[FairfieldLife] Re: The Alien in the White House

[authfriend]

emptybill, did you post this because you agreed with it, or
because you found it ridiculous?


--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "emptybill" <emptyb...@...> wrote:
>
> The Alien in the White House   The distance between the president and
> the people is beginning to be revealed.  By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
> <http://online.wsj.com/search/term.html?KEYWORDS=DOROTHY+RABINOWITZ&byli\
> nesearch=true>
> The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from
> commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too,
> were the charges from some of the president's earliest enthusiasts about
> his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.
> 
> 
> 
> There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who
> has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements.
> For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded,
> ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from
> darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens
> have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and
> presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for
> them, the nation's voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn't lacking in
> concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for
> good reason.
> 
> 
> 
> Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric;
> Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail.
> They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that
> binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings
> held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there
> and not only on the Fourth of July.
> 
> 
> 
> A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of
> identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He
> is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because
> he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological
> class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do
> with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.
> 
> 
> 
> One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of
> Winston Churchill—a gift from Tony Blair—by packing it back off
> to 10 Downing Street. A cloudlet of mystery has surrounded the subject
> ever since, but the central fact stands clear. The new administration
> had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for
> the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind.
> Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his
> nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president
> to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of
> Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.
> 
> 
> 
> Far greater strangeness has since flowed steadily from Washington. The
> president's appointees, transmitters of policy, go forth with singular
> passion week after week, delivering the latest inversion of reality.
> Their work is not easy, focused as it is on a current prime
> preoccupation of this White House—that is, finding ways to avoid any
> public mention of the indisputable Islamist identity of the enemy at war
> with us. No small trick that, but their efforts go forward in public
> spectacles matchless in their absurdity—unnerving in what they
> confirm about our current guardians of law and national security.
> 
> 
> 
> Consider the hapless Eric Holder, America's attorney general,
> confronting the question put to him by Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) of
> the House Judicary Committee on May 13.
> 
> 
> 
> Did Mr. Holder think that in the last three terrorist attempts on this
> soil, one of them successful (Maj. Nidal Hasan's murder of 13 soldiers
> at Fort Hood, preceded by his shout of "Allahu Akbar!"), that radical
> Islam might have played any role at all? Mr. Holder seemed puzzled by
> the question. "People have different reasons" he finally answered—a
> response he repeated three times. He didn't want "to say anything
> negative about any religion."
> 
> 
> 
> And who can forget the exhortations on jihad by John Brennan, Mr.
> Obama's chief adviser on counterterrorism? Mr. Brennan has in the past
> charged that Americans lack sensitivity to the Muslim world, and that we
> have particularly failed to credit its peace-loving disposition. In a
> May 26 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr.
> Brennan held forth fervently, if not quite comprehensibly, on who our
> enemy was not: "Our enemy is not terrorism because terrorism is just a
> tactic. Our enemy is not terror because terror is a state of mind, and
> as Americans we refuse to live in fear."
> 
> 
> 
> He went on to announce, sternly, that we do not refer to our enemies as
> Islamists or jihadists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate
> tenet of Islam. How then might we be permitted to describe our enemies?
> One hint comes from another of Mr. Brennan's pronouncements in that
> speech: That "violent extremists are victims of political, economic and
> social forces."
> 
> 
> 
> Yes, that would work. Consider the news bulletins we could have read:
> "Police have arrested Faisal Shahzad, victim of political, economic and
> social forces living in Connecticut, for efforts to set off a car bomb
> explosion in Times Square." Plotters in Afghanistan and Yemen, preparing
> for their next attempt at mass murder in America, could only have
> listened in wonderment. They must have marvelled in particular on
> learning that this was the chief counterterrorism adviser to the
> president of the United States.
> 
>   Long after Mr. Obama leaves office, it will be this parade of
> explicators, laboring mightily to sell each new piece of official
> reality revisionism—Janet Napolitano and her immortal "man-caused
> disasters'' among them—that will stand most memorably as the face of
> this administration.
> 
> It is a White House that has focused consistently on the sensitivities
> of the world community—as it is euphemistically known—a body of
> which the president of the United States frequently appears to view
> himself as a representative at large.
> 
> It is what has caused this president and his counterterrorist brain
> trust to deem it acceptable to insult Americans with nonsensical
> evasions concerning the enemy we face. It is this focus that caused Mr.
> Holder to insist on holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower
> Manhattan, despite the rage this decision induced in New Yorkers, and
> later to insist if not there, then elsewhere in New York. This was all
> to be a dazzling exhibition for that world community—proof of Mr.
> Obama's moral reclamation program and that America had been delivered
> from the darkness of the Bush years.
> 
> 
> 
> It was why this administration tapped officials like Michael Posner,
> assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.
> Among his better known contributions to political discourse was a 2005
> address in which he compared the treatment of Muslim-Americans in the
> United States after 9/11 with the plight of the Japanese-Americans
> interned in camps after Pearl Harbor. During a human-rights conference
> held in China this May, Mr. Posner cited the new Arizona immigration law
> by way of assuring the Chinese, those exemplary guardians of freedom,
> that the United States too had its problems with discrimination.
> 
> 
> 
> So there we were: America and China, in the same boat on human rights,
> two buddies struggling for reform. For this view of reality, which
> brought withering criticism in Congress and calls for his resignation,
> Mr. Posner has been roundly embraced in the State Department as a
> superbly effective representative.
> 
> It is no surprise that Mr. Posner—like numerous of his kind—has
> found a natural home in this administration. His is a sensibility and
> political disposition with which Mr. Obama is at home. The beliefs and
> attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found
> everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above
> all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and
> their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth
> that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the
> chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.
> 
> 
> 
> They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a
> president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more
> extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the
> influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour
> through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he
> decried America's moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They
> were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came
> naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly
> elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns
> in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country
> he was about to lead.
> 
> 
> 
> The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the
> good. A country governed by leaders too principled to speak the name of
> its mortal enemy needs every infusion of reality it can get.
> 
> 
> 
> Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
>