To lay the blame for what happened Wednesday in San Bernardino on Barack Obama might seem excessive. But if not on him, who? From the day he took office, the president has been engaged in a game of outright denial that Islam has anything to do with what is wrong in the world.
In fact, if he ever points a finger, it’s usually at Western imperialism or Christianity or Republicans or Benjamin Netanyahu (to name a few of his favorite enemies).
But never at the I-word.
To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, “When somebody says it’s not about Islam, it’s about Islam.”
Syed Farook did not go to Saudi Arabia to study Zen Buddhism.
America, and its trailing entities in Europe, has a problem now of gargantuan proportions. Barack Obama was and is precisely the wrong man, possibly the worst conceivable man, to be president of the United States at this point in history. No one more invidious could be invented.
Still amazing that he got elected once, let alone twice.
The NASA Advisory Council is pretty remarkable to listen to today, particularly Bill Ballhaus. They’re essentially telling NASA it doesn’t have the technology or a plan. Which has always been the case. As I tweeted, the NAC needs to speak truth to Congress about SLS.
Without the use of the teleprompter, his speech can be described only as “halting.” It was impossible to count the number of times he seized up, able to deaden the silence with only a drawn-out “uh,” “um” or “ahhh.”
The White House dutifully scrubbed all the halts and stutters from the official transcript, and it was impossible to count them in real time. But a sample of his incoherent word salad found him stuttering about every 15 words, which comes to more than 330 “uh-um-ahhs” in a single appearance.
This is not the same soaring speaker who inspired so many in 2008. This is a broken-down man who has lost the only gift he ever had.
Unfortunately, there is no more 2/3rd of the Congress to act on this than there is for impeachment in the Senate.
I’d also note that I don’t think he ever had a gift for extemporaneous speaking. He was always Candidate, and then President Teleprompter.
The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement. (For those inclined to defend p.c. on the grounds that racism and sexism are important, bear in mind that the forms of repression Marxist government set out to eradicate were hardly imaginary.)
American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government, but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state. The continuous stream of small-scale outrages it generates is a testament to an illiberalism that runs deep down to its core (a character I tried to explain in my January essay).
Of course, given his own history, he’s not the best standard bearer for the message.