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Mark Steyn thinks the fall of GM, and the speech, are indications of decline.
… And so it goes. Like General Motors, America is “too big to fail.” So it won’t, not immediately. It will linger on in a twilight existence, sclerotic and ineffectual, declining unto a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what’s happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past, but able on occasion to throw out impressive words albeit strung together without much meaning: empower, peace, justice, prosperity – just to take one windy gust from the president’s Cairo speech.
There’s better phrase-making in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, in a coinage of Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Committee on Foreign Relations. The president emeritus is a sober, judicious paragon of torpidly conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, musing on American decline, he writes, “The country’s economy, infrastructure, public schools and political system have been allowed to deteriorate. The result has been diminished economic strength, a less-vital democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit.” That last is the one to watch: A great power can survive a lot of things, but not “a mediocrity of spirit.” A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow superpower.
Charles Krauthammer’s thoughts.
Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word of that. Instead, among all the bromides and lofty sentiments, he issued but one concrete declaration of new American policy: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” thus reinforcing the myth that Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the settlements.
Blaming Israel and picking a fight over “natural growth” may curry favor with the Muslim “street.” But it will only induce the Arab states to do like Abbas: sit and wait for America to deliver Israel on a platter. Which makes the Obama strategy not just dishonorable but self-defeating.
National Review conducted on online symposium on the Cairo speech. Here are a few participants.
… Where he failed in Cairo was to delineate the overarching fact that Islam’s troubles lie within. It is not that America is not at war with Islam. It is that Islam is at war within itself — to identify what this religion and system of beliefs is in the modern age. Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian sidekick Ayman Al Zawahiri want to take us all back to the Stone Age because they have nothing better to offer their followers than hate-filled preaching. Why didn’t Obama say that?
Islam’s worst enemies are within it. If wealthy Gulf Arabs want peace for Palestinians with Israel, why don’t they take a fraction of their profligate spending (in nightclubs in Geneva, at bars in London, at boutiques in Milan) and redirect it to rebuilding Palestinian enclaves with schools, hospitals, food-production facilities, and manufacturing plants? We might then have durable peace possible in the Middle East. Why didn’t Obama say that? …
Just imagine: After a thousand years during which Islam and Western civilization have trod opposite paths in philosophy, science, and the most basic attitudes toward relations between the sexes and the role of work in life — and after a half-century during which Muslims have murdered Western ambassadors and Olympians, to the cheers of millions of their own — suddenly a young American seems to believe he can conjure up a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” How could anyone imagine he possesses such a “reset button”? The answer only starts with Yuppie hubris. …
The speech could do a lot of harm. Obama endorsed the basic claim of Islamists such as Osama bin Laden and Ali Khamenehi, who divide the world into Dar al-Islam (House of Peace) and Dar al-Harb (House of War).
By abandoning Bush’s Freedom Agenda, Obama could encourage despots whose brutal role has given radical Islamists, acting as opponents of the established order, a certain legitimacy.
Obama’s position on women in Islam was pathetic. …
President Obama’s Cairo speech should have been called “a pretend beginning” rather than “a new beginning.” To the extent it wasn’t dangerously naïve, it provided little more than warmed-over left-wing dogma: Obama portrayed Islam and the world as he and other progressives would have them (the president said “progress” eleven times), rather than as they are — under the risible claim that his desired “partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t.”
In Obama’s bowdlerized Islam, the Koran teaches merely that “whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.” Quite apart from the fact that the president simply purged the very next inconvenient verse (which, as Robert Spencer points out, mandates the crucifixion or mutilation of those who fight against Allah and Muhammad), many in the Muslim world — not just terrorists — subscribe to a supremacist interpretation of scripture that does not regard non-Muslims as “innocents.” …
Regarding Andrew’s above lines from the Koran, Lisa Schiffren notes their roots in the Jewish Babylonian Talmud.
As a cornerstone of the case that Islam is the religion of peace, the Koranic sura which Andy cited, 5:32 (“The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.”), has more problems than the mere fact that it is entirely contradicted by the following verse (i.e., the one promising execution, crucifixion, or decapitation to those who oppose Allah and his messenger).
