The Absolution of Barack Obama

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter just doesn't get it. See, "‘The Illustrated Man’." Obama's certainly socialist --- or neo-socialist, as Jonah Goldberg has explained --- and that's to say nothing of "terror-coddling."

Our maddening times demand that the truth be forthrightly stated at the outset, and not just that the president has nothing in common with the führer beyond the possession of a dog. The outlandish stories about Barack Hussein Obama are simply false: he wasn’t born outside the United States (the tabloid “proof” has been debunked as a crude forgery); he has never been a Muslim (he was raised by an atheist and became a practicing Christian in his 20s); his policies are not “socialist” (he explicitly rejected advice to nationalize the banks and wants the government out of General Motors and Chrysler as quickly as possible); he is not a “warmonger” (he promised in 2008 to withdraw from Iraq and escalate in Afghanistan and has done so); he is neither a coddler of terrorists (he has already ordered the killing of more “high value” Qaeda targets in 18 months than his predecessor did in eight years), nor a coddler of Wall Street (his financial-reform package, while watered down, was the most vigorous since the New Deal), nor an enemy of American business (he and the Chamber of Commerce favor tax credits for small business that were stymied by the GOP to deprive him of a victory). And that’s just the short list of lies.

And of course it's not Obama's fault that these perceptions --- right or wrong --- stick like melted marshmallows. It's that like many things, there's another side to it. Language, for one thing. Obama just doesn't have the knack for appearing American, much less resoloute. I mean, he spent the first year touring the globe apologizing for America's allegedly racist, imperialist history. And on foreign policy, every big decision in the war on terror has been worse than removing impacted molars. Minimizing our threats and prolonging tough decisions on troop requests is just the start of it. Forget sympathy for sharia, Obama sympathizes with Iran's frantic efforts to get the bomb. And the bills are coming due. Worse than Jimmy Carter is a pretty accurate dismissal at this point, but we'll know more on November 2. Most voters are probably thinking along more pragmatic lines, like job-creation, and because this administration focused on such non-socialist agenda items like non-socialist nationalized health care over restoring the economy, the Democrats are looking to a defeat of bloodbath proportions. "Obama's Waterloo" is sounding pretty accurate these days, although folks dismissed the idea back in the day.

Cross-posted from American Power.