With many, both liberal and conservative, agreeing that Obama's West Point speech was varying degrees of awful, boring, false, lacking real substance, utterly misplaced in its pedagogic pretensions, poorly argued, a transparent and rather feeble effort to cast wandering and weak as provisionally pragmatic and well reasoned just so long as, ya know, no one dare question the reasoning - given that response one perforce now wonders: what the hell was Dear Leader thinking? Is he just clinging to the idea that he can still govern by means of pretty speech giving? He squeezes out a few lofty sounding phrases and order is restored? Maybe - and you know, when it comes to spewing rhetoric about inequality and climate change deniers and homophobia and racism and the war on women and all the vague base pleasing populist fodder of that sort, he probably can still get away with the illusion of governing by teleprompter because the media is generally gonna back up those narratives. But foreign policy is just too real and combustible and stubborn and intractable a thing to be easily tamed by false narratives spun by your media allies - there's only so many lies you can tell before the flood of reality starts to push its way through and not even the Grey Lady can save you when that levee starts to crumble.
The image of Obama as weak, misguided, tentative, indecisive, prone to seeking refuge in phony intellectual conceits, pandering, apologetic, not a strong and proud promoter and defender of American interests and power, unfeared as an enemy and untrusted as a friend when it comes to the practice of foreign policy is out there, it's settling in, it's embedded in the weave of his desultory actions - and it ain't going away - and I don't think there's much he can do to fix it. The worrying thing is that that may be because he doesn't see it as in need of fixing, he doesn't see it as a problem, he just doesn't see America or the value of American power in those crudely unenlightened terms - such a viewpoint I'm sure would stand him in very good stead in the Harvard faculty lounge - but in the real world it means you're gonna get your ass kicked.
The image of Obama as weak, misguided, tentative, indecisive, prone to seeking refuge in phony intellectual conceits, pandering, apologetic, not a strong and proud promoter and defender of American interests and power, unfeared as an enemy and untrusted as a friend when it comes to the practice of foreign policy is out there, it's settling in, it's embedded in the weave of his desultory actions - and it ain't going away - and I don't think there's much he can do to fix it. The worrying thing is that that may be because he doesn't see it as in need of fixing, he doesn't see it as a problem, he just doesn't see America or the value of American power in those crudely unenlightened terms - such a viewpoint I'm sure would stand him in very good stead in the Harvard faculty lounge - but in the real world it means you're gonna get your ass kicked.