Obama is not a statesman

President Obama spoke today on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's great "I Have a Dream" speech. Said the President:

[O]ur politics has suffered. Entrenched interests -- those who benefit from an unjust status quo resisted any government efforts to give working families a fair deal, marshaling an army of lobbyists and opinion makers to argue that minimum wage increases or stronger labor laws or taxes on the wealthy who could afford it just to fund crumbling schools -- that all these things violated sound economic principles. We'd be told that growing inequality was the price for a growing economy, a measure of the free market -- that greed was good and compassion ineffective, and those without jobs or health care had only themselves to blame. And then there were those elected officials who found it useful to practice the old politics of division, doing their best to convince middle-class Americans of a great untruth, that government was somehow itself to blame for their growing economic insecurity -- that distant bureaucrats were taking their hard-earned dollars to benefit the welfare cheat or the illegal immigrant.

It has gotten so that every time I listen to Mr Obama speak, I come away with the same impression: he is petty; he is divisive; he is small.

If ever there was an occasion for magnanimity, this was it. Dr King's dream has been largely realized: the current administration, Democratic, is led by our first black President and includes our first black Attorney General; the previous administration, Republican, brought us our first two black Secretaries of State. On a day when the President had the opportunity to rise above the “blame game” and bring all Americans together to celebrate the fulfillment of the aspirations of Dr King, Mr Obama could not hold back from a whining partisan attack on his opponents.

His speech impugned the motives of a large portion of the American population. His opponents are not the loyal opposition, but rather mere “entrenched interests.” They disagree with him not out of principle, but because they are unjust, unfair, greedy. They tell “great untruths,” they “resist,” they lack compassion.

And, then, in the same speech in which he launched these partisan salvoes, he had the temerity to suggest that it is his opponents who practice the “politics of division” rather than he himself.

He is not the President of us all. And he would have us believe (and his supporters never seem to stop reminding us) that it is our racism rather than his divisiveness that makes it so.

The American people long for a statesman who can uplift, inspire, unite. Obama only alienates, antagonizes, divides. Instead of celebrating the legacy of the great statesman, Reverend King, Mr Obama's petty attacks only served to demean it. How sad.

Just so Obama can save face...

The images of gassed Syrian children gasping their lives out as they roll on the ground in their final death throes are unquestionably horrific. On the other hand, you can be sure that if Sunni rebel groups affiliated with Al Qaeda achieve military ascendency in Syria, they will commit atrocities equally horrific against the Alawites. No matter which side we support, we will be supporting genocide and terror. And, how can it possibly be beneficial to the United States to aid and abet rebel groups affiliated with Al Qaeda?

Obama made another of his unguarded, utterly stupid statements when he said that Assad would be crossing a red line if he used poison gas. And, now he has to save face. So, he is going to drag the US into the middle of an age-old blood feud between Alawites and Sunnis. The only thing our involvement will accomplish is to exacerbate tensions between the US and all the various parties in the Middle East, since one side will be angered by the US military attacks, while the other side will be angered because the attacks are not intense enough.

How Obama can think that he will promote peace by escalating the level of violence in the Middle East is utterly beyond my understanding.

Did Obama never read his Burke?

Obama assisted in toppling the edifice of Hosni Mubarak’s government. Declaring "The transition must begin now!", Obama gave a little push and down the Mubarak regime came in a crashing ruin.

And yet, what did Obama imagine would replace it? Obama helped destroy the only central authority that existed in Egypt. And now, he has not a clue what to do as he stands there and surveys the chaos and ruin that he himself helped to create. The regime of Mubarak will be viewed as a Golden Age in comparison to the horrors that will be unleashed by the intensifying civil war in Egypt.

Did the brilliant political scientist Obama never read the writings of Edmund Burke? In Reflections on the Revolution in France Burke wrote, for example:

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. [In other words, Egypt had to move beyond Mubarak.] All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniencies of mutation. This mode will, on the one hand, prevent the unfixing of old interests at once: a thing which is apt to breed a black and sullen discontent in those who are at once dispossessed of all their influence and consideration [the Egyptian army]. This gradual course, on the other hand, will prevent men, long under depression [the Muslim Brotherhood], from being intoxicated with a large draught of new power, which they always abuse with licentious insolence.

Burke taught us never to try to undertake a radical reformation of government. I use the term “radical” advisedly. It implies that you tear out the old government by the roots (radices) and rebuild it from scratch based on abstract political theories. This never works. Once you have destroyed the old government entirely, all the customs, traditions, laws, and usages that bound the society together and prevented it from descending into a state of barbarity are destroyed along with it. Factions that lived in uneasy peace are suddenly at each other's throats. And then, finally, there is nothing left to restrain the mob. Under the ancien regime, people are accustomed to behave towards each other at least with some civility, no matter how imperfect. Muslims and Copts get along, albeit grudgingly. But once the ancien regime has been demolished, all civility disappears and is replaced by spasms of bloodshed.

This is the lesson to be learned from the French Revolution (and from the Russian Revolution, too). This is the lesson that Burke taught us. When the great politician Obama was hounding Mubarak from office, did he never think of Burke’s lessons and stop to ask himself what demons he was unleashing? Liberals always think of revolutions as a positive, cathartic experience, the refreshing breeze of an Arab Spring. They never bother to study the horrors that revolutions have inevitably brought in their trail.

The right approach would have been: gradually, through individual, targeted measures, modify those aspects of the ancien regime that were undesirable and detrimental, maintain stability during the transition, keep the good parts while excising the bad. Instead, Obama decided that radical democracy could be manufactured out of whole cloth in Egypt (of all places), thereby putting on display for all the world to see his utter naivete and complete ignorance of the way revolutions have played out throughout history.

Acute race fatigue

Right on Derryck Green!