Town Hall: Obama explained earlier today that he is working with the international community to shrink ISIS into a “manageable problem.”

———————————-

Twichy

———————————-

I’d say that it looks to most of us that adversaries like ISIS and Vladimir Putin have already managed to shrink Obama into a manageable problem.

A Facebook friend of Glenn Reynolds recently argued that, life under the leadership of Barack Obama, is a lot like the vision of Pottersville George Bailey was shown by the angel Clarence.

Let’s accept, arguendo, that the outgoing DIA chief is right, and that we are now in an era of danger similar to the mid-1930s. How did we get here? It’s worth looking back into the mists of time — an entire year, to Labor Day weekend 2013. What had not happened then? It’s quite a list, actually: the Chinese ADIZ, the Russian annexation of Crimea, the rise of ISIS, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the fall of Mosul, the end of Hungarian liberal democracy, the Central American refugee crisis, the Egyptian-UAE attacks on Libya, the extermination of Iraqi Christians, the Yazidi genocide, the scramble to revise NATO’s eastern-frontier defenses, the Kristallnacht-style pogroms in European cities, the reemergence of mainstream anti-Semitism, the third (or fourth, perhaps) American war in Iraq, racial riots in middle America, et cetera and ad nauseam.

All that was in the future just one year ago.

What is happening now is basically America’s version of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The President of the United States — supported to an exceptional extent by an electorate both uncomprehending and untrusting of the outside world — is Clarence the Angel, and he’s showing us what the world would be like if we’d never been born, Unsurprisingly, Bedford Falls is now Pottersville, and it’s a terrible place. Unfortunately we do not get to revert to the tolerable if modest status quo at the end of the lesson: George Bailey will eventually have to shell the town and retake it street by street from Old Man Potter’s Spetsnaz.

But the larger point here is not what’s happening, because what’s happening is obvious. Things are falling apart. The point is how fast it’s come. It takes the blood and labor of generations to build a general peace, and that peace is sustained by two pillars: a common moral vision, and force majeure. We spent a quarter-century chipping away at the latter, and finally discarded the former, and now that peace is gone. All this was the work of decades.

Look back, again, to Labor Day weekend 2013, and understand one thing: its undoing was the work of mere months.

The big news item yesterday was the storm of astonishment and reaction, when Barack Obama, a professional politician, dared to appear in public in a non-blue, tan suit.

I thought myself that the suit was perfectly appropriate for before Labor Day (though one could easily see that it was off-the-rack from its less-than-perfect fit). But, I wondered myself, what was with that sub-fusc grey tie?

Victor Davis Hanson is a real historian, so he is understandably indignant about the characteristic ways in which Barack Obama misstates and mangles history.

In Obama’s hazy sense of the end of history, things always must get better in the manner that updated models of iPhones and iPads are glitzier than the last. In fact, history is morally cyclical. Even technological progress is ethically neutral. It is a way either to bring more good things to more people or to facilitate evil all that much more quickly and effectively.

In the viciously modern 20th century — when more lives may have been lost to war than in all prior centuries combined — some 6 million Jews were put to death through high technology in a way well beyond the savagery of Attila the Hun or Tamerlane. Beheading in the Islamic world is as common in the 21st century as it was in the eighth century — and as it will probably be in the 22nd. The carnage of the Somme and Dresden trumped anything that the Greeks, Romans, Franks, Turks, or Venetians could have imagined.

What explains Obama’s confusion?

A lack of knowledge of basic history explains a lot. Obama or his speechwriters have often seemed confused about the liberation of Auschwitz, “Polish death camps,” the political history of Texas, or the linguistic relationship between Austria and Germany. Obama reassured us during the Bowe Bergdahl affair that George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt all similarly got American prisoners back when their wars ended — except that none of them were in office when the Revolutionary War, Civil War, or World War II officially ended.

Contrary to Obama’s assertion, President Rutherford B. Hayes never dismissed the potential of the telephone. Obama once praised the city of Cordoba as part of a proud Islamic tradition of tolerance during the brutal Spanish Inquisition — forgetting that by the beginning of the Inquisition an almost exclusively Christian Cordoba had few Muslims left.

