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IBD Editors wonder if the president will ever take the job seriously.
The Mideast is in turmoil, the economy is faltering and the president opts to spend precious time with David Letterman, Beyonce and Jay-Z. Are we the only ones to wonder if Obama’s suited to be president?
Last week, Michelle Bachmann had it partly right when she said that “President Obama needs to get his priorities straight.”
There’s no question that Obama should, as Bachmann recommended, cancel his appearance on the Letterman show and agree to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But the idea that Obama’s problem is a mixed-up priority list is giving the president more credit than he deserves. Time and again, Obama has proved that he is simply incapable of taking the job of president seriously. And the repercussions of this grow by the day. …
… If all Obama wants to do in life is golf, take fancy vacations, crack jokes on late-night TV and offer meaningless policy proposals, he should go run a nonprofit and leave running the country to someone who’ll take the job seriously.
Jennifer Rubin picks up the theme.
President Obama’s argument for reelection seems to be: 1) the economy is getting better, and 2) if I win I can work with Republicans.
The first argument has been essentially eviscerated by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. The Fed doesn’t come up with a super-charged printing press to flood the economy with dollars, push down bond yields and light a fire under the stock market if we are on the right track. QE3 is an emergency response to an economy that is headed for zero growth or contraction.
As for the second, the idea that if Obama is given four more years he could unlock the stalemate in Washington has been dealt a death blow by Bob Woodward’s book, “The Price of Politics.”
The bulk of the book is a step-by-step account of Obama’s unique ability to frustrate, annoy and blindside both Democrats and Republicans throughout the search for a grand bargain to address the debt. By contrast, VP Joe Biden comes across as responsible, digging for spending cuts with Republicans and trying to keep the process on track. (He came up with over $1 trillion in cuts both sides could live with.)
Several aspects of the failed grand bargain negotiations are illuminated: …
… And that really is the powerful message of Woodward’s book. The president doesn’t know what he is doing. He is buffeted by events. He commands neither trust nor respect from either party.
For reasons not clear to me, the Romney campaign has failed to grasp the central thread running through Obama’s presidency, from passivity in the Green Revolution to fumbling a debt deal to insisting the embassy attacks have nothing to do with anything but a movie. In all these instances a vacuum created by non-leadership, confusion and inexperience allowed events to get out of hand. In all these instances the United Sates came out the worse for it. Do we really think a second term would be any different?
So does Andrew Malcolm.
OK, let’s just pull a few things together from recent days:
1) Before a wild protest mob storms the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to remove the Stars and Stripes, the embassy tweets an apology for an anti-Islam video it had nothing to do with but finds no time to defend or explain freedom of speech, even hateful speech.
2) In Libya three days after a warning of upcoming violence, the American ambassador is allowed to go to lawless Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11 with hardly any security where some five dozen terrorists catch them in the bungalow consulate, engage in a prolonged firefight involving rocket-propelled grenades and mortars that just happened to be at hand, resulting in the death of four Americans, including the much-respected ambassador.
3) President Obama expresses appreciation for their sacrifice, urges calm and says some Libyans helped get the dead ambassador to a hospital. He says now after such unanticipated violence on the anniversary of 9/11, he’s ordered U.S. embassy security beefed up in lots of places because you can’t be too careful after four people are dead. He takes no questions.
4) To demonstrate his grief, executive expertise and concern for appearances at such a sad, tragic time,, Obama flies to Vegas for some campaign fundraising.
5) Later, his obedient ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, maintains on four different television shows that the deaths and Cairo riot on 9/11 are all attributed to the anti-Islam video, which has been on YouTube most of the summer, and she knows from her best information they have no connection to 9/11 or terrorism. (Watch those weasel words; her best information could be the worst available.) …
Rubin also covers Woodward’s book as it shows Ryan never had a chance to make a deal because the administration never wanted one.
Unfortunately for the president and the legion of media spinners who insist on portraying the Republicans as the sole problem in reaching a debt reduction deal, Bob Woodward in “The Price of Politics” pretty much points the finger at President Obama. Along the way, to the surprise of some conservatives, he paints a picture of a rather amiable and flexible speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-Ohio) and a dogged Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who, he notes, had been laboring for years on real budget reform and put together the first budget to tackle our entitlement programs.
In Chapters 10 and 11 Woodward gives the ticktock in Obama’s response to Ryan’s 2011 budget that included real Medicare reform. Obama is portrayed as peevish. Rather than wait, for example for the Gang of Six, Woodward reports: “ ‘We’re not waiting,’ the president said in exasperation. He wanted to rip into Ryan’s plan.” So much for trying to reach out to the other side.
Woodward also details Obama’s now-infamous speech on April 13, 2010 at GeorgeWashingtonUniversity, in which — with Ryan sitting in the first row — the president launched into a nasty partisan, assault. …
And Jennifer Rubin defends Ryan from the attack this weekend from Maureen Dowd.
Others have already written on the shockingly anti-Semitic tropes that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd chose to weave into her bizarre attack (“Neocons Slither Back”) on vice-presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and one of his advisers, Dan Senor, who is Jewish. I suppose the left is so drenched in the language of “Israel firster” and “Israel lobby” and images of a hanging Jew, this rhetoric has become a reflexive writing tic, like framing columns as conversations with taxicab drivers.
But for now I’ll turn my attention to the grossly inaccurate portrayal of Ryan as an empty vessel into which neocons supposedly pour their toxic brew. Aside from being grossly insulting that a man seeped in conservative thought, widely read and traveled and a 14-year veteran of the House wouldn’t have his own views it contradicts the other elite line that Romney-Ryan have no foreign policy views at all or they are muddled. …
Elsewhere Dowd has taken a lot of hits for her column. Noah Rothman of MEDIA-ite summarizes.
Long-time New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd is facing a significant backlash over her latest column in which she uses a number of medieval, anti-Semitic stereotypes to describe neoconservatives and, specifically, Dan Senor, a close advisor to Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan.
In Dowd’s latest column, Neocons Slither Back, she describes Ryan’s senior advisor as snake-like. Dowd also describes Senor as the “puppet master” behind Ryan’s supposed lurch towards a neoconservative foreign policy critique of President Barack Obama. This, too, is a trope used for centuries to villainize Jews.
Commentary Magazine’s Jonathan Tobin savaged Dowd’s column as “creepy” and says that this episode should not be swept under the rug:
“Dowd’s column marks yet another step down into the pit of hate-mongering that has become all too common at the Times. This is a tipping point that should alarm even the most stalwart liberal Jewish supporters of the president.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic, responded immediately to the slurs printed in the Times on the eve of the Jewish new year holiday. In Happy New Year, Puppet Masters, Goldberg goes after Dowd for her liberal use of offensive slurs to attack Ryan.
“Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews,” Goldberg wrote. …
Instapundit notes Romney is compared to Thurston Howell, but Obama is more like Gilligan. Good Photoshop here.
But Obama’s more like Gilligan — the skinny guy with big ears who screws things up every time it looks like they’re going to be rescued. Kinda like he’s done with the economy . . .