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Back to President Bystander. Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor gets a few shots.

Today Obama shared with the world his deep insights on ISIS and Ukraine.

The gobsmacking revelation: “We don’t have a strategy yet” on ISIS. (Precisely because he calls it ISIL, I will refer to it by ISIS.)

This brings to mind the old Lone Ranger joke, with the punchline: “What do you mean we, paleface?” (Don’t go there.)

I am sure that the Pentagon presented Obama with multiple strategies, and that he found none of them to his liking.

No doubt none of the options were all that palatable. Primarily because his previous decisions have left the United States with a set of choices that range between bad and terrible. But there are certainly several that would be better than nothing, which is what he is choosing to do. I would surmise that part of the reason that Obama is refusing to choose any of them, which would involve getting more deeply involved in Iraq and bombing Syria, is that by choosing them, he would be drawing attention to his own blunders. …

… Back to Obama. Other than the “I don’t need no steenkin’ strategy” line, what drew the most comment was his tan suit.

His sartorial choice is easily explained. He would much rather have people obsessing about the color of his suit, than noticing the fact that it is empty.

The president says things aren’t worse, it’s just that we get more news now, what with social media and all. Craig Pirrong has comments.

My grandfather told a story about his step-father, Bill Wilcox. Wilcox “shot” oil wells (the fracking of its day) in West Virginia and southeastern Ohio. He lived in very rough coal mining country, and newspapers were something of a rarity.

My grandfather related how one day in what would have been around 1910-1915, Wilcox brought a newspaper from the general store in Glouster, OH to his home in Burr Oak (now submerged under BurrOakLake). The headline was about a massive flood in China which killed many and threatened millions with starvation. Wilcox put down the paper, and said: “There’s too much damn information in the world. Now I have to worry about 5o million starving Chinese.”

Fast forward a century or more. At a fundraiser in New York, Obama blamed his current travails on too much information:

“The world has always been messy. . . . We’re  just noticing now in part due to social media.” ”Second reason people are feeling anxious is that if you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart.”

No, actually. Obama is apparently trying to rebut claims that he bears some responsibility for the fraught state of the world, and to resist pressures that he needs to act more decisively against Putin, and ISIS, and Assad, and . . . by claiming that the current world isn’t really that much different than it’s ever been. It’s just that we notice it more because of Twitter and the nightly news. …

Noemie Emery writes on why the left keeps defending the failed presidency.

… When Republicans fail, it’s always their fault, but when things fall apart under Democrats, larger forces are always at work. In the first volume of his work, Reagan biographer Steven F. Hayward took a stroll with us down memory lane to the last time this happened, under one James Earl Carter: “The job of President is too difficult for any single person because of the complexity of the problems and the size of government,” pronounced the historian Barbara Tuchman. “As the country goes to the polls in the 47th national election, the Presidency as an institution is in serious trouble,” wrote the columnist Joseph Kraft. Political scientist Theodore Lowi said the presidency had become too big for even the likes of a Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Perhaps the burdens have become so great that, over time, no President will be judged adequate,” said U.S. News and World Report. And Newsweek added, “The Presidency has in some measure defeated the last five men who have held it—and has persuaded some of the people who served them that it is in danger of becoming a game nobody can win.”

There was much more of that, but as Hayward points out, this line of thought stopped being talked about halfway through Reagan’s first term. “There’s a .  .  . reason for that,” he noted. “The elite complaints .  .  . always abstract from the substantive views and actions of the occupant. The possibility that ‘maybe we have a crappy president’ ” refuses to enter their minds.

Especially it refuses to enter their minds when the president in question is not only the spokesman for their favorite political outlook, but the embodiment of all of their dreams. If liberals felt compelled to protect a peanut farmer from Georgia, what must they feel for an Ivy League-trained exotic from Hyde Park, a man of the world and messiah, a speaker and writer, but never a doer; themselves, in short, to the ultimate power; themselves as they dreamed they could be? And that is the problem: If he fails, then they fail, and that cannot happen. So the fault is in the stars, in the cards, in unfair expectations—anywhere but where it should be.

Matthew Continetti calls the second term 1,461 days of summer vacation. 

The headline was brutal. “Bam’s Golf War: Prez tees off as Foley’s parents grieve,” read the cover of Thursday’s New York Daily News. Obama’s gaffe was this: He had denounced the beheading of James Foley from a vacation spot in Martha’s Vineyard, then went to the golf course. Seems like he had a great time. Such a great time that he returned to the Farm Neck Golf Club—sorry, membership is full—the next day.

Technically, Obama’s vacation began on August 9. It is scheduled to end on Sunday, August 24. With the exception of a two-day interlude in D.C., it has been two weeks of golf, jazz, biking, beach going, dining out, celebrating, and sniping from critics, not all of them conservative, who are unnerved by the president taking time off at a moment of peril.

