House of Eratosthenes

“The United States cannot wait for problems surrounding the legitimacy of the Afghan government to be resolved before making a decision on troops, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said,” Reuters reports from aboard a U.S. military aircraft:

Gates did not say when he expected U.S. President Barack Obama to decide on whether to increase troops, a decision complicated by rising casualties and fading public support for the stalled, eight-year-old war.

But he pointed out that further high-level deliberations would need to wait for the return of cabinet members from foreign travels through part of next week.

“It’s just a matter now of getting the time with the president when we can sort through these options and then tee them up for him to make a decision,” Gates said.

But Agence France-Presse reports the president hasn’t yet chosen whether to choose not to decide:

President Barack Obama has not yet determined whether he will make a decision on sending more troops to Afghanistan before the November 7 election runoff, a US official said Tuesday.

“The UN, NATO, the US stand ready to assist the Afghans in conducting the second round,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters.

“Whether or not the president makes a decision before that I don’t think has been determined.

“I have continued to say a decision will be made in the coming weeks as the president goes through an examination of our policy,” he added.

It really bolsters your confidence in the president’s ability to achieve victory in what he used to call a war of necessity, doesn’t it?

But we suppose it’s easy to sit on the sidelines and snark. Barack Obama is president of the United States, and he is juggling all kinds of urgent responsibilities. Such as this one, reported by the New York Times:

Mr. Obama will fly to New York on Tuesday for a lavish Democratic Party fund-raising dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel for about 200 big donors. Each donor is paying the legal maximum of $30,400 and is allowed to take a date.

And hey, if you don’t like it, grab a damn mop! As Obama said just last week at…uh, another lavish Democratic Party fund-raiser.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports from Washington that “frustrations and anxiety are on the rise within the military” as the president dithers over Afghanistan:

A retired general who served in Iraq said that the military had listened, “perhaps naïvely,” to Mr. Obama’s campaign promises that the Afghan war was critical.”What’s changed, and are we having the rug pulled out from under us?” he asked. Like many of those interviewed for this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals from the military’s civilian leadership and the White House.

Shouldn’t it be the enemy that fears reprisals?

During the presidential campaign, Obama’s opponents mocked him for frequently voting “present” on difficult questions that came before the Illinois Senate. This is even worse. The commander in chief is absent without leave.

Speaking just for myself, I must agree the CinC’s absence bothers me quite a lot; but I’m even more bothered by the lack of conceptual policy direction in that absence.

Well, He is our President, so His problem here is really ours. And this one is one we’ve had since long before He came along. But Obama has exacerbated the situation somewhat, and to me this represents the most glaring indictment against His leadership style.

To figure out what I mean by that, imagine yourself driving a car down a freeway. Speeding up and slowing down demands that you apply some judgment; moving the steering wheel to the left or right demands a little bit more. For the engine to actually detonate the gasoline and turn the crankshaft, requies none at all. There is a trade-off at work with all these things: A strong process demands little judgment to take place, a weaker one requires a strong leader.

Look to software development for a superlative illustration. During development there is testing, and during the testing there is a human finding out what’s going on and using that data to make a decision about the next test. Once the development is done, the decision-making has been hardened, goldenized, and packaged into what becomes the product. The human component has been removed, because a capability has been incrementally built up to replace the human component. The product is a strong process that is now completely on auto-pilot. It has been fully defined.

Obama’s style of leadership is the antithesis of this, and demonstrates once again the perils of personality politics. We had an election not quite so much about what policies would be put in place, but rather about which one among the candidates was the most wonderful fella. And…insert the obligatory paragraphs about what a swell guy Barry is. But there’s a price to be paid for all that charisma-or-whatever. In the absence of a decision from Him, there is a vacuum that is something of a spectacle in the extent of its emptiness. What I really mean here is illustrated by the rhetorical question: “If Obama won’t announce His decision anytime soon, then what is He at least likely to do?” It’s like predicting which way a football will bounce. If you had a heart attack at the wheel of your car and perished on the spot, the car would still possess some momentum. If your death spasm didn’t involve a violent jerking of the wheel, the car would likely continue in something of a straight line before veering off the road. But that’s not the case here. We really don’t know what’s going to happen.

I speak somewhat beyond the extent of my knowledge. Perhaps, behind closed doors, there are whispers about what The Great One finds to be an appealing direction and what among the various strategies He finds most abhorrent. But it’s likely that if this was the case, there’d be some way to find out about it. All I really know is this: Obama is as much a politician as any of the others, and now is the time for Him to read some polls. He is bridging a schism within His party that is not helpful to Him in any way. It is a fracture between the “Blame America First!” crowd that He would just as soon we all ignore, and pretend it doesn’t exist; and those other leftists who really do want the nation to continue surviving so they can continue to make it into something that clashes more horrendously with its original design than they realize.

To the last of those, you have to add the numbers of those who aren’t quite so liberal but voted for Obama just because He isn’t George W. Bush. Those who bought into the Soros-funded fairy tale that our military operations were suffering under a layer of weak and disinterested leadership, and perhaps The Holy One would be the fix for what ailed us. Yeah…that’s probably not looking like quite such a swell idea right about now. Had aliens abducted George W. Bush, it would be fairly obvious what general direction our military policies in those theaters would take. (And that’s presuming our acting President Dick Cheney was indecisive and in need of some direction, which is laughable whether you love ‘im or hate ‘im…but we’ll go ahead and presume it for the sake of our hypothetical.) What, on the other hand, is to take place right now if our Wonderful Leader Barack Obama is abducted by those same aliens? This is my indictment against our current administration, and the true extent of the horror involved is evident only to those who can think on it awhile. The lack of direction is far greater than we should allow. There is absolutely none. Our current leadership is so wonderful and perfect, that the process itself has withered on the vine. There is no process at all.

