Awaiting President Obama’s How I Am Going to Passively Confront the Darned (I Forget Their Religion) Militants speech tomorrow is as titillating as anticipating the return of your spouse 21 seconds after she leaves the room.
No suspense. No surprise. Only more lukewarm ice water explained so sonorously that those who bother to tune in will think they, too, have become infected by Mr. Obama’s lethal passivity.
Even the President’s most dovish cheerleaders seem to have given up on his so far invisible ability to state a position with a modest measure of clarity.
But not really.
“Perhaps the president will eliminate any confusion when he addresses the nation, but I doubt it,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, perhaps Mr. Obama’s No. 1 media sycophant, said today. “Based on what he told NBC's Chuck Todd on ‘Meet the Press,’ there may be no way to reduce Obama's fluid and perhaps deliberately ambiguous thinking to a black-or-white, all-or-nothing dichotomy.”
“Fluid?” Is that what evasive, hollow speechmaking is called for this administration? His political strategizing is an exact match for grabbing a handful of air and holding it for the length of one of his narcissistic adventures into the land of Mary Had a Little Lamb.
Here is how a typical leftist thinks.
Despite the light brush of criticism above, it is Mr. Robinson’s frozen position that it would be impossible for Mr. Obama to make a judgmental error.
Try to track the essayist’s muddled reasoning without zagging into a ditch.
“To the hawks, Obama's cautious, patient, this-could-take-years approach to dealing with the Islamic State will be emotionally unsatisfying. But, given the complexity of the situation, subtlety and indirection are more promising tools than brute force.”
Mr. Robinson is struggling to tell us that no matter what Mr. Obama says tomorrow, he will be correct and his critics will be wrong.
