Must-Reads Everywhere – Obama on the Precipice

posted at 1:25 pm on April 22, 2009 by CK MacLeod
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One thing you can say for the Obama Administration:  It inspires “must-read” columns and articles at unheard-of rates, must-reads in chain reaction.

Just today, we already have David Ignatius’s How Obama’s scaring the CIA into timidity at the Washington Post, declared a “must-read” at HotAir.  We have Dorothy Rabinowitz’s Obama Blames America, accuratedly described as a “brilliant must-read” by Jennifer Rubin at Contentions, whose own analysis would on any normal day in any normal time itself be a candidate for the day’s must-read – except for the competition provided by her own post on Ignatius, or John Podhoretz’s must-read post on David Frum’s must-read post on the dire (read:  late Roman Republic) implications of one administration throwing a previous one to the legal wolves.  When Rush Limbaugh’s morning summation of Obama’s 100 Days becomes available in transcript, it, too will be a must-read.

We have a must-read here today at the Green Room, too, a post by cold warrior, on what it means to have a president undermining his own intelligence professionals, that would be difficult enough to bear if everything else was going very well indeed.

And, in a possible preview of tomorrow’s or the next day’s must-read, we have Rasmussen’s daily poll of likely voters showing Mr. Obama at his all-time lows in approval since taking office – suggesting that Obama has given up the entirety of his election “bonus,” the difference between where he stood on election night and where he stood as the object of the country’s united good will:  We don’t know whether this is a floor or a ledge yet, whether the must-read chain reaction is about to go nuclear, but the Honeymoon, anyway, is over – and a lot of us brides find ourselves envying Megan McAllister and wishing, not for the first time, that the political cops had been there for us.

What happens when the impressions seep in further?  Ask yourself how well Obama would have done last Fall if, asked about his first 100 days if elected, he had said he’d be bowing to King Abdullah, making bro-love with Hugo Chavez, attacking the US from foreign capitals, sending his AG after Bush officials, castrating the CIA, and, oh yeah, planning trillion dollar deficits through 2020 and beyond.  (Everyone has his or her own list… better start early if you’re trying to be comprehensive and want to finish before the next commercial break.)

Contemplating this all, as with so much else about this presidency and where it’s leading us, produces “thoughts too deep for tears,” as the poet said.  It’s easier on the nerves and the soul to step back, and just think politically for a moment.  I’m therefore wondering whether, approaching Day 100 of the Age Episode of Obama, we might not be seeing an inflection point, or at least its shape.

Is it too late for the Chavez soul-shaker to pull back from an unnecessary war on the institutions, assumptions, and morale that underpin not just American national security, but American political life?  Just on the “torture prosecutions” question, even before the dangers of Obama’s approach have been made real in unforgettable headlines, this sop to the utopian left of his coalition, and against what I believe is still the vast majority in American opinion, reminds me of “Gays in the Military” under Bill Clinton, when a new President whose national security bona fides were already tenuous, went a bridge too far against institutional and cultural consensus.  In short, we may be seeing “Gays in the Military” to the power of 10 – to the power of 10 again.  And that’s just “torture.”

A pessimistic German once said, “There is no present.  There is only the past projected into the black hole of the future.”  Maybe not as catchy as “Change We Can Believe In,” but increasingly looking like just about the same thing, a multi-sided assault on the American future – on American assumptions about/assumptions about America as a future always busy being born, worth rushing to, ever more real, not to be passively watched like an interminable, tragic movie, or vaguely hoped for like the “green jobs” fantasy the President is blathering about (…false choice… I always said…) as I write.   What we now see taking shape ever more clearly is the opposite of Reaganism:  Sunset in America.

It’s never sold before, not for very long anyway, not here.  Polls aren’t my be-all and end-all, far from it, but I’ll still be clicking Rasmussen tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, looking for that next must-read.

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