the Commons in the prime minister’s Syria strategy, it also demonstrated a striking lack of confidence in Barack Obama and US leadership.

Drawing out the comparison, he continued:

In marked contrast to Obama, President Bush invested a great deal of time and effort in cultivating ties with key US allies, especially Britain. The Special Relationship actually mattered to George W. Bush. For Barack Obama it has been a mere blip on his teleprompter. …  Obama simply hasn’t bothered making friends in Europe, and has treated some nations with sheer disdain and disrespect, including Poland and the Czech Republic. He has found common currency with France’s Socialist President Francois Hollande, an ideological soul-mate, but finds himself in a very lonely position elsewhere across the Atlantic.

As I said, you reap what you sow.

In fairness, the administration has not touted its forthcoming strike as a military action. It has defined it as a police action. Remember when we weren’t going to be “the world’s policeman?”

Obama has noted that Bashar Assad has gassed his own people. Assad did it even after Obama told him not to do it. So, Assad has committed a genocidal crime and he must be punished.

This is what you get when your foreign policy guru is Samantha Power. Now, American military power can only be used to exact justice, to punish people who do very, very bad things. By implication, it cannot be used to defend American interests or to advance American goals. We are citizens of the world before we are citizens of the USA.

Obviously, the policy is incoherent. It makes our nation look like an adolescent bumbler with an identity crisis.

Mark Steyn points out that when you see the world as a courtroom you follow the rules of “discovery” and announce what you are going to do before you do it.

Steyn writes:

In the world’s most legalistic culture, it was perhaps inevitable that battle plans would eventually be treated under courtroom discovery rules and have to be disclosed to the other side in your pre-war statement. But in this case it doesn’t seem to be impressing anyone. Like his patrons in Tehran and Moscow, Assad’s reaction to American threats is to double up with laughter and say, “Bring it, twerkypants.” Headline from Friday’s Guardian in London: “Syria: ‘Napalm’ Bomb Dropped on School Playground, BBC Claims” — which, if true, suggests that even a blood-soaked mass murderer is not without a sense of humor. Napalm, eh? There’s a word I haven’t heard since, oh, 40 years ago or thereabouts, somewhere in the general vicinity of southeast Asia.

You know and I know and everyone else knows that Assad is now filling his important military sites with political prisoners and other innocent souls. In the pursuit of criminal justice Obama will be punishing the people he wants to be helping.

I didn’t think it possible, but he has gone beyond intellectual incoherence.

The amazing thing, Steyn adds, is that the administration’s stated goal in Syria is … not to be mocked. Having made itself an international joke the administration is now worried that the world will start laughing at it.

Naturally, the people who want to punish Assad did not in any way want to punish Saddam Hussein for gassing a far larger number of Kurds. It’s what happens when you run policy by the seat of your ego.

Steyn explains:

I see the Obama “reset” is going so swimmingly that the president is now threatening to go to war against a dictator who gassed his own people. Don’t worry, this isn’t anything like the dictator who gassed his own people that the discredited warmonger Bush spent 2002 and early 2003 staggering ever more punchily around the country inveighing against. The 2003 dictator who gassed his own people was the leader of the Baath Party of Iraq. The 2013 dictator who gassed his own people is the leader of the Baath Party of Syria. Whole other ball of wax. The administration’s ingenious plan is to lose this war in far less time than we usually take. In the unimprovable formulation of an unnamed official speaking to the Los Angeles Times, the White House is carefully calibrating a military action “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”

Excepting the French, the whole world is laughing.

The AP Sees the Light

Former members of the crack Obama foreign policy team have begun the arduous task of salvaging their reputations. Their opening gambit has been to criticize the president's conduct of foreign policy.

After all, there comes a time in the life of every presidency when you can no longer blame everything on George W. Bush. For Barack Obama, that time is now.

So says the AP’s Julie Pace (via Powerline):

Nearly five years into his presidency, Barack Obama confronts a world far different from what he envisioned when he first took office. U.S. influence is declining in the Middle East as violence and instability rock Arab countries. An ambitious attempt to reset U.S. relations with Russia faltered and failed. Even in Obama-friendly Europe, there's deep skepticism about Washington's government surveillance programs.

