Jonah Goldberg delivered an excellent rant all about the national epidemic of Obama fatigue today via the Goldberg File email. (Since it can’t be linked right now, I quoted the whole Obama part.)

Obama fatigue is setting in. Indeed, I’ve gone from Obama fatigue through full-on Obama Epstein-Barr to end-stage Obama narcolepsy. I hear him talking, or hear some MSNBC-type rhapsodizing about how misunderstood he is, and I start dozing off like a truck driver who took the drowsy-formula Nyquil by mistake. “Gotta stay awake! This is my job!” But then 20 seconds later, Jonathan Alter starts telling me how misunderstood the president is, and suddenly orange traffic cones are bouncing off my truck’s grill as I somnolently drift into a highway work zone. You could fill a cereal bowl with broken glass and barbed-wire shards drenched in hot sauce right below my face. All it would take for me to use it as a pillow is a 30-second loop of Obama saying “Let me be clear.” His speeches are like whale sounds, but with less substance. I’d say they’re all white noise, but I don’t want to get called a racist.

This is a problem for a couple of reasons. First, as I said during that less-than-exquisite truck-driving simile, this is my job – or at least one of them (I don’t need to follow Obama’s doings for my side gig as chinchilla rancher). I can’t just tune out the president of the United States for the next two years like a normal, happy, well-adjusted American might. I can’t help but feel like Donald Sutherland in Animal House complaining to his bored literature students:

Don’t write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring, too. He’s a little bit long-winded, he doesn’t translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible.

[Bell rings, students rise to leave]

But that doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility for this material. Now I’m waiting for reports from some of you . . . Listen, I’m not joking. This is my job!

Hey, substitute “Obama” for “Milton” and that holds up pretty well.

This Should Be More Fun

Second, my Obama-narcolepsy is interfering with my Obama-schadenfreude. I for one find it nothing less than hilarious to watch liberal eggheads (both real and imagined), never mind Obama himself, spin elaborate theories for why Obama is not just unpopular but pretty much a failed president.

For the record, this designation – “failed president” – may be premature by objective and historical standards (though I don’t think it is), but his presidency is already in the books as a failure by the standards Obama set for himself. If you promise to turn water into wine and then just run out of water without providing any wine, there’s really no way to plausibly shout “Success!”

He wanted to transform America, not just via policy, but by restoring faith in government itself. He’s had some success on the former but has been a catastrophic failure on the latter, which means the policy successes aren’t nearly as secure as the Left thinks they are.

Speaking of catastrophic failure, rather than risk triggering your own Obama fatigue, watch this metaphorical recap of Obama’s attempts to transform America, as re-enacted by cats trying to jump.

It’s Not Him, It’s You

Explanations for Obama’s failures vary in their honesty and persuasiveness, of course. Mary Landrieu represents the more hackish end of the spectrum. Borrowing a line from the New York Times editorial board, Landrieu blamed it all on southern racism and sexism. In fairness, she was speaking specifically about Louisianans – you know, her constituents. But she helpfully managed to throw all of the South under the bus as well. Hey, if you’re going to go down in a blaze of glory, why be stingy with the kerosene?

Of course, the problem with this theory is that Obama is unpopular across America and in at least 43 states. Even the most generous definition of “southern racist” won’t get you that far in explaining his unpopularity in Wisconsin or Michigan. Moreover, for his numbers to be so bad, it means lots of people who voted for him once or even twice must now disapprove of him. Did all of these independents and moderate Republicans wake up one morning and decide to cut some eyeholes in their pillowcases and become Klansmen?

Other explanations are similar in their desire to place blame elsewhere. The fault lies not in Obama, but in ourselves. Let’s come back to this in a moment because I know exactly what you’re thinking right now. “Gosh, isn’t it about time Jonah quoted East German Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht?”

In Die Lösung Brecht famously quipped that if the people lose faith in the government it would be better if the government dissolved the people and elected another.