A Pollyannaish belief in historical predetermination seems to substitute for action. If Obama believes that evil should be absent in the 21st century, or that the arc of the moral universe must always bend toward justice, or that being on the wrong side of history has consequences, then he may think inanimate forces can take care of things as we need merely watch.

In truth, history is messier. Unfortunately, only force will stop seventh-century monsters like the Islamic State from killing thousands more innocents. Obama may think that reminding Putin that he is now in the 21st century will so embarrass the dictator that he will back off from Ukraine. But the brutish Putin may think that not being labeled a 21st-century civilized sophisticate is a compliment.

In 1935, French foreign minister Pierre Laval warned Joseph Stalin that the Pope would admonish him to go easy on Catholics — as if such moral lectures worked in the supposedly civilized 20th century. Stalin quickly disabused Laval of that naiveté. “The Pope?” Stalin asked, “How many divisions has he got?”

There is little evidence that human nature has changed over the centuries, despite massive government efforts to make us think and act nicer. What drives Putin, Boko Haram, or ISIS are the same age-old passions, fears, and sense of honor that over the centuries also moved Genghis Khan, the Sudanese Mahdists, and the Barbary pirates.

Alan Caruba thinks –as do I– the more vacationing Obama does, the better.

When the President spent three of a recent week’s five working days fund raising for the Democratic Party people, even the press took notice. On August 9 he began a two-week vacation in a Martha’s Vineyard mansion and I’d like to suggest that he just stay on vacation for the remainder of his second term.

I grant you that his vacations do tend to be a tad costly. Last year the Obama family took vacations to Africa in June and July, and spent Christmas in Honolulu. According to Air Force documents, the two trips racked up nearly $16 million in expenses. If the President would just pick someplace to stay and not be getting on and off Air Force One to fund-raise it could be considered a savings. …

My thought is that, as long as Obama is on vacation things cannot get much worse here at home, short of a foreign invasion. …

My feeling that he should just stay on vacation for the next two years is based on what he’s done to us over the past six. Indeed, our grandchildren will be able to name the 44th President given the fact that they will be paying off the debt he has created since 2009; $17 trillion and growing.

Then, of course, there’s Obamacare which a Democrat-controlled House and Senate passed without a single Republican vote. And we all know how partisan the GOP is, right?

On the other hand, millions of people who had perfectly good healthcare insurance plans lost them and the problems plaguing Obamacare have run from its website to the path White House lawyers are making as they visit the Supreme Court every other week trying to justify its various provisions. If the President stays on vacation maybe people will forget that he told them, “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it.”

If he stays on vacation, maybe people will forget the billions wasted on Green energy projects, wind and solar, involving companies that went bankrupt so fast it was hard to keep up with them. The solar farms that exist roast birds in mid-flight and the wind farms decapitate them, including eagles that are a protected species everywhere other than near a wind turbine.

Obama is not a big fan of affordable energy. He gave the finger to Canada on the Keystone XL pipeline which would have not cost taxpayers a dime and generated jobs, plus revenue. He has openly waged war against coal used to produce electricity even though the U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal. At least he hasn’t come out against fracking that has helped produce a boom in natural gas.

One thing Obama would not have to think about while on vacation are the millions of Americans who are still out of work. Unless, of course, he doesn’t think about them anyway. Unless, of course, he only thinks of them in terms of how to get them enrolled in some Big Government giveaway program. The problem with that is that he’s giving away the money taken from people who do have jobs.

My concern is that, on an extended vacation, he might begin to obsess about “climate change”, but then I realized that, for him, that only applies if his golf game gets rained out.

Who could take over while he’s on the links? Certainly not Joe Biden. Or John Kerry. Maybe George W. Bush would lend a hand?

So think about it, Mr. President. You’re taking off two weeks in August. Why not make it two years?

Read the whole thing.

Via Policy Girl.

Woodbridge Hall, meeting room where Yale’s top officials make decisions.