In some cases, the current climate has been driven by factors outside the White House's control. But missteps by the president also are to blame, say foreign policy analysts, including some who worked for the Obama administration.

Note Pace’s remarkably misleading turn of phrase. Whoever would have imagined that the world would be what Barack Obama envisioned? He’s not a magician, is he? Given his lack of experience, Obama only had his imagination to rely on. No sentient adult should be surprised that reality has refused to do his bidding.

In her second paragraph Pace explains that the president can be blamed for some of the changes but cannot be blamed for others. You would have a difficult time disagreeing with a statement whose truth value does not depend on reality.

More importantly, whatever it is that a president envisions, he and his  foreign policy advisers should have been prepared for many different eventualities. It is better to be prepared to deal with reality than to pretend that reality must correspond to your vision.

Pace then begins to list the failures of the Obama/Clinton foreign policy team:

Among them: miscalculating the fallout from the Arab Spring uprisings, publicly setting unrealistic expectations for improved ties with Russia and a reactive decision-making process that can leave the White House appearing to veer from crisis to crisis without a broader strategy.

I would qualify the statement by saying that the administration mismanaged the Arab Spring and the relationship with Russia. Yet, Pace is correct to see that the amateurs who are running the administration foreign policy seem more to be lurching from one crisis to another than following a coherent strategy.

As a result America has lost the ability to influence events around the world:

But the perception of a president lacking in international influence extends beyond the Arab world, particularly to Russia. Since reassuming the presidency last year, Vladimir Putin has blocked U.S. efforts to seek action against Syria at the United Nations and has balked at Obama's efforts to seek new agreements on arms control.

Strangely, Pace closes with a reference to Obama’s approval ratings. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that people around the world like Barack Obama. They like him less than they did before they had the chance to see him conduct foreign policy, but they still like him.

Obama has long enjoyed high approval ratings from the European public, though those numbers have slipped in his second term. So has European approval for his administration's international policies.

A Pew Research Center poll conducted this spring, before the NSA programs were revealed, showed that support for Obama's international policies was down in most of the countries surveyed, including a 14 point drop in Britain and a 12 point drop in France.

The real question is: do they respect him?

What Went Wrong in the Middle East? Walter Russell Mead Explains.

Chastened Obama-voter Walter Russell Mead surveys the Middle East in today’s Wall Street Journal and draws the only possible conclusion: Obama’s policy in the region has been a colossal failure.

Mead is hardly the first to note the point. Still, he describes the situation well:

This month the Middle East seems to be reverting to that primeval state: Iraq continues to unravel, the Syrian War grinds on with violence spreading to Lebanon and allegations of chemical attacks this week, and Egypt stands on the brink of civil war with the generals crushing the Muslim Brotherhood and street mobs torching churches. Turkey's prime minister, once widely hailed as President Obama's best friend in the region, blames Egypt's violence on the Jews; pretty much everyone else blames it on the U.S.

How did the Obama administration get it so wrong? How did someone as intelligent and capable as Walter Russell Mead get fooled into thinking that Obama could conduct foreign policy successfully? After all, Mead holds a chair in foreign affairs at Bard College. I have often had occasion to quote his excellent and informative blog, Via Meadia.

Or better, once you have so thoroughly misjudged a presidential candidate how do you save some face?

Mead does so by saying that the Obama administration based its policies on reasonable assumptions and good intentions. He says that administration strategy was: “well intentioned, carefully crafted and consistently pursued.”

It is not quite a whitewash of failure, but it removes the charge that the administration was incompetent and inept. If Obama was not up to the job, those who voted for him could and should have known it.

What were the administration’s reasonable assumptions about the Middle East? Mead explains:

The plan was simple but elegant: The U.S. would work with moderate Islamist groups like Turkey's AK Party and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to make the Middle East more democratic. This would kill three birds with one stone. First, by aligning itself with these parties, the Obama administration would narrow the gap between the 'moderate middle' of the Muslim world and the U.S. Second, by showing Muslims that peaceful, moderate parties could achieve beneficial results, it would isolate the terrorists and radicals, further marginalizing them in the Islamic world. Finally, these groups with American support could bring democracy to more Middle Eastern countries, leading to improved economic and social conditions, gradually eradicating the ills and grievances that drove some people to fanatical and terroristic groups.

