This fascinating little piece on the putative 'Asia pivot' perfectly sums up the Obama presidency as far as I'm concerned. When the pivot was announced my immediate reaction, uber cynic that I am, was 'bull shit - no way that's happening' - some more refined defense specialists shared my scepticism but politely were willing to give Obama some benefit of the doubt with the understanding that such a strategic shift would require a larger navy and therefore a funding commitment and if we didn't see that happening then at that point it would be fair to conclude Obama wasn't serious - but that was my point from the beginning: there was absolutely no way Mr Lead From Behind was serious about expanding our defense profile when it was very clear he was all about reducing it. To me, the Obama campaign saw that Romney was going to come after them on defense, judged they were maybe vulnerable there and the pivot was just a campaign calculation without much real substance beyond the utility thereof - and the linked article says essentially that that indeed looks to have been the case.
We're talking a serious strategic statement spoken as mere theater in service of a political calculation - your allies are watching that and your enemies are watching that and coming to conclusions, serious conclusions - that's extreme and that's Obama: a man with an extreme left wing agenda and a fanatical willingness to lie and mislead and falsely propagandize in service of it. Now, he's not the first politician to be less than honest and somewhat unsavoury so I'm not gonna get hysterical about what he is especially since what he is has been obvious for a very long time - no, what's truly troubling here is the press and media's complicity in it - that complicity encourages and enables bad behavior, bad governance, bad ideas and bad blood, all of which are thoroughly on display in Washington right now. Obama may be an awful president - history will make a decision on that and I for one am confident history will not be kind - but the truly troubling thing here and the real threat to the nation are the things that have made that awfulness possible: when the pivot was announced I don't remember a single mainstream media outlet questioning the seriousness of it, the sincerity of it, the logistics behind it [and in an infamous debate encounter the media even mocked Romney for accurately pointing out that Obama's pivot rhetoric was not in keeping with his views regarding the size of the Navy] - and yet just about every serious defense specialist I read on a regular basis viewed the announced pivot with skepticism. That says a lot about the nature of this presidency I think.