For progressives it’s always five minutes to Brecht-O-Clock. What I mean is this desire to fix the people, not the government always seems to be lurking behind liberalism. It was there when Woodrow Wilson said the first job of an educator is to make your children as unlike you as possible. It was there when Obama explained in 2008 that Hillary Clinton’s Pennsylvania primary supporters weren’t ready to vote for him because they were too busy clinging to their sky god and boom sticks. It’s the central theme of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? It was whispering in John Podesta’s ear when he said the American political system “sucks.” It is at the heart of the Voxy “explanatory journalism” craze, which holds that if you call proselytizing “explaining” it will help the rubes come to their senses. It runs riot in the mainstream media and their sovereign contempt for these stupid, stupid, Americans and their parochial “unscientific” concerns about an organ-liquefying disease (even as the MSM caters to those concerns for the ratings they deliver). It runs like an underground river through the White House’s national-security policies, as they constantly downplay the dangers Islamic terrorism (“ Let’s just call it ‘work place violence’!”) for fear of rousing the fearsome beast of public opinion on the side of the war on terror. It’s why the White House doesn’t want Congress to get involved in a deal with Iran, because Congress might actually listen to the people. It’s why the New York Times laments the “bumpkinification of the midterms.”

Obama Creates a Boulder Too Heavy for Him to Lift

Anyway, back to Obama-failure explanations. Some are more structural or formal. The Constitution holds us back. The presidency is too big for any one man. We can’t have great presidents anymore. Even president Obama has come around to this point of view. Here’s Jeff Shesol in The New Yorker:

Despite the grand hopes and hype of the 2008 campaign, this tempering of ambitions, this recognition — and acceptance — of the constraints on Presidential power has been a leitmotif of the Obama Presidency. In an interview with David Remnick published earlier this year, Obama talked about “that business about the great-man theory of history. The President of the United States cannot remake our society, and that’s probably a good thing. Not ‘probably,’ ” he added. “It’s definitely a good thing.” Over the years, Obama and his advisors have issued a long string of statements to this effect: on foreign policy, “ leading from behind” (2011); on the limits of executive authority, “there’s no shortcut to democracy” (2013); on civil rights, we must sometimes take “a quarter of a loaf or half a loaf” (2014).

Shesol is right, but it’s worth noting Obama’s learning curve has been steep. And he’s still climbing it. By my calculations, Barack Obama should be adequately qualified for his current job around 2072. But Shesol, like so many others, let’s Obama off the hook by blaming the system, not the man.

When Obama came into office, he thought it would be different. First, he got almost everything he wanted. These were the salad days when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid served as de facto co-presidents. Then, as it dawned on him that he couldn’t just give a speech to fix a problem, he started complaining about his relative powerlessness. Over the years, the president has let slip countless times that he wishes he had the sort of power not afforded to presidents in a democratic republic. He riffed that he was envious of the power wielded by Frank Underwood in House of Cards (“This guy’s getting a lot of stuff done,” Obama said. “I wish things were that ruthlessly efficient”). He whined that the president of China has it so much easier. Yes, because the president of China can give a speech and things will change. You know why? Because he’s a dictator.

Get the Popcorn

Anyway, as the German sadist said after he signed up for his Amazon Prime delivery of special nipple clamps, “Back to schadenfreude.”

I should be enjoying all of this more. The wheels are coming off the very same bus that Barack Obama has been throwing people under for years. And, as Maimonides noted so long ago, it is very hard to throw someone under a bus if the bus has no wheels.

Watching Obama go around insisting that he’s fine with the way his fellow Democrats are distancing themselves from him all the while backhandedly nationalizing the election has been hilarious.

Even more amusing: watching all of these Democrats insist they don’t support Obama when they were perfectly happy to be part of the president’s entourage when he was popular. Now they’re all clearing out like the disco-partiers at Navin Johnson’s house after news of the Opti-Grab class-action lawsuit breaks .

And Shesol’s point about Obama’s learning curve notwithstanding, the president still seems incapable of rhetorically conceding that he’s a political albatross. A couple of weeks after declaring in a big speech that “every single one of my policies are on the ballot” he went on Al Sharpton’s radio show. “The bottom line is, though,” he said of vulnerable Dems, “these are all folks who vote with me; they have supported my agenda in Congress,” he told the tracksuit-wrapped-carbuncle. “These are folks who are strong allies and supporters of me, and I tell them, I said, ‘You know what? You do what you need to do to win. I will be responsible for making sure our voters turn out.’”

And then he started naming specific Democrats by name, starting with Michelle Nunn.

Sometime last year, Obama said that he dreamed of going full Bullworth so he could drop truth bombs on everybody. If you never saw Bullworth, good for you. But just so you know, it was a movie starring Warren Beatty. And, like all Beatty movies of the last 20 years, he spent most of the time under special lights that only illuminated his eyes, to minimize the staggering scope of his enormous forehead and clarify for audiences that he is not in fact Ned Beatty’s skinny kid brother. But that’s not important right now. What you need to know is that Beatty played a senator who had a kind of nervous breakdown and decided to keep it real and say what he really thought.