The plan may have been simple and elegant, but it had nothing to do with reality. Mead himself goes on to explain that none of these assumptions turned out to be true.

When your batting average is Zero, it means that you need more time in the minors. It means that you are not ready for the major leagues. It is meaningless to say that you had a simple and elegant plan, that you pursued it consistently, but that, alas, you never got a hit.

Mead then goes on to show how badly the Obama administration missed the point:

With the advantages of hindsight, it appears that the White House made five big miscalculations about the Middle East. It misread the political maturity and capability of the Islamist groups it supported; it misread the political situation in Egypt; it misread the impact of its strategy on relations with America's two most important regional allies (Israel and Saudi Arabia); it failed to grasp the new dynamics of terrorist movements in the region; and it underestimated the costs of inaction in Syria.

Most of Mead’s article explains how the administration misread every particular of the situation in the Middle East. But note well, the face-saving phrase: “with the advantages of hindsight.”

Mead is suggesting that every rational individual, handed the situation that Barack Obama faced in 2009 would have made the same assumptions and conducted policy the same way. That, of course, is untrue.

I have never had a problem finding intelligent and perspicacious analysts of Middle Eastern politics who knew from the onset of the Arab Spring that the Obama administration was making a complete mess of the situation. I mention David Goldman and Caroline Glick. Neither of them needed the advantage of hindsight to see the reality.

I would also underscore a point that commenter Lastango made in response to an earlier post. Why is it that Mead fails to mention the Secretary of State who was charged with formulating and implementing administration policy?

Is Mead trying to distance Hillary Clinton from the foreign policy failures that occurred while she was Secretary of State?

If we grant the Obama administration the best of intentions, these are for nothing when foreign policy is being conducted by people who are inexperienced and incompetent. Everyone should have known that President Obama had no experience in foreign policy and that his understanding of the realities of world politics was grossly inadequate.

That being the case, he was obliged to run a policy that referred, not to reality, but to a fictional world he did understand.

You will say that many American presidents come to office with little experience in foreign affairs. Obama’s problem was not that he did not know, but that he did not know that he did not know. His fawning admirers thought that his towering intellect would allow him to grasp all of the nuances of foreign policy in a few short weeks.

Obama bought the idea, but in order to maintain the illusion that he was competent he needed to surround himself with people who knew less than he did. Case in point, Hillary Clinton.

The Limbaugh Theorem

For the past several months Rush Limbaugh has been promulgating what he calls the Limbaugh Theorem. It explains, in a very high-concept way, how Barack Obama has been able to escape responsibility for his many failures.

According to the Limbaugh Theorem, Obama has never gotten out of campaign mode. Since he never appears to be governing, when his administration does something wrong, he does not look like the man in charge. He does not look like he is responsible. He looks like someone who is fighting the Washington forces that are causing the nation’s turmoil and malaise.

Thus, Obama presents himself as the perpetual outsider, the champion of the downtrodden masses. By trafficking in this mirage, he deflects blame from himself on to those who he puts in charge, whether it’s the Bush administration, Congressional Republicans, the Tea Party… whomever.

It’s a brilliant strategy, but it does not have to have been a premeditated strategy. Obama knows how to campaign. He has a great deal of experience campaigning. He does not know how to govern. He brought no governing experience to his current job. If we are all naturally inclined to do what we know how to do, it makes sense that Obama would remain in campaign mode. As the old saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Limbaugh explains that Obama could not be selling this illusion without the active assistance of the mainstream media. When something bad happens, be it Benghazi or Fast-and-Furious or the IRS scandals, the media does everything in its power to shield the president from any association with it.

If, Limbaugh points out, the Secret Service closes down all White House tours, the first thing you know, Obama’s spokesman is out there saying that Obama has nothing to do with the Secret Service. The press dutifully reports that Obama has no control over the Secret Service.

Barack Obama comes to us straight from central casting. The media wanted to advance its agenda, and to flex its muscles. More than that, it wanted to impose a narrative on America.

In the narrative, policy does not matter. Governance is trivial. Obama is above all that. He is the Savior who was sent to redeem America’s original sin of racism. With this redemption, the narrative goes, a new kingdom of social justice will descend on America and the nation will, for the first time, be worthy of its citizens’ pride.