Attacking the president for vacation is usually the job of the out party. But these days it is the job of all parties. …

… Criticizing the president the other day, Joe Scarborough nonetheless conceded, “Presidents are always working, whether on a golf course or behind a desk.” But is that actually so? What, exactly, does President Obama do? He seems to learn everything from the papers—from the IRS scandal to the VA scandal to the mobilization of the Missouri National Guard. International events routinely take him by surprise. His professional activities include fundraising—40 events this year so far—and perfunctory addresses to the public. He goes through the presidential motions: meeting with officials and foreign dignitaries, holding press conferences, sitting for interviews, shipping MREs to endangered populations, ordering air strikes. But there is no passion behind these activities, no restless energy, no managerial competence, no sense of purpose or mission or strategy, none of the qualities associated with leadership in business, politics, and culture.

Donors complain the president does not schmooze, or even have much interest in what they are doing or thinking. Democrats on the Hill have the same complaint. “Obama Is Seen as Frustrating His Own Party,” read the headline on the front-page of the Times this week. The story opened with a telling anecdote. The congressional leadership was meeting with the president at the White House. Harry Reid complained to President Obama that Mitch McConnell is holding up judicial nominations. Obama scoffed. “You and Mitch work it out,” he told Reid. He wasn’t interested.

What does interest Obama is celebrity: His own, and that of others. He enjoys opportunities to expound on the world, as though he were an essayist for the New Yorker, which he surely will be soon after leaving office. He wants to be recognized in public, during his choreographed stops outside the White House, and during “major speeches” that lead to applause but no discernible change in affairs, and during appearances on talk shows, the more mindless the better. He likes intimate gatherings of rich and famous people, people who enjoy notoriety—though not nearly as much as he—people of means, people of uniform opinion on the state of the world, the economy, and, most importantly, the state of Barack Obama. He is interested in good food, in good company. He likes golf.

And he is interested in television. He watches HBO. Last winter, when the network’s CEO visited the White House for a state dinner, the president asked him for copies of “True Detective,” and of “Game of Thrones.” Obama watches “House of Cards.” He subscribes to the theory that we are living in the rather oxymoronic “golden age of television.” According to CBS, “His go-tos include ‘Breaking Bad,’ ‘Mad Men,’ and ‘Homeland.’” So we know how Obama has spent at least 275 hours of his presidency. Did he punch out before watching Carrie go crazy? …

…In the 1990s, America had a holiday from history. Today, it has a president on holiday. The boundary separating vacation from vocation has disappeared. The party won’t end for years. And the hangover will be severe.

Jonah Goldberg reminds us of how some in the media called him the “Chess Master.”

… You remember the Chess Master right? Here’s Bob Herbert describing him back in 2009:

Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He’s smart, deft, elegant and subtle. While Lindsey Graham was behaving like a 6-year-old on the Senate floor and Pete Sessions was studying passages in his Taliban handbook, Mr. Obama and his aides were assessing what’s achievable in terms of stimulus legislation and how best to get there.

Here’s Barack Obama describing his favorite person:

“I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Obama told him. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Yesterday at his news conference, the president said he doesn’t have a strategy yet for the Islamic State. The blowback required the White House to send out his spinners like a farmer sending out his sons in search of a wayward hog. Personally, I don’t care that the president doesn’t have a strategy for the Islamic State — yet. One of the downsides of leading from behind is that it by definition allows problems to fester and become more complex. (“In other news today, six people burned to death as firefighters watched another building burn to the ground as part of Fire Chief Obama’s ‘firefighting from behind’ initiative.”) …

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We treat ourselves to another day of ignoring President Trainwreck.

National Review’s Josh Gelernter pens a piece arguing for better treatment for some zoo animals.

… The ballyhooed gorilla Koko, who has a thousand-word sign-language vocabulary, invented a word for ring by combining the signs for “finger” and “bracelet” into “finger-bracelet.” When Koko met a green-winged macaw, she named him “Devil Tooth.” Evidently, the parrot reminded Koko of a red toy dinosaur she owned, named “Red Devil”; green-wings are mostly red, and macaws are famously dinosaur-ey. And as far as Koko knew, the bird’s big beak was a big tooth — a fair assumption; hence: Devil Tooth. …

 

… A conservationist named Mark Shand wrote a superb book called “Travels on My Elephant,” which recounts his story of buying an elephant and riding it across India. At the end of the book, one of Shand’s companions falls into a bonfire and badly burns his arm. At the beginning of his next book, Shand’s elephant, Tara, sees the burnt fellow for the first time in four years — the first time since the night he was burned. The first thing she does is run her trunk over his once-burnt, now healed arm — just checking up on him.

Elephants recognize themselves in mirrors. They make and use tools, ranging from fly-swatters to corks for watering holes. I once heard a story about a large African elephant who would get drunk on fermented fruit and then go around looking for trees full of baboons. He would grab a tree’s trunk with his trunk, and — to the baboons’ chagrin — shake it empty. There’s nothing funnier to a drunk elephant than an annoyed baboon.

Which is not to say that elephants are jerks; in fact, they’re famously altruistic. An elephant-operator in India couldn’t figure out why his work-phant wouldn’t drop some logs into a hole, per his instructions. The operator found a dog napping in the designated ditch; when the dog was removed, the elephant resumed work. …

The slow growing young of humans and the subsequent intensive care has in many ways been portrayed as a liability. Turns out the altruistic behavior of our species might have grown out of solutions to that problem. The University of Zurich reports on a new study.