Substantively, Obama’s been doing that already. By saying this election is about his agenda, he’s in effect the most honest politician in America, at least on this issue. Essentially, he is saying the senators distancing themselves from him are opportunistic liars – and he’s right. Still, it would be more fun to see Obama go Bullworth on style, if for nothing else to see the New York Times headline: “Obama on Vulnerable Dem Candidates: ‘They All My Bitches.’”

Clarice Feldman strikes her lyre and proceeds to read an ancient scroll containing the record of a story that might sound strangely familiar.

The father of the Emperor was said to be a god from an ancient land across the sea who often imbibed too much mead and had many wives. Others whispered his real father was the pedophilic poet who lived on the other side of the island with his wife. These people said the Emperor’s mother made up the story about the father god. In any event, the Emperor never lived with either man. The man from across the sea sailed away soon after his birth. …

The Emperor’s education was also remarkably strange. True, he was sent to the island’s most expensive lyceum, but his free time was mostly spent with his grandfather and the island lowlifes. He smoked a lot of choom, the weed of strange dreams, and was educated to despise order and thrift, diligence and competence. Natural-born genius leaders of men have no need of such characteristics. His teachers and friends and family led him to believe that the people of his island were responsible for all the ills of the world, that want and disease were caused by the islanders’ greed.

Read the whole thing.

Truth in Revolt:

Vice President Joe Biden held up traffic around Los Angeles for a second day on Tuesday, but it was President Obama himself on the minds of many Southern California drivers as bumper stickers began appearing on area cars featuring the word Ebola with the Obama logo replacing the letter “o.”

The scathing stickers come on the eve of President Obama’s Thursday trip to LA for a fundraiser at the home of Gwyneth Paltrow and on the same day that the LATimes reports that it may be premature for Mr. Obama’s government to declare that the deadly Ebola virus is not transmitted by air.

Read the whole thing.

Doyle McManus, at the LA Times, contends that the federal government is focused on political competition at the expense of competence.

Whatever happened to good old American know-how?

The nation that invented modern management seems to be suffering a crisis of competence.

The Secret Service can’t protect the White House. Public health authorities can’t get their arms around a one-man Ebola outbreak. The army we trained in Iraq collapsed as soon as it was attacked by Islamic extremists, and our own veterans can’t get the care they need at VA hospitals. And, lest we forget, it was only a year ago that the White House rolled out its national health insurance program, only to see its website grind to a halt.

Yes, you can argue that these problems all have different causes.

But it’s hard not to conclude that something basic is amiss in Washington.

“This isn’t a partisan problem,” argues Linda Bilmes, a public policy scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School who worked in the Clinton administration — although she does fault the people at the top. “It hasn’t been a priority under this president to appoint good managers to top positions, but it wasn’t a priority under George W. Bush either.”

Read the whole thing.

Via Theo.

Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan (who has never been a US citizen, and who has escaped criminal conviction and consequent deportation only through blat), nonetheless, editorializes about Americans in the plural including himself (“We War-Loving Americans“), and makes a personal specialty of prescribing US Foreign Policy, often vigorously denouncing the decisions in that area made by mere elected presidents.

Despite Andrew’s long-demonstrated canine love for Barack Obama, Obama’s recent decision to bomb ISIS has seriously offended Andrew’s Neville-Chamberlain-esque principles, and the Chosen One is coming in for a stern scolding these days from his disappointed admirer.

One particularly penetrating observation leapt out at me. After airily asserting that defeating the Sunni Insurrection was beyond our powers, Andrew advised allowing the Middle Eastern atrocities to proceed. In his view, the successful erection of the new Caliphate would have no consequences affecting Europe or the United States, and would naturally simply diminish to the status of a “regional conflagration.” If (and when) Iran proceeded to intervene in the conflict, we should hope “both sides lose,” and perhaps “intervene from a distance” (which must mean: bomb). According to Andrew: “Our real interest is in bolstering the one stable power in the region, which is Iran.”

Now, there is foreign policy analysis at its finest. The same United States which defeated the German Army and the Japanese Navy cannot possibly defeat 10,000 sand monkey belligerents armed with AKs and driving new Toyotas. And our real interest (who knew?) lies in supporting the Shiite fanatics and long-time sponsors of terrorism in Iran who have made hatred of America and the West their regime’s very raison d’être since the time of Jimmy Carter.

How Andrew’s most admired regime maintains its stability.