Within this narrative, failure is unthinkable. Being crucified is inevitable.

Many of those who are living the narrative are what Limbaugh calls the “low-information voters.”  They do not care about the facts. They like the story. Rather than see themselves as failures, they see themselves as actors on the stage of world history.

Besides, even if the news is bad, even if they and their neighbors are out of work, even if their children have graduated college and can’t find jobs, it is just the punishment that America deserves for its sins.

They believe that America’s pain, its diminishing status, its failures in the world are well-deserved punishment for the crimes it has perpetrated. They see the pain as a stepping stone to a glorious future where their suffering will be redeemed.

Naturally, they are not just taking it all on faith. When they hear good news, dutifully reported by the press, they use it to sustain hope. The stock market has been on an extended rally. The housing market has been recovering. Inflation has been moribund. The unemployment statistics seem to be improving. Besides, the “low-information voters”  still have their food stamps.

It’s what I once called the politics of  bread and circuses.

Here’s Rush, articulating his theorem in March:

I'm talking about the perception that he's creating with the perpetual campaign, the perception among low-information voters. They think that Obama is still fighting these powerful forces that are doing great harm to the country. And he's come up with idea after idea. He had the stimulus to try to fix the roads and bridges, and he promised that he'd do a health care plan that would lower everybody's premiums, and he said that whatever program he did would never add a dime to the deficit, and people believed that. None of that happens, but it's not tied to him, because he's not seen as in charge of it. It's the magic, the beauty of constantly running against something, in this case, the Republicans, or the bad news, or the sorry events that are taking place in the country.

The key for Obama and the low-information voters that vote Democrat is to make sure that he's not seen as having any relationship to these events. This is where you and I for four years were pulling our hair out trying to figure out how in the world, with all of this bad news, with all this unemployment, the stagnant or plummeting economy, no increase in salary, no increase in disposable wages, none of this, no economic improvement at all, why does this guy continue to be popular and get reelected? And it's because nobody associates him with the bad things happening in the country. And that's why he will never come to an agreement with Republicans on, say, the fiscal cliff or the debt ceiling or the sequester.

There won't be an agreement, because that puts his name on it, and that then connotes some measure of responsibility. A further proof of this is when the sequester finally went into effect, Obama then told everybody that was listening: Whatever bad economic news happened in the next month -- the next two months, three months, six months -- is because of this, because of this sequester.

And, the other night on the Greta van Susteren show Rush said: 

 I've never, never known a president to be immune from economic circumstances at an election as he was in 2012. It all became clear to me -- there was a New York Times story, I think one of their blog posts on the Web back in February. And it basically said via poll data what I just said to you. It said most people disapprove of the Obama agenda. They don't like the direction the country's going. They like him and they think he's great for the country.

And I said, How can that be? Intellectually, how can a majority of people -- and you know they oppose "Obama care" by 55, 60 percent in a number of polls. They are worried about jobs. How in the world can they like him, reelect him and yet disapprove of everything he's doing?

And I came up -- I call it the Limbaugh Theorem. And you hear other people talking about it in the sense that he's a bystander president or he's outside Washington. The way he does this, he never appears to be governing. That's why he's constantly campaigning.

Why is there a campaign going on for "Obama care"? It's already the law of the land. Why is he out campaigning for all this stuff that's already law, it's already going to happen?

And my theory is that Obama has positioned himself as an outsider, not attached to anything that's happening. What he has made happen, he positions himself as opposed to it and against it and fighting for everybody else to overcome what he has done!

And that's one of the reasons why the constant campaign, so he doesn't appear to be governing, so he doesn't appear to be part of Washington, so there are -- he appears to have this mysterious, powerful bunch of forces that are opposing him and stopping him from creating jobs and stopping him from giving people proper health care and stopping him from making their home values go up. But he's constantly out there fighting it. And he does that by constantly campaigning and never seen to be -- to be governing.

So all of these scandals -- he calls them -- they're not distraction, they're real. But he likes them because they detract from the absolute reality of what has happened to this country as a result of his policies.

Who's Hating Us Now?

Once upon a time we Americans were anguished to learn that certain people hated us. What could we have done to deserve such rancor? For those who believed that we must have done something to provoke the anger, it was puzzling.