Apes hardly ever act selflessly without being solicited by others; humans often do. What has caused this curious divergence, which is arguably the secret to our species’ unparalleled success? A team headed by an anthropologist from the University of Zurich now reveals that cooperative care for the young was the evolutionary precondition for the emergence of spontaneous altruistic behavior.

Scientists have long been searching for the factor that determines why humans often behave so selflessly. It was known that humans share this tendency with species of small Latin American primates of the family Callitrichidae (tamarins and marmosets), leading some to suggest that cooperative care for the young, which is ubiquitous in this family, was responsible for spontaneous helping behavior. But it was not so clear what other primate species do in this regard, because most studies were not comparable.

A group of researchers from Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Italy and Great Britain, headed by anthropologist Judith Burkart from the University of Zurich, therefore developed a novel approach they systematically applied to a great number of primate species. The results of the study have now been published in Nature Communications. …

We do have comments for one politician – the last GOP governor of Virginia; now on trial for corruption. Bart Hinkle of the Richmond Times-Dispatch writes on the handouts that greet the successful practitioners of public narcissism. He thinks the governor’s economic slush funds are part of the problem.

… The funds come from the state’s coffers, which are filled by Virginia taxpayers, which include businesses that might have done other, better things with the money. But politicians find the political allocation of economic goods irresistible because the benefits are clear and concentrated, while the costs are hidden and dispersed.

Despite his calls for tougher ethics rules, however, just three months ago McAuliffe vetoed one. The bill would have prohibited both him and his political action committee from taking money from companies that seek or get handouts from — you guessed it — the Governor’s Opportunity Fund.

Moreover, McAuliffe speaks about the state’s economy much as McDonnell did. “We need to … build a new entrepreneurial, innovative and dynamic economy,” he told leaders of the General Assembly’s budget committees a few days ago. “If Virginia is going to remain a leader in the global marketplace, we must renew our efforts to diversify our economy.”

We? Our?

The state’s economy does not belong to the state’s politicians. It is not theirs to manage or direct — though clearly they think otherwise.

As long as they think that — as long as they try to direct the state’s economy using slush-fund handouts, special tax favors and product promotions — business interests will continue trying to grab a piece of the action. And the higher the stakes, the harder they’ll try. As Jonnie Williams testified when asked why he made his private jet available to McDonnell: “If you’re a Virginia company, you want to make sure you have access to these people. He’s a politician, I’m a businessman.” Q.E.D.

Did Bob McDonnell surrender to some form of corruption when he took so much swag from Williams? No doubt. But by then he already had committed a form of corruption far graver — the kind that led Williams to assume he could get something for his swag in the first place.

The New Yorker wonders if we’re seeing the twilight of baseball.

If Mike Trout walked into your neighborhood bar, would you recognize him? Let me rephrase: If the baseball player who is widely considered the best in the world—a once-in-a-generation talent, the greatest outfielder since Barry Bonds, the most accomplished twenty-two-year-old that the activity formerly known as the national pastime has ever known—bent elbows over a stool and ordered an I.P.A., would anyone notice? A few weeks ago, Trout, who plays center field for the Angels, hit a ball nearly five hundred feet. At the All-Star Game, he was clocked at twenty miles per hour—rounding the bases, on foot. Yet his Q rating is about on par with that of Jim, the guy in South Jersey whose burgers Trout’s mother sometimes mails, frozen, to her superhuman son in Anaheim, to keep him rooted in the tastes and comforts of home. The pride of Millville: a chubby-cheeked mama’s boy with a haircut certified by the Marine Corps. He strides among us like a colossus, anonymous. …

… the Trout conundrum strikes me as a significant milestone in baseball doomsaying—more problematic, say, than the demise of corporate slow-pitch leagues, which theWall Street Journal recently foretold. When was the last time baseball’s reigning king was a cultural nonentity, someone you can’t even name-drop without a non-fan giving you a patronizing smile?

I’ve been thinking about Trout lately, because of the interminable retirement parade for Derek Jeter, and because of Bud Selig’s planned departure from the commissioner’s office in January. In a few months, Red Sox Nation will toast David Ortiz on the occasion of his thirty-ninth birthday. Soon enough, Big Papi, too, will be gone—and baseball under Commissioner Rob Manfred may be looking at a horizon devoid of personalities who exist beyond the realm of fantasy leagues. …

Downton Abbey has new plot twists in the season 5 which airs Jan. 5th. Huffington Post has a short. 

It appears things are heating up at Downton Abbey.

The trailer for Season 5 of the hit series was released on August 30, and it foreshadows some major plot twists and turns. Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery) seems to have her sights set on Lord Gillingham (Tom Cullen), Tom Branson (Allen Leech) has a new love interest and the Countess of Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) looks to be making a mysterious connection of her own with newcomer, Simon Bricker (Richard E. Grant).

Plus, it looks like a devastating fire breaks out, which could change everything.