K.C. Johnson, at Minding the Campus, describes the truly Orwellian system of adjudicating complaints of sexual assault which has evolved at Yale as the result of threats of sanctions by Barack Obama and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights.

Yale, as part of an agreement with OCR (Office of Civil Rights), revised its procedures and promised biannual reports from Yale deputy provost Stephanie Spangler.

Over the past three years, these Spangler documents have provided a first-hand illustration of what passes for due process at one of the nation’s leading universities. From them, we learned that more than a half-dozen Yale students (including former quarterback Patrick Witt) had been found culpable for sexual assault under “informal complaint” procedures that provide no grounds for an accused student to present evidence of his innocence. The latest Spangler report has now been released. It suggests that due process still stands in short supply on the New Haven campus. …

Seven cases this semester have gone through the “informal” process—which can best be seen as a kind of “Scarlet Letter” approach. That is: given the limitations on the accused student’s ability to present evidence, it’s almost impossible for an “informal complaint” to end without the accused student being branded a rapist. But beyond the branding, Yale allows only limited punishment through the informal procedure. Of the six students (one case remains pending) who faced charges of sexual assault through the “informal complaint” process, each received the same punishment—“counseling” and a prohibition on contacting the accuser.

For one student last spring, the allegation was just the beginning. Yale’s “formal complaint” procedure prevents the accused from having an attorney as part of the process; brands the accused a rapist based on a 50.01 percent finding from a panel specially trained panel; and denies the accused any right to cross-examine the accuser. Even under these guilt-tilting procedures, one accused student was found not culpable—meaning that Yale’s disciplinary panel concluded that it was more likely than not he was the subject of a false allegation.

The outcome of the case? The accused student was punished. He received a no-contact order with his accuser (there was no reciprocal order)—meaning that if the two happen to enroll in the same course, the accused student would need to drop the class; or if the two happened to be assigned to the same dorm, the accused student would have to move.

Yale also referred the accused student for “sexual consent training.” (Yale’s website contains no description of what this “training” entails, but here’s a summary from a feminist blog.) Again: Yale concluded that it was more likely than not that the accused student was the victim of a false allegation. Yet even though Yale’s own accuser-friendly procedures concluded that it was more likely than not the accuser leveled a false allegation, the accused was punished, while the accuser received no punishment of any sort.

In the several years of Spangler reports, there never has been any indication that Yale has punished even one student for filing a false claim of sexual assault. …

One of the Title IX cases from the spring provides a sense of the Orwellian nature of the Title IX coordinator’s work. “A third party reported,” according to Spangler, “that more than one female [Yale] student, whom the reporter would not identify, [emphasis added] was sexually assaulted by a male Yale student.”

Or, in plain English, a Yale student is now being investigated as a serial rapist, with the possibility of sanctions—even though none of the females he allegedly raped have filed a complaint, or have even been identified. How any student could defend himself against such a charge is unclear.

Read the whole thing, and feel your blood run cold.

Walter Russell Mead admires the way the Mainstream Media looks carefully away as the Obama Administration’s “Smart Diplomacy” puts Middle Eastern countries, provinces, and WMDs into the hands of murderous fanatics. The days of the New York Times micromanaging US Foreign Policy are clearly over.

If Obama were a Republican, the press and the weekly news shows would be ringing with hyperbolic, apocalyptic denunciations of the clueless incumbent who had failed to learn the most basic lessons of Iraq. Indeed, the MSM right now would be howling that Obama was stupider than Bush. Bush, our Journolist friends would now be saying ad nauseam, at least had the excuse that he didn’t know what happens when you overthrow a paranoid, genocidal, economically incompetent Arab tyrant in an artificial post-colonial state. But Obama did—or, the press would nastily say, he would have done if he’d been doing his job instead of hitting the golf course or yakking it up with his glitzy pals at late night bull sessions. The ad hominem attacks would never stop, and all the tangled threads of incompetence and failure would be endlessly and expertly picked at in long New Yorker articles, NYT thumbsuckers, and chin-strokings on all the Sabbath gasbag shows.

