Triumphantly riding into the Middle East on a unicorn.

It’s frightening to contemplate how close this guy came to being president.

On the other hand, it would have been a Carteresque single term, and we’d have probably been spared Barack Obama.

They’re reporting, a year later, that Fox News had the story right in the first place.

It’s in danger of collapsing.

I’d say it’s collapsed. As Glenn often says, another Jimmy Carter was a best-case scenario in terms of foreign policy.

Aiiiieeeeeeee! It’s melting!!!!

Those horrid little Tea Partiers:

What is at issue here is not some sacred moral value, such as “In God We Trust.” Domestic politics or the affairs of nations are not an avocation for angels. But the coin of this imperfect realm is credibility. Sydney Greenstreet’s Kasper Gutman explained the terms of trade in “The Maltese Falcon”: “I must tell you what I know, but you won’t tell me what you know. That is hardly equitable, sir. I don’t think we can do business along those lines.”

Bluntly, Mr. Obama’s partners are concluding that they cannot do business with him. They don’t trust him. Whether it’s the Saudis, the Syrian rebels, the French, the Iraqis, the unpivoted Asians or the congressional Republicans, they’ve all had their fill of coming up on the short end with so mercurial a U.S. president. And when that happens, the world’s important business doesn’t get done. It sits in a dangerous and volatile vacuum.

The next major political event in Washington is the negotiation over spending, entitlements and taxes between House budget chairman Paul Ryan and his Senate partner, Patty Murray. The bad air over this effort is the same as that Marco Rubio says is choking immigration reform: the fear that Mr. Obama will urge the process forward in public and then blow up any Ryan-Murray agreement at the 11th hour with deal-killing demands for greater tax revenue.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a president reach complete lame-duck status so soon into his second term.

Snub the General Assembly:

It’s not just our Syria non-policy that has the Saudis at arm’s length. The newfound cooperation between President Obama and President Rouhani of Iran has put an added strain on the US-Saudi relationship. The Saudis, like the Israelis, are displeased with the prospect of US-Iranian non-proliferation talks. They see them as an Iranian ploy to ease UN sanctions while continuing to press toward getting the bomb. And while the Saudis are a key American ally, they are adept at securing their interests in the region and are not beholden to Washington. If they continue to be dissatisfied with US policy, they might hinder, or at a minimum do nothing to help, other US interests in the Middle East.

I’d be very surprised if Jerusalem and Riyadh aren’t having some serious back-channel talks. They both know they can’t count on this White House.

A CIA employee involved with Benghazi has been suspended for refusing to practice omerta:

The CIA reiterated its denial in a Tuesday call to a Free Beacon reporter, calling Wolf’s allegations “categorically false.”

Well, if the CIA says it, it must be true.

Roger Simon has changed his mind:

I overlooked — or more exactly chose to ignore — the obvious. We would be going to war with a blind man as our commander-in-chief. And I don’t mean a physically blind man like the Japanese samurai Zatoichi, whose heroic exploits were magnificent despite his infirmity, if you remember the film series. I mean a morally, psychologically and ideologically blind man incapable of coherent policy, action or even much logical thought on any matter of significance, let alone on such a crucial one with life and death at stake.

Meanwhile, Norman Podhoretz wonders if the president is deliberately weakening our standing in the world:

So far as domestic affairs were concerned, it soon became clear—even to some of those who had persuaded themselves that Mr. Obama was a moderate and a pragmatist—that the fundamental transformation he had in mind was to turn this country into as close a replica of the social-democratic countries of Europe as the constraints of our political system allowed.

Since he had enough support for the policies that this objective entailed, those constraints were fairly loose, and so he only needed a minimum of rhetorical deception in pursuing it. All it took was to deny he was doing what he was doing by frequently singing the praises of the free-enterprise system he was assiduously working to undermine, by avoiding the word “socialism,” by invoking “fairness” as an overriding ideal and by playing on resentment of the “rich.”

But foreign policy was another matter. As a left-wing radical, Mr. Obama believed that the United States had almost always been a retrograde and destructive force in world affairs. Accordingly, the fundamental transformation he wished to achieve here was to reduce the country’s power and influence. And just as he had to fend off the still-toxic socialist label at home, so he had to take care not to be stuck with the equally toxic “isolationist” label abroad.

And Walter Russell Mead notes that once again, the president has found the “sour spot”:

During his time in the White House, President Obama has repeatedly demonstrated a style of decision making that gets him in trouble. Especially when the stakes are high and the issue is complex, the President overthinks himself and tries to split the difference between tough policy choices. He comes up with stratagems that work beautifully on paper and offer well reasoned, moderate alternatives to stark choices. Unfortunately, they usually don’t work all that well in the real world, with the President repeatedly ending up in the “sour spot” where his careful approaches don’t get him where he needs to go.

This style of strategy is what’s boxed him in and tied him in knots over Syria. He didn’t want to intervene (too risky) but he didn’t want to ignore the carnage completely (too heartless) so he split the difference and proclaimed a red line. He didn’t lay the political preparations for war before the red line statement; again, too risky and too warlike. Instead, he split the difference once again: he made a threat without ensuring that he’d have the backing to carry it out.

It really is hard to tell whether this is malicious, or simply a sufficiently advanced cluelessness.

[Early-afternoon update]

Max Boot: Obama’s Syria blunder:

It would take a psychologist to unravel what the president was thinking in making this monumental blunder. I am still not convinced by those who claim he is consciously trying to diminish American power, because if the U.S. is less powerful so is our president. But even if he has no such conscious design, Obama’s actions are definitely leading in the direction of a diminished superpower–one that will be increasingly derided, not respected, on the world stage.

If it’s not his goal, he’s sure doing a good job of making it look as though it is.

Are Obama and Kerry passing it? Gee, in the olden days, of Boooosh, having dozens of countries with us, but not France, was “going it alone.” Now, apparently France, and no one else (other than Turkey), is the World United.

And yes, I am back from Alaska, though we didn’t make it to Seward — the weather was too crummy — but we did take a walk in Kincaid Park in Anchorage, and saw a bull moose fifty feet off the trail. But we have relatives visiting for the weekend, so posting will remain spotty.