It's not just the failure of the Obamcare rollout with the website "glitches" (man, is that word getting refined every day!) and the "unanticipated" (by anybody other than cruel Republicans) side effects of the law itself. Although that is bad enough:
[The] Obama crowd have bet that, after the usual whining, you’ll settle down and get used to it: higher co-pays, higher premiums, higher deductibles, higher mountain of paperwork, higher futzing. But the fact remains that nowhere in the Western world has the governmentalization of health care been so incompetently introduced and required protection by such a phalanx of lies. Obamacare is not a left–right issue; it’s a fraud issue.
No, as Mark Steyn writes further:
We are assured by the headline writers that the president was “unaware” of Obamacare’s website defects, and the NSA spying, and the IRS targeting of his political enemies, and the Justice Department bugging the Associated Press, and pretty much anything else you ask him about. But, as he put it, “nobody’s madder than me” at this shadowy rogue entity called the “Government of the United States” that’s running around pulling all this stuff. And, once he finds out who’s running this Government of the United States rogue entity, he’s gonna come down as hard on him as he did on that videomaker in California; he’s gonna send round the National Park Service SWAT team to teach that punk a lesson he won’t forget.
How is it that the man with just the sharpest pants creases ever doesn't even know what his own government is doing? Let alone have a handle on how to make it work?
Jonah Goldberg nails it:
Often in error but never in doubt, Barack Obama could walk into the Rose Garden and step on a half-dozen rakes like Foghorn Leghorn in an old Looney Tunes cartoon, and the official line would be, “He meant to do that.”
And the amazing thing is that so many people believe it. “Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He’s smart, deft, elegant and subtle,” proclaimed then–New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in 2009. It’s an image of the president that his biggest fans, in and out of the press, have been terribly reluctant to relinquish — because it confirms the faith they invested in him. Nobody ever likes to admit they were suckered.
Seriously, what evidence is there of this purported giant brain? It obviously isn't the Obamacare website rollout. As Jonah writes about the government shutdown standoff over Obamacare:
If Obama were a chess master — or even a fairly adept checkers novice — he would have known that when you’re not ready to do something incredibly important, it’s best to buy time. He could have traded a delay (three months? six months?) for some major budget concessions, maybe even lifting the sequester. Perhaps his base wouldn’t have liked it, but he could have easily spun the compromise as a necessity given how irrational and “extreme” the GOP was being.
Indeed, by forcing his Congressional allies to defend Obamacare timetables to the hilt even as the website and law debuted to less than competence-inspiring news, the president actually makes Republicans look like they took a lonely stand to stop this mess.
If not the signature program Obamacare, is proof of brilliance our foreign policy?
With ties between Washington and many close allies strained because of eavesdropping revelations and differences over U.S. policies in the Middle East, the Obama administration can take some comfort from an improvement in ties with China.
A year after China's President Xi Jinping took over the helm of the country's ruling Communist Party, senior U.S. officials say they see increased cooperation on a range of issues from climate change to North Korea's nuclear weapons ambitions. They also regard greater bilateral military contacts as an important safety valve if there are any potential flare-ups.
"Allies" are mad at us. And our policies in the Middle East are a major cause? When President Obama promised to be the anti-Bush and end wars and promote ties with the Islamic world? And our largest potential foe is doing what exactly that's better?
If China is getting better on North Korea, it is only because they fear that South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan (and maybe Vietnam) might go nuclear in a cascading response to their little psycho pet's nuclear program. Heck, a collapsing North Korea could find South Korean scientists walking into Pyongyang's facilities, no?
As for global warming, if that is even a problem that is bad and even if we could affect it, in what world would China be a factor to fight it?
As for those mil-to-mil contacts helping out? The Chinese military just isn't absorbing the hope or the change.
Oh, and there is that little thing about China pushing to slowly annex every island in the East China Sea and South China Sea. There's no cooperation there, is there?
Given that a major part of President Obama's foreign policy is his loud embrace of a "pivot to Asia," why would the Chinese suddenly be happier with us? Is it because they figured out that it's all hat and no cattle? Who could give them that impression?
Yet that analysis of strained ties and increased cooperation is just part of a general disposition among his supporters in and out of the press who only see brilliance in whatever rake-pivoting step he takes. If the president now looks like he's three steps behind the rest of us, they'll reason that it's because this is a race and not chess, and the president is just about to lap us.
So why would President Obama even need to think three steps ahead (except when he pivots to college basketball brackets in the spring, lovingly chronicled by the adoring press) when any head-bonking step will be praised as brilliant by the press corps and the left wing blogosphere?
If President Obama--based on its own ideology and claims of competence-- can't make a big federal government work well (and let's skip over his claims that he would change the tone in Washington and create the most transparent government ever), just who could make it work? Isn't the Obama administration the biggest argument for shrinking the scope of the federal government?
