So the troika of Dunn, Emanuel and Axelrod were dispatched to the Sunday talk shows to lay down the law. We all know the lines from “The Untouchables” – “the Chicago way,” don’t bring a knife to a gunfight – and, given the pay czar’s instant contract-gutting of executive compensation and the demonization of the health insurers and much else, it’s easy to look on the 44th president as an old-style Cook County operator: You wanna do business in this town, you gotta do it through me. You can take the community organizer out of Chicago, but you can’t take the Chicago out of the community organizer.
The trouble is it isn’t tough, not where toughness counts. Who are the real “Untouchables” here? In Moscow, it’s Putin and his gang, contemptuously mocking U.S. officials even when (as with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) they’re still on Russian soil. In Tehran, it’s Ahmadinejad and the mullahs openly nuclearizing as ever feebler warnings and woozier deadlines from the Great Powers come and go. Even Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is an exquisite act of condescension from the Norwegians, a dog biscuit and a pat on the head to the American hyperpower for agreeing to spay itself into a hyperpoodle. We were told that Obama would use “soft power” and “smart diplomacy” to get his way. Russia and Iran are big players with global ambitions, but Obama’s soft power is so soft it doesn’t even work its magic on a client regime in Kabul whose leaders’ very lives are dependent on Western troops. If Obama’s “smart diplomacy” is so smart that even Hamid Karzai ignores it with impunity, why should anyone else pay attention?
The strange disparity between the heavy-handed community organization at home and the ever cockier untouchables abroad risks making the commander in chief look like a weenie – like “President Pantywaist,” as Britain’s Daily Telegraph has taken to calling him.
Obama is “tough” on Fox News but wimpy to the point of drawing up into a fetal position with real enemies of America.
Weenie is an overly polite term for this behavior.
We have seen Obama apologize to the world, over and over again. We have seen concession after concession, overture after overture to thug regimes the world over. But we also see thug tactics against domestic opponents, real and perceived. This is not what we expect of a president.
What we are seeing, the increasingly hostile attacks on fellow Americans is bullying. The increasingly less-than-robust response to real enemies outside our borders is shameful.
Put the two behaviors together and I’ll bet you can come up with a one word description of what Obama is. Have at it. (Keep the comment policy in mind, please.)
It’s exactly what both you and I expected, however. I don’t have a one-word description, but I do have a name: Robert Mugabe. This is who we put in office last November.
Barack Obama has the backbone of a “WORM”.
A spineless, naive, narcissistic, marxist WORM.
Antidisestablishmentarianism. By the time you figure out what it means it’s too late to do anything about it. Like the 0bama Doctrine.
I don’t know if it is described as ironic or paradoxical, but Obama and his crew think of the good people of central Pennsylvania as bitter clingers to guns and religion, but they themselves are pathetic lampreys and remoras sucking the lifeblood out of America to sustain their narcissistic ids and egos.
I’m working on it, but it’s slow going. How about a hint? Is it some literary reference?
Meanwhile Bebe Netanyahu schedules a visit to the AJC, which The One is speaking at, and doesn’t even let the White House know. That’s a pretty serious put down by a sharp operator.
I think you used the word, “bully”. He’s not afraid to threaten people who can’t effectively retaliate but cringes in the face of a real threat.