Daily Beast:

On “60 Minutes,” the president faulted his spies for failing to predict the rise of ISIS. There’s one problem with that statement: The intelligence analysts did warn about the group.

Nearly eight months ago, some of President Obama’s senior intelligence officials were already warning that ISIS was on the move. In the beginning of 2014, ISIS fighters had defeated Iraqi forces in Fallujah, leading much of the U.S. intelligence community to assess they would try to take more of Iraq.

But in an interview that aired Sunday evening, the president told 60 Minutes that the rise of the group now proclaiming itself a caliphate in territory between Syria and Iraq caught the U.S. intelligence community off guard. Obama specifically blamed James Clapper, the current director of national intelligence: “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” he said.

Reached by The Daily Beast after Obama’s interview aired, one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq was flabbergasted. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” the former official said.

And he makes a good argument:

Miss Dunham, reflecting celebrity culture at large, makes a fetish of voting, and it is easy to see why: Voting is the most shallow gesture of citizenship there is, the issuance of a demand — a statement that “this is how the world should be,” as Miss Dunham puts it — imposing nothing in the way of reciprocal responsibility. Power without responsibility — Stanley Baldwin would not have been surprised that Miss Dunham and likeminded celebrities think of voting in terms of their sex lives. Miss Dunham, in an earlier endorsement of Barack Obama, compared voting in the presidential election to losing one’s virginity — you want it to be someone special. Understood that way, voting is nothing other than a reiteration of the original infantile demand: “I Want!”

As a procedure for sorting out complex policy issues, voting is of distinctly limited value: If you wanted to know whether the compressive strength of a particular material were sufficient to support a bridge over Interstate 20, you would not go about solving that problem by bundling that question with 10,000 other equally precise and complex but largely unrelated questions, presenting the bundle of questions to the least-informed few million people you could identify, and then proceeding with whatever solution 50 percent +1 of them preferred. That would be a bad way to build a bridge — a homicidal way, in fact — and though it is a necessary instrument of accountability in a democratic republic, voting properly plays a very limited role. For instance, we have a Bill of Rights, which could with equal accuracy be called the List of Stuff You Idiots Can’t Be Trusted To Vote On. A majority of Americans don’t like free speech? Too bad, Harry Reid.

But for Miss Dunham et al., this isn’t a question of citizenship — it’s a therapeutic matter. Voting, she promises, will offer “a sense of accomplishment,” knowledge that one has done the right thing, even “joy.” But checking a box is the most trivial accomplishment imaginable; having done so is no guarantee that one has done the right thing, inasmuch as voters routinely make bad decisions for evil reasons; and one suspects that Miss Dunham means something different and less by “joy” than did, say, Beethoven or Walt Whitman. “I wore fishnets and a little black dress to vote,” she writes, “then walked around with a spring in my slinky step. It lasted for days. I can summon it when I’m blue. It’s more effective than exercise or ecstasy or cheesecake.” And that of course is the highest purpose of our ancient constitutional order: to provide adult children with pleasures exceeding those of cheesecake or empathogenic phenethylamines.

Hat tip to Darleen Click via Karen L. Myers.

The portion of the national commentariat viewing reality from the Right has been giving Obama hell for two days now for returning a salute from a pair of Marines while holding a container of coffee in his hand. Examples at Twitchy.

All this demonstrates just how few of the intelligentsia, on either side, have any real personal contact with matters military. The commentariat doesn’t realize that a salute is a honor normally exchanged by uniformed members of the military. Saluting is actually a privilege. Prisoners in the brig, for instance, are not entitled to salute.

Customs of saluting vary among the various branches of the American military. The Marines saluting Obama, like the Navy, only salute when in uniform and wearing their cover.

It is appropriate for American military personnel to salute Obama in his capacity as commander-in-chief. The president, however, is never attired in uniform and moreover does not wear a cover. He is actually, in fact, not entitled to salute.

It is understandable, of course, that presidents generally, not only Obama, feel a human obligation to try to respond to military salutes, but they are actually wrong, and violating proper military etiquette, by trying to salute at all, coffee cup or no coffee cup.

In his capacity as commander-in-chief, any president actually does possess the power to amend military customs and etiquette and to award himself and other occupants of his office the right to return salutes when not a serving member of a military and when not in uniform and not covered, but until some president formally creates that right, they are all wrong to around saluting.

Wikipedia entry on the salute

Apparently, it was Ronald Reagan who started saluting.

This article suggests that maybe Ronald Reagan really did, sort of, kind of, officially modify military custom.