For our direction, we look to whatever twitch happens to pop in between those two big floppy ears of His.

Cassy is linking to a column by Richard Cohen, who evidently is being blackmailed, called “Perfection may be President Obama’s biggest flaw.” There we go again. Forget for a moment about what a laughable self-parody this media suck-up is…and think for those moments about the actual damage involved in failing to put together a process because of the lack of need for one, resulting from the extreme heights to which Dear Leader’s wonderfulness ascends. It’s all fine & good we have some direction on all those other issues on which The Great One has spoken…and indeed there’s no shortage of those. Afghanistan aside, Holy Man seems to have an opinion on just about everything.

But nobody knows what’s about to happen in Afghanistan. Ever since Jeremiah Wright got thrown under the bus and we were given our Holy Directives not to think about that bigot anymore…nobody really seems to have a clue about the sources of Obama’s amazing insight. Every time President Obama bothers to source them, it seems they all point back to — Him. “I just think…” is standard prologue to just about every little decision made, or value system expressed, large or small.

Strong leader. Weak process. If He’s gone, or dead, or abducted, or incapacitated — or, once in awhile, it emerges that He really isn’t that strong of a leader, gasp! — there’s no direction or momentum accumulated whatsoever. Nothing can move.

Now add to that, the other charge…that Cohen, along with slobbering people like him, live in a desperate denial of exactly what attributes make their idol so appealing to them. For if they were ever to face that, they would face what exactly it is that they have become…and it would be like the Gorgon Medusa looking in a mirror. As I said over at her place,

The Morgan Freeberg rule of leftist idolatry:

Middle-of-the-road people, and conservatives, would much rather have Sarah Palin watch their kids or grandkids over an entire weekend, than Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi or the late Ted Kennedy;

Liberals, too, would rather have Palin watch their kids&grandkids over an entire weekend than Obama/Pelosi/Kennedy…
:
We aren’t really in disagreement about what qualities these people have. Not when we bet important things on those ideas…like the welfare of our families. What we disagree about are which qualities are important in the people who occupy our most influential and important offices. To conservatives it’s all about integrity and strength [of] character. To liberals it’s all about the ability to sell things against the interests of the person who buys them; the ability to compellingly portray things as the opposite of what they truly are. Leftists want our “leaders” to have exactly the aptitudes they would recoil in horror at seeing developed in their own children. They want their/our leaders to lie to us, as competently as is possible.

This was not always the case. Jimmy Carter was hired in to a job that, it turned out, demanded talents in which he was decidedly lacking…because although he was perceived as a milquetoast and a weakling, at least he was a somewhat nice guy. It was post-Watergate. Ever single made-for-teevee movie villain was middle-aged, with thinning hair, big fluffy eyebrows, and a nice tailored three-piece suit. Heroes, on the other hand, wore plaid shirts unbuttoned down to the belly-button, and jeans with leggings that flared down to the size of bicycle tires by the time they reached the ankles. Formality, it was thought — especially cold, corporate, bureaucratic formality — was a sign of treachery, and we wanted to avoid treachery.

That was wrong-headed, but far superior to what we have going on now. Now, a good leader is someone who can sell things. And we’re not terribly concerned about the ability to sell true things…that’s a job that completes somewhere around the same spot where it begins, isn’t it? No, Bill Clinton was most popular among his fans when he started a debate about the meaning of the word “is.” When, with crafty lawyerly double-talk, he led his own impeachment trial to a conclusion that was distant from where common sense would have taken it. That was the real draw. The demonstrated ability to convert something into the opposite of what it really was. Had he truly deserved to be acquitted, his base wouldn’t have been nearly as impressed. Had he really not had sexual relations with that woman Ms. Lewinsky, he wouldn’t have drawn nearly so much reverence and awe. Behold the unmasked, naked, and altogether unappealing appeal of the modern liberal superstar: It is the power to deceive. It is directly contrary to those attributes responsible parents, of all ideological flavorings, seek to instill in our children.

And so now we have Obama, who is so wonderful that Richard Cohen says such a level of perfection is a problem. Gee, maybe that’s what’s causing global warming! Well, what makes Barack Obama so wonderful? This is what turns the Gorgon Cohen into stone if & when he should ever gaze into Perseus’ polished shield: We are enamored of those soothing nasal dulcet tones coming from PresBO not so much when He expresses truth, as when he bends it — alters it from what it was previously. There are damn few campaign promises to fulfill, and what ones He did make, nobody expects Him to fulfill them anyway. He can sell things contrary to the interests of those who buy them, He can explain everything as the opposite of what it really is, He can argue with dictionaries, He can tell us socialized medicine is what’s needed to fix our ailing economy, He can even tell us the solution to a suffocating level of debt is to take out more debt. He can tell us hot is cold, wet is dry, up is down and — dare I say it — black is white. Which brings me to that other thing: Anybody who dares argue with Him is a racist.

Every single situation He puts His hands on, is like warm putty in them. He is encumbered by nothing. Every slate his marker meets, starts out blank. And, because He is such a skilled politician, it stays that way.

Here, I plagiarize shamelessly from something I heard on Season One of Yes, Minister: “He’s the kind of fellow who can follow you into a revolving door, and come out first.”

So it’s fair to conclude, is it not, that something must be terribly amiss for a leader who enjoys such an array of rare advantages, to struggle for such a time making a decision about something. Hey Barry — if there are none among your constituents that hate America, and I’d be a racist for even daring to think so…what’s the hold-up?

[…] WHILE OBAMA WAFFLED– “James Taranto does the most capable job yet of summarizing how badly the […]
- Steynian 392 « Free Canuckistan! | 10/23/2009 @ 16:25

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Memo For File CIWednesday, October 21st, 2009

Memo For File CI
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009