It is one of the suras that comes straight from another religion. Not that they teach this in Al Azhar, but the original occurrence of the line is found in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, 4:5. You know, the book in which the ancient rabbis interpret Jewish law. It reads …
Caroline Glick comments on the speech.
From an Israeli perspective, Pres. Barack Obama’s speech today in Cairo was deeply disturbing. Both rhetorically and programmatically, Obama’s speech was a renunciation of America’s strategic alliance with Israel.
Rhetorically, Obama’s sugar coated the pathologies of the Islamic world — from the tyranny that characterizes its regimes, to the misogyny, xenophobia, Jew hatred, and general intolerance that characterizes its societies. In so doing he made clear that his idea of pressing the restart button with the Islamic world involves erasing the moral distinctions between the Islamic world and the free world.
In contrast, Obama’s perverse characterization of Israel — of the sources of its legitimacy and of its behavior — made clear that he shares the Arab world’s view that there is something basically illegitimate about the Jewish state. …
Charles Hurt in the NY Post.
… The problem with talking so much is that you eventually just start babbling and saying a bunch of stuff that makes no sense.
At one point, Obama fretted over the rise of new power that, to the horror of civilized people, exudes an obsessed and twisted view of “sexuality” and “mindless violence.”
Islamo-fascism?
No, the Internet.
They guy is confronting one of the most evil and relentless mindsets in the history of man and he finds room in his big address to whine about the Internet — by far a greater tool for freedom than anything else. …
You never again have to watch the kid president before his teleprompter, because a Daily Beast blogger has broken his speech code.
President Obama has faced his share of tough issues and audiences over the years, but at every turn he’s managed to defuse tension with a well-timed speech. Already he’s receiving rave reviews for this morning’s address in Cairo, Egypt, on America’s relationship with the Muslim world. But how does he do it? We analyzed Obama’s most famous speeches to bring you this handy instruction manual.
Step 1. Thanks for having me.
Step 2. Express shock that someone with your life story could ever stand before such a crowd…
Step 3. …But that’s just America for you. …
We have a couple of items on the auto bankrupts. First from the Corner.
… gotta love Indiana’s Richard Mourdock (PDF): “‘Hoosier retirees and taxpayers are being deprived of millions of dollars in their funds while a foreign corporation [Fiat] receives a windfall at no cost, this is not equitable,’ stated [Indiana state] Treasurer Mourdock.” He also called the administration’s actions “unprecedented and illegal.”
Hoosier retirees and taxpayers . . . doesn’t exactly square with Obama administration’s depiction of its opponents as a bunch of Wall Street vultures.
Michael Levine from the Financial Times.
… the Obama administration overtly played favourites to get the United Auto Workers protection it would not have received under Section 1113, probably elevating costs in a way that will damage prospects for a successful reorganisation. It made and imposed business judgments on GM about what cars to make and what plants to close (and perhaps about suppliers and distribution) that no one in the government or on the task force had the experience to make and for which no one would be financially accountable. Worst of all, despite Sunday’s desperate attempt to distance itself from GM’s future decisions, it left its fingerprints all over the new plan. Inevitably the White House will take political and hence financial responsibility for its success, relieving pressure on management and labour to succeed. Ultimately it elected to adopt an industrial policy toward the industry that failed utterly in the UK, and has worked out badly and expensively in France and Italy.
Finally, in the process, it disturbed the security of expectation that has made lenders willing to provide capital as secured credit, thus handicapping all US industry and undermining what has been, for all its flaws, one of the best financial reorganisation processes in the world, now emulated elsewhere.
The administration took a tragic situation and turned it into an expensive mess to pay a political debt. It wasted billions of dollars over many months delaying GM’s filing and then implicitly put itself on the hook for many billions more. The financial, political and social echoes of that decision will be with us for a long time. In short, they blew it.
We close with Mark Steyn who has found a need for another czar.
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