Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Marty Peretz is aghast at the president’s Mid-East advisors.
Wowy, zowy, Obama is doing his own thinking on the Middle East and here’s the even worse news: He’s taking advice from Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria.
These pathetic tidings about the inner Barack Obama, who puts his very own twist on all things, particularly Arab and Muslim matters, and the other Barack Obama, who needs counsel from two political therapists, famous and even clever but not especially deep, come from the subtle and highly reliable journalist Mark Landler in The New York Times. These tidbits are not contradictory. Zakaria’s diagnosis, at least for the last few years, is that America is over, just plumb over. Or, to use the ill-omened word from his The Post-American World, “enfeebled,” which implies continuous decline. Enfeebled nations do not, after all, usually rise again. Zakaria was, however, more than a bit mortified by being called a presidential adviser, although it was he who labeled himself. He posted a statement on Saturday saying, well, that he didn’t really advise but spoke to Obama several times in face-to-face meeting about the Arab Spring (which, by the way, in my view is fast becoming Arab winter, like the east coast winter last season.) Anyway, if he is trying to establish a difference, it’s not a distinction. …
… In contrast to Zakaria, Friedman is not embarrassed by being seen as the president’s counselor. … Anyway, Tom’s lens for seeing contemporary America is through contemporary China. He wishes America were China, almost the way some native fascists like Charles Lindbergh wanted America to be like Germany and the way ignorant but “idealistic” oodles of American intellectuals and radical Jewish immigrants wanted the country to be like Soviet Russia. The Chinese can do everything. America can do nothing. Except push the peace process. Yet even Obama must grasp that there is no peace process to push. Mahmoud Abbas has dispatched those killed trying to invade Israel on Nakba Day to the heavens as “martyrs,” moral exemplars, indeed. …
… I wonder what Obama can really learn from Zakaria and Friedman, neither of whom know Arabic, neither of whom know the sources (arcane or simply erudite), both of whom jump from one fashionable topic to another. Today, it’s energy. No, that was yesterday. Wouldn’t the president have been better off and the country better off, too, if he had sat down with, say, Fouad Ajami, who doesn’t agree with him but has the learning to explain why. Maybe Obama should also sit down with Paul Berman, who has explored the ties between radical Arab politics and radical Muslim theology, a generally forbidden topic, especially in this White House. (Berman has done much of his essay writing in this magazine.) Or is it the president’s habit to talk only with people who agree with him? …
… And here’s one more suggestion for whom the president ought to meet: I don’t know Timur Kuran, a Turkish economic historian at Duke. But I did read his book, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East. It will clarify why Obama is so wrong in insisting that Muslim religious principles are unrelated to the regressive politics and economics of countries under their sway. Obama should at least have a conversation with this man, especially since he can’t possibly have time to read a serious scholarly book.
Of course, it is not exactly the president’s lack of knowledge about the Arabs (and the Jews, for that matter) that has left his Middle East policy in shambles. It is the continuous Arab sandstorm of sanctimony and duplicity which has blinded him to the precise underlying realities the sandstorm was meant to conceal. He is a victim of their deceit and his own credulity. But it is even more than that: He believes in his own powers to discern and to persuade as a function of that discernment. Now that virtually every society in the region has upended Obama’s benign take of their reality, it remains to be seen whether he himself can adjust his inner lens to accommodate the brute bedrock. …
… Syria is where the new paradigms of Arab history will be made. The brutality of the Assad dictatorship is legendary, and it has gone over 40 years from father to son. No one is willing to predict whether the family will survive or be taken out. If it survives, it will be more dictatorial than anyone imagined possible. If it is overthrown, it will be replaced by a regime equally cruel but more pious, much more pious. It is not easy for outsiders to decide what they want.
But Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have already more than indicated that they prefer the continued dominion of Bashar Assad. You have to be pretty cold-blooded to make a choice like that. There are other consequences to this decision. Syrian dominion over Lebanon will continue. The Syrian alliance with Iran will continue. Syrian influence over Turkey will continue, perhaps intensify. Syrian intrusion in Iraq will continue. Syria might even get its chance to be on the U.N. Human Rights Council. Hey, and here’s a good thing: The Golan will remain a part of Israel.
Charles Krauthammer find’s Obama’s inner Bush.
Herewith President Obama’s Middle East speech , annotated:
“It will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region, and to support transitions to democracy.”
With this Barack Obama openly, unreservedly and without a trace of irony or self-reflection adopts the Bush Doctrine, which made the spread of democracy the key U.S. objective in the Middle East.
“Too many leaders in the region tried to direct their people’s grievances elsewhere. The West was blamed as the source of all ills.”
Note how even Obama’s rationale matches Bush’s. Bush argued that because the roots of 9/11 were to be found in the deflected anger of repressed Middle Eastern peoples, our response would require a democratic transformation of the region. …
Stephen Colbert decided to make fun of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision with a spoof. The tables were turned on Colbert when he ran afoul of the very laws the Court was attempting to control. The story comes from two Institute for Justice attorneys writing in the WSJ.
Comedy Central funnyman Stephen Colbert, like most of his friends and allies on the left, thinks that last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC is, literally, ridiculous. To make his case that the ruling invites “unlimited corporate money” to dominate politics, Mr. Colbert decided to set up a political action committee (PAC) of his own. So far, though, the joke’s been on him.
The hilarity began last month, when Mr. Colbert began to have difficulty setting up his PAC, which is a group that can raise money to run political ads or make contributions to candidates. So he called in Trevor Potter, a former Federal Elections Commission (FEC) chairman who is now a high-powered Washington lawyer.
Mr. Potter delivered some unfunny news: Mr. Colbert couldn’t set up his PAC because his show airs on Comedy Central, which is owned by Viacom, and corporations like Viacom cannot make contributions to PACs that give money to candidates. As Mr. Potter pointed out, Mr. Colbert’s on-air discussions of the candidates he supports might count as an illegal “in-kind” contribution from Viacom to Mr. Colbert’s PAC. ..
Ed Morrissey picks up the thought.
Satire is notoriously difficult to do well. If anyone doubts that, just ask Esquire, which might face a lawsuit for libel over its clumsy attempt to skewer WND this week on the birth-certificate controversy, although I share James Taranto’s skepticism that the case will succeed. Even those who make a successful career out of satire, like Stephen Colbert, they eventually miss badly as well when their stunts backfire. The Wall Street Journal explains how Colbert started off trying to skewer the Supreme Court over the Citizens United v FEC ruling, and ended up getting a lesson in its necessity: …
Richard Epstein too.
The recent masterstroke by Steve Simpson and Paul Sherman in the Wall Street Journal offers yet another explanation as to the weird absurdity of the current campaign finance laws, whose complexity defies description, especially by folks like myself who think that the FEC has better things to do with its time.
Simpson and Sherman take the occasion to lampoon that master lampooner, Stephen Colbert, who makes his living by making other people look like fools when they crave center stage. But in this instance, he broke his own rules and decided to go solo, at which point his own actions became a delicious point of self-parody. …