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MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) reports on a Saudi pundit’s assessment of Dear Follower.
“The problem of U.S. President Barack Obama can be summed up in a single word: hesitation. The man is short-sighted, confused and diffident. It seems that the gist of his policy is disagreeing with every position of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and that is quarrelsomeness, not policy.
“This assessment of Obama’s policy is not voiced only by his Republican rivals in the U.S., or by those who hate some [aspects] of his global [foreign] policy, but also by some proponents of his own school of thought, like the well-known American author David Ignatius, who recently wrote a critique of the Obama administration’s policy that was not confined to foreign [policy] affairs… Summarizing the problematic aspects of Obama’s conduct, he said that the public is more afraid of a weak administration than a strong one!
“We are not talking [only] about harsh critics of this administration, inside or outside the U.S. This is apparent from a recent article by Lebanese-American writer Fuad ‘Ajami, who slammed Obama for his feebleness, his lack of leadership, and his inability to take bold decisions under difficult circumstances, especially when it comes to his position on the Syrian catastrophe. Nor is it only Republicans who attack [Obama]. [Criticism is also voiced] by people who were overjoyed by the arrival [in the White House] of a black Harvard graduate with African and Islamic roots, the son of Hussein Obama. [They expected him] to have a better understanding of the Islamic and Arab societies and their nature. But eventually, as the helplessness of the international community [to address the situation] in Syria increased due to the [conduct of] the U.S. and Obama, it became apparent that this man is unable to lead and that he hides his failure and ignorance behind a lot of hypothetical talk about red, green and purple lines…” …
… “This leads us to a frustrating conclusion about Obama’s precise and rigid implementation of his bad and superficial policy of retreating [from the Middle East] at any cost, even in the face of new developments. [We must conclude that] this is not a skilled statesman and politician with creative solutions, but an ordinary academic who repeats meaningless slogans and does not possess the political sensitivity to give each factor the weight it deserves, to take bold [action] when necessary and to refrain [from action] when necessary…”
John Podhoretz has a column on the Attorney General PlaceHolder’s remorse about his policies. We’ll have more next week on Holder who finally is circling the drain. We first heard of him when he couldn’t find anything wrong with Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich early in 2001.
Attorney General Eric Holder says (or had his flunkies say) he only understood the severity of his own actions against Fox News reporter James Rosen when he was sitting at his breakfast table reading The Washington Post on a Monday morning.
Yes, that’s what he told the Daily Beast, which did him the inestimable favor of not crumpling to the ground in hysterical peals of laughter.
For one thing, the story about the Rosen subpoena was released on the Post’s Web site the day before. To believe the tale about Holder and the breakfast table, you have to believe no one told him about it on that Sunday.
If you buy that, fella, I have a CitiBike rack to sell you.
Besides which, given that Holder approved the subpoena on Rosen’s records back in 2010, and that his department had to go to three judges before it could find one who’d execute it, the whole story smells to high heaven.
The Justice Department knew it was breaking new ground with its action in the Rosen case, and you don’t forget it when you do something unprecedented.
But Holder isn’t breaking new ground with his denials here. He’s merely following his boss’s fascinating habit of acting as though policies for which he is responsible have nothing to do with him. …
A treat today is a piece from American.com on Eric Hoffer; Longshoreman Philosopher.
Hardly anyone had heard of Eric Hoffer when his first book, The True Believer, was published in 1951. In fact, when Harper & Brothers was considering accepting it, they asked Norman Thomas, the former presidential candidate for the Socialist Party, to go and see Hoffer. They wanted to verify that he really existed and was what he claimed to be — a longshoreman in San Francisco. No one at the publishing house had seen him or even spoken to him on the telephone. (Hoffer never had a phone except in the last year of his life.) Furthermore, Hoffer’s book was written in an abstract and intellectual style rarely encountered on the waterfront.
Norman Thomas’s son, Evan Thomas (father of the present-day journalist in Washington), was a senior editor at Harper & Brothers (later Harper & Row). Hoffer, according to his own oft-told story, had mailed the manuscript of The True Believer to Harper in a brown paper parcel, without making a copy first. He said he didn’t worry about losing it because he had rewritten it so many times that he knew it by heart.
Norman Thomas vouched for Hoffer, who spoke with a strong German accent. He had joined the longshoremen in 1943, when he was already in his mid-forties. In normal times, Hoffer later wrote, the Longshoreman’s Union was as hard to join as an aristocratic club. But the military draft had shrunk the available manpower and Hoffer was accepted. The boss of the Longshoremen’s Union was Harry Bridges, an Australian whom Congress had tried to deport as a Communist. Hoffer admired Bridges’s ability but not his ideology. At the end of his life he said that he “never spoke a word to Bridges.”
As a class, intellectuals are aristocratic in temperament and seek power for themselves.
In The True Believer Hoffer said that “faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves” — a serviceable summary of the book. It was published to considerable acclaim, with the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune joining in. The San Francisco Examiner always maintained good relations with Hoffer and later published his newspaper column, but the San Francisco Chronicle retained a curious and lifelong animosity toward its homegrown author.
Hoffer went on to write nine more books, all of them short. …
Andrew Malcolm tops off our week with late night humor.
Fallon: At a recent fundraiser Obama noted a shortage of common sense in Washington. Then, the people who had just paid $5,000 per plate applauded.
Leno: Not looking good for President Obama with all these scandals. Today, his teleprompter took the Fifth.
Conan: A new report says someone close to Obama knew about the IRS scandal and kept his mouth shut. In other words, we can rule out Joe Biden.
Letterman: President Obama says, “Sorry, I’ve been out of the loop.” VP Joe Biden says, “Wait a minute. I’m supposed to be the one out of the loop.”