Don't blame our woes in the president who once believed his mere presence would change the course of the world--and beyond mere foreign policy problems, end the rise of the freaking oceans, if you'll recall!
“Republican jingoists scapegoat President Obama for all the world’s ills and try to impose a simple story of weakness and strength on events of stupefying complexity,” Kuttner added, complaining that today’s wars lack the grandeur and moral simplicity of the Cold War, and of course World War II. “Who are the good guys and bad guys in Syria and Iraq?” Corn concurred: “Barack Obama is in charge . . . at a time when the world seems to be cracking up more than usual. . . . There are no simple fixes to these nuance-drenched problems. . . . None of these matters are easily resolved.”
Those lucky, lucky, bastards, FDR and Truman, leading us through simple World War II! The moral simplicity of allying with the Soviet Union's Stalin! The simplicity of Fascist Italy switching sides! The simplicity of storming Normandy and blasting Japanese troops out of bunkers from island to island across the Pacific! The simplicity of using the atomic bomb!
Also world devastation and 50 million dead--but President Obama has the really tough job. (Hey, if it's so nuanced, he should spend a little less time on the golf course and more studying the Presidential Daily Briefings, eh?)
As for the Cold War? I lived during the Cold War. And this supposedly morally simple struggle sure seemed to confuse a lot of our liberals who claimed the Soviets were the wave of the future and really kind of admirable--as they also thought of other blood-drenched Communist thug states in the Third World. Then the simplicity was assuming America was on the wrong side of history.
Do you forget how the Left mocked President Reagan for calling the USSR the "evil empire"?
In 1983 President Reagan gave a famous speech in which he outraged American liberals, and warmed the hearts of conservatives, by describing the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”
College faculties were pretty uniformly left wing in the 1980’s, and reflexively hostile to anything anti-Communist. Professors on campuses all around the nation reacted to the President’s speech with outrage.
I went to college in the 1980s. I remember the apologists for the Soviets very clearly.
Yet now to defend The One (yeah, kiss his place on Mount Rushmore goodbye) the Left honors the simplicity of opposing the obviously bad Soviets? Really?
And what is so freaking nuanced about our current crises?
Putin has invaded a sainted member of the international community in violation of the UN Charter and the promises Russia made in the Budapest Memorandum to guarantee Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
(With bonus collateral damage to President Obama's
China is pushing neighbors around and trying to expand their country.
Iran wants nuclear weapons.
Our southern border is porous and we spend too much money.
And who are the good or bad guys in Syria and Iraq? Are you kidding me? When one enemy, ISIL, is so evil that it is virtually comic book-level simplicity (as was al Qaeda when so many on the Left urged us to "understand" them and figure out "why do they hate us?" don't forget)?
The president called the Islamic State a “cancer” that had to be eradicated. Secretary of State John Kerry referred to it as the “face of . . . evil.”
Although most people across the ideological spectrum see no problem with calling the Islamic State evil, the change in rhetoric elicited a predictable knee-jerk response. ...
Who are you saving the word for if “evil” is too harsh for the Islamic State? More to the point, since when is telling the truth evidence you’ve stopped thinking?
If you have trouble rousing yourself to fight ISIL because the question of good guys versus bad guys is just too nuanced for you to figure out, you have no business writing about foreign affairs.
It's just about come to this for Obama defenders:
It's not his fault!
And more to the point, I'll start taking lessons in moral clarity abroad from our Left just after I take their advice on military matters--which is three days after never.