 “Why do they hate us?” became a battle cry for therapy. If only we knew why they hated us, we could change, and then, mirable dictu, they would cease to hate us. Neat, clean, precise… problem solved.

At some future point we will wonder why we were worrying ourselves about why Islamist terrorists hate us. It takes very little acumen to see that they hate us because they are in the hate business, and we happen to be the biggest target.

That wasn’t too difficult, now was it?

As it happens, the Obama administration has done its level best to ensure that the Muslim world likes us. Make that… really, really likes us.

In Egypt it has enjoyed a limited success. The Islamists who are running that sad country like us. They like us a lot.

But then, somehow or other, many people in newly democratic Egypt still hate us. Only, it's not the same people. Those who hate us now comprise the democracy advocates and the Christians who are being harassed and persecuted by the government that we have empowered.

The Wall Street Journal reports the sad story:

Anger against the U.S. is nothing new in the Middle East, and neither are conspiracy theories in which Washington plays a strong, silent hand.

But rarely have such theories placed U.S. influence so squarely behind Islamists such as Mr. Morsi, a former leader in the powerful Muslim Brotherhood that the White House helped to subdue for decades by backing successive anti-Islamist autocrats.

In Egypt, people who love freedom hate America, because, after all, America has put itself on the side of the Muslim Brotherhood. Maybe that’s what the administration meant when it called for a foreign policy reset.

Egyptians pay close attention to American diplomacy. They saw our policy clearly when Mohamed Morsi was elected president of Egypt:

Immediately after the Brotherhood cited its own unofficial tallies in announcing that Mr. Morsi had won presidential elections in June 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton angered anti-Islamist politicians when she called on Egyptian authorities to "support the democratic transition" and yield power to an elected president.

Activists were further vexed when Mr. Morsi announced a constitutional declaration awarding himself power over the judiciary. The announcement sparked suspicion because it came immediately after Mrs. Clinton visited Cairo and activists complained the U.S. didn't condemn Mr. Morsi's action.

True to its policy, the Obama administration appointed an ambassador to Egypt who is either incompetent or is very fond of the Brotherhood.

The Journal reports:

But comments by Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, earlier in June at an Egyptian pro-democracy organization have sparked a renewed eruption of anti-American sentiment in the secular media.

In an effort to "set the record straight" about the U.S. relationship with the Brotherhood, Ms. Patterson said the White House supported Mr. Morsi because he was fairly elected and poured cold water on protesters' plans to oust him on June 30.

"Some say that street action will produce better results than elections. To be honest, my government and I are deeply skeptical," Ms. Patterson told the audience of mostly activists. "More violence on the streets will do little more than add new names to the lists of martyrs. Instead, I recommend Egyptians get organized."

The backlash from activist corners was fast and fierce. George Ishaq, a prominent Egyptian Christian and longtime pro-democracy campaigner attacked Ms. Patterson on the popular talk show "The Issue" on Al Hayat, Egypt's most-watched satellite channel.

"She is an evil lady who is creating divisions. How is this any of her business?" Mr. Ishaq said of Ms. Patterson. "If I saw her walking down the street I would tell her, 'shut up and mind your own business.' "

In a profile of Ms. Patterson titled "The Brotherhood's Ambassador," the anti-Islamist newspaper Al Watan called her a "pariah" among Egypt's political opposition. Secularist former parliamentarian Mustafa Al Bakri announced on television that Ms. Patterson had been recruited into a Brotherhood "sleeper cell."

A leader in the pro-democracy group The National Association for Change called Ms. Patterson's comments "provocative" and dangerous.

The new American policy toward s Egypt is based, Caroline Glick suggests, on hope and a prayer. It is certainly not based on American interest, American values or an understanding of the situation in Egypt:

The Obama administration supports the Morsi government even as it persecutes Christians. It supports the Muslim Brotherhood even though the government has demonstrated economic and administrative incompetence, driving Egypt into failed state status. Egypt is down to its last few cans of fuel. It is facing the specter of mass starvation. And law and order have already broken down entirely. It has lost the support of large swathes of the public. But still Obama maintains faith.

So, in Egypt, the Obama administration has succeeded to getting our friends, the people who share our values to hate us. The nicest thing we can say is that it’s amateur hour in American foreign policy.