“A Few Cruise Missiles Short in the Leadership Arsenal”

Hal G.P. Colebatch manages to identify a surprisingly long list of things in common between our current commander-in-chief and the famous captain of the USS Caine.

In President Barack Obama, the United States today has its Captian Queeg on the bridge. He has not committed the “high crimes and misdemeanors” which the Constitution has established as the grounds for impeachment, or at any rate the necessary majority of Congress could not at this moment be convinced that he has. Nonetheless, his administration has produced a record of bungling and bad judgment not even approached by any previous President of modern times and perhaps ever.

As the U.S. Navy regulations had nothing to cover the case of Queeg — what might be called borderline madness — so the U.S. Constitution has nothing to cover the case of Obama — a president with a fixed term of office, who is not mad in the literal clinical sense, but desperately incompetent, and who now appears to be looking to a strange, one-sided alliance with some of America’s most dire enemies.

Like Queeg, Obama functions adequately at a low level of responsibility, and like Queeg he is unable to handle a real crisis. Like Queeg he has never had to face a real enemy in the military sense. Like Queeg, he has very considerable cunning and plausibility in protecting his own ends. Add to this the fact that he is the first president to reveal himself as hating and despising much of the traditional culture of the United States and a wish to see it weakened.

The Queeg-type incidents are mounting up, though they are infinitely larger and more serious: the “beer summit” first showed, like cutting the tow-line, a disturbing oddity of behavior. This was followed by the betrayal of Poland and the Czech Republic over missile defenses, the ludicrous claim that the Benghazi massacres were provoked by a video on YouTube; the vow, made a year ago with all the sincerity of the utterances of a ventriloquist’s dummy, to bring the Benghazi killers to justice; the IRS scandal — a direct affront to the whole spirit of the Republic; his role in the Martin-Zimmerman affair, the destruction of American prestige in Egypt and almost every part of the Middle East and to a degree in Europe, the golf and safaris in the midst of crises… the list goes on and on.