[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]Almost one-third of the way through President Obama’s term, it still puzzles and frustrates me when he makes one of his stunningly odd observations only to have the eyecatching phrase unanimously ignored by print and electronic journalists.
Their motivation is unmistakable:
Most working journalists adore the President. They would drink a quart of turpentine before embarrassing him.
The other side of that sizzling coin is that no one wants to face his withering wrath.
Through 15 months, we probably have seen the thin-skinned Mr. Obama lose his temper more often than any President since LBJ 45 years ago.
He turns radioactive when even glancingly criticized. Some non-liberal journalists are cowed into silence by the fear they will be broadbrushed as racists-in-waiting for speaking against a black President.
Just the other day, the aging left wing commentator Joe Klein of Time magazine said that Tea Party members flirt with racism when they so passionately and openly criticize Mr. Obama and his policies.
Returning to a memorable — but seeming throwaway — line the President used last week at what the brilliant Prof. Victor Davis Hanson called the totally useless Obama Vanity Nuclear Summit, that settled nothing, he made a statement that should shock even a blasé, cynical world:
“It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.”
Whether we like it or not?
What was he trying to convey?
If any journalist had the chutzpah to ask the President what he meant, it has not been publicly reported.
You may recall that on several occasions last year, only when traveling abroad, mind you, Mr. Obama stated that he did not believe in American exceptionalism. That stunner also drew barely visible desultory comment.
Incurious, effete journalists shrugged away last week’s staggering words as if he had, instead, pounded his chest.
“Whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower.”
This sounds like a man determined to disarm us, a ludicrous thought under any other administration, except for Jimmy Carter’s.
I cringe when I watch him dance down the steps of Air Force One, and slaps his hand to his head in a thoroughly disingenuous salute.
I am reminded of a cheating husband. He breezes through the front door and plants a juicy kiss on his just-deceived wife with the kvetching kids encircled around her ankles.
When the most fanatical human monsters in the history of the world are lurking in the weeds, their exotic weapons aimed at the United States, I find it chilling that our leader, our trusted principal decision-maker, would trade in our armaments for an egalitarian world where Luxemburg and America and Latvia look alike.
Isn’t anyone else upset? Or at least curious by what Mr. Obama meant?