Why, the ever-admirable tribunes of a free and unbiased press would be asking non-stop, didn’t this poor excuse for a President learn from what happened in Iraq? When you upend an insane and murderous dictator who has crushed his people for decades under an incompetent and quirky regime, you’d better realize that there is no effective state or civil society under the hard shell of dictatorial rule. Remove the dictator and you get chaos and anarchy. Wasn’t this President paying attention during the last ten years?

Some of the criticism would be exaggerated and unfair; the Monday morning quarterbacks never really understand just how complicated and tragic this poor world really is, not to mention how hard it is to make life and death decisions in real time in the center of the non-stop political firestorm that is Washington today. And the MSM attracts more than its share of deeply inexperienced but entitled, self-regarding blowhards who love to pontificate about how stupid all those poor fools who have actual jobs and responsibilities actually are.

But luckily for Team Obama, the mainstream press would rather die than subject liberal Democrats to the critiques it reserves for the GOP. So instead, as Libya writhes in agony, reputations and careers move on. The news is so bad, and the President’s foreign policy is collapsing on so many fronts, that it is impossible to keep the story off the front pages. “Smart diplomacy” has become a punch line, and the dream Team Obama had of making Democrats the go-to national security party is as dead as the passenger pigeon. But what the press can do for the White House it still, with some honorable exceptions, labors to accomplish: it will, when it must, report the dots. But it will try not to connect them, and it will do what it can to let all the people involved in the Libya debacle move on to the next and higher stage of their careers.

Read the whole thing.

Walter Russell Mead delivers, what Andrew Sullivan calls, “a majestically sweeping indictment of everything [P]resident Obama has achieved in foreign policy over the last six years.”

One wishes we had a Republican President right now if only because when a Republican is in the White House, the media and the chattering classes believe they have a solemn moral duty to categorize and analyze the failures of American strategy and policy. Today that is far from the case; few in the mainstream press seem interested in tracing the full and ugly course of the six years of continual failure that dog the footsteps of the hapless Obama team in a region the White House claimed to understand. Nothing important has gone right for the small and tightly knit team that runs American Middle East policy. Most administrations have one failure in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking; this administration has two, both distinctly more ignominious and damaging than average. The opening to the Middle East, once heralded by this administration as transformative, has long vanished; no one even talks about the President’s speeches in Cairo and Istanbul anymore, unless regional cynics are looking for punch lines for bitter jokes. The support for the “transition to democracy” in Egypt ended on as humiliating a note as the “red line” kerfuffle in Syria. The spectacular example of advancing human rights by leading from behind in Libya led to an unmitigated disaster from which not only Libya but much of north and west Africa still suffers today.

Rarely has an administration so trumpeted its superior wisdom and strategic smarts; rarely has any American administration experienced so much ignominious failure, or had its ignorance and miscalculation so brutally exposed. No one, ever, will call this administration’s Middle East policies to date either competent or wise—though the usual press acolytes will continue to do what they can to spread a forgiving haze over the strategic collapse of everything this White House has attempted, as they talk about George W. Bush at every chance they get.

Now, from the ruins of the Obama Administration’s Middle East strategy, the most powerful and dangerous group of religious fanatics in modern history has emerged in the heart of the Middle East. The rise of ISIS is a strategic defeat of the first magnitude for the United States and its allies (as well as countries like Russia and even China). It is a perfect storm of bad policy intersecting with troubled times to create the gravest threat to U.S. and world stability since the end of the Cold War.

The mainstream press and the professional chatterboxes of the news shows need to set aside their squeamishness at poring over the details of a major strategic failure by a liberal Democrat. The rise of ISIS/ISIL is a disaster that must be examined and understood. How could the U.S. government have been caught napping by the rise of a new and hostile power in a region of vital concern? What warning signs were missed, what opportunities were lost—and why? What role did the administration’s trademark dithering and hairsplitting over aid to ISIS’s rivals in the Syrian opposition play in the rise of the radicals?

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Clarice Feldman.