Superman leads from behind

With the president of the United States doing everything he can to dial back American hegemony, even the superheroes of yesteryear are following suit (or leading from behind, the new White House version of Manifest Destiny). It seems that Superman himself has renounced his American citizenship, the better to be a citizen of Mr. Obama's brave new world. To be sure, there may be a hidden motive: Mr. Man, as is well known, was never a natural born citizen of the United States; indeed, he was an illegal immigrant. And he is, after all, getting on in age, given that he was throwing automobiles around during the Great Depression. Realizing he can never win the presidency, perhaps he has his eye on the chairmanship of the United Nations. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Oops

Micah Zenko has a very discouraging piece in the online magazine Foreign Policy , in which he lays out all the reasons why we goofed in assuming that Britain, France, and the Arab League could topple Qadaffi in "days, not weeks" of U.S. assistance with the no-fly zone. Didn't work out that way, did it? Here's his final, downbeat paragraph:

Qaddafi is most assuredly a vicious tyrant, and his ouster is a worthy goal. But it will not be achieved through incremental aid to the rebels and intermittent decapitation attempts. Yet we are where we are. Given its current level of commitment, the United States should continue to use its military capabilities to support the no-fly zone, monitor and publicize killings of civilians by Qaddafi's forces or the rebels, and respond with direct force to prevent or mitigate any mass atrocities. More importantly, however, the administration should work toward a negotiated end to the civil war, while starting to plan for the U.S. military assets, humanitarian assistance, and financial aid required to keep any peace.

Sounds like the Yugoslavian intervention at best, Iraq at worst. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Trading places

I am a great admirer of David Petraeus, but director of Central Intelligence? I'm not so sure about that! Meanwhile, spook chief Leon Panetta becomes Secretary of Defense, presiding over the army, navy, marines, and air force. Huh. In the New York Times, Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt seem to think this is a very fine thing, recognizing as it does "a significant shift over the past decade in how the United States fights its battles — the blurring of lines between soldiers and spies in secret American missions abroad."

Well, perhaps. Or does it just reflect the way Barack Obama does business? My first reaction was: this is weird. My second reaction was, hey, a lot of the stuff Mr. Obama does is weird. (Ordinarily I wouldn't use a lazy word like stuff on a matter of national security, but it does seem to be one of the president's favorite nouns.)

I hope it's not as stupid as it seems. Nixon swapped cabinet secretaries one time, and Dubya also played musical chairs. And look on the bright side: the CIA director wears a suit. That's a good thing, because there's no room on Mr. Petraeus's uniform blouse to add the inevitable medals to the array he already displays. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On taxing and spending

Here (from the Wall Street Journal) is what our federal government spending looks like, as proposed by the president in February (green line) and as modified by him last week (gray line), and as contrasted to the Republican budget proposed by Paul Ryan (orange line). Gross Domestic Product is the sum of all goods and services created by 300 million Americans. Historically, the federal government has spent one dollar out of five--20 percent of GDP. Last year we boosted that to 25 percent of GDP, a level not reached since the Second World War. Mr. Ryan would like to beat that down to the historical average, but the president will have none of it. He thinks it would be neat to spend somewhere between 22.5 and 24 percent of American wealth every year.

In return for this geyser of spending, what have we gained? The unemployment rate is higher now than when Mr. Obama took office. In terms of the Great Depression, we are now at 1935. If madcap spending didn't work for Franklin Roosevelt, it's highly unlikely to work for Barack Obama. Recall that the United States didn't get out of that tax-and-spend ditch until 1940--that is, 2014 in terms of the Great Recession. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Ask not what you can do for your country

"Energy--we haven't talked a lot about energy today, but first of all, $4-a-gallon gas really hurts a lot of people around this country. It's not because they're wasteful, but if you're driving 50 miles to work and that's the only job you can find, and you can't afford some hybrid so you're stuck with the old beater that you're driving around that gets eight miles a gallon, these gas prices are killing you right now." -- Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States of America.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Posted without comment

Blue skies! (not so blue, actually) -- Dan Ford

Spending reductions in the tax code

I haven't listened to the president's speeches for the past couple of years, because they remind me of how stupid I was to have voted for him in the 2008 New Hampshire primary. Comedian Jon Stewart points out that I thereby missed a particularly fine piece of political sophistry, where Mr. Obama explained Wednesday evening that he was going to reduce the deficit through "spending reductions in the tax code." This is how Mr. Stewart riffed on that bit of bafflegab:

What? “Spending reductions in the tax code”? The tax code isn’t where we spend, it’s where we collect, and that…. ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I guess what you said is tax “code”, code for raising taxes. You managed to talk about a tax hike as a spending reduction. Can we afford that and the royalty checks you’re going to have to send to George Orwell? That’s the weirdest way of… just say “tax hike”! That’s like saying, “I’m not going on a diet, I’m going to add calories to my excluded food intake!”

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On bending in the right direction

Congratulations to the US Congress for bending the budget (and President Obama) in the right direction. We are still piling trillion upon trillions of dollars onto the national debt, but we've taken a small step toward reversing the trend: domestic discretionary spending will drop 4 percent this year, after having grown 6 percent in 2008, 11 percent in 2009, and 14 percent in 2010.

It's a start. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Now Gaddafi can breath again!

I suppose it's churlish of me, after weeks of urging that our Follower in Chief get off the dime and do something to help the Libyan rebels, to complain about Mr Obama's apologetic declaration of war--er, kinetic action--last night. So I'll just pass along this, from NBC News via Newsbusters (boldface as on the website):

WILLIE GEIST: What's the reaction there [in Libya], though, not only from the rebels but if any from Colonel Gaddafi to what the president said last night about not wanting to wait to see images of mass graves and slaughter of civilians before he intervened? What are they saying there?

JIM MACEDA: Well, there hasn't been any official comment, Willie, from Gaddafi or from the regime or from the compound, yet. I can tell you that the whole, the atmospherics here of the government officials and minders is very different. They had gone to ground for a number of days: very quiet, very tense. They're looking much more themselves: much more bellicose, much more defiant in the past 24 hours. I would think, it's an educated guess but I would say that Gaddafi, after hearing that speech ... that the regime now is feeling a lot better. That they're feeling that they dodged a bullet. If NATO's taking over, they like that. They've got much better relations with NATO than with the United States in general. And they love the idea that the US position as stated by Obama is that they're not looking for regime change. Soon as he heard that, I'm sure Gaddafi was quite excited. He thinks he can probably negotiate his way out of this as he has over the past 41 years in other situations.

The video is on the Newsbusters site. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

We can breath again

According to the New York Times this morning, anti-Qaddafi forces are on the march again in Libya, apparently retaking the town of Ajdabiya, which controls access to the country's eastern shore. There's a useful map here. Libya has two strips of Mediterranean shore, separated by a gigantic bight, the Gulf of Sidra. The interior is notable largely for the Sahara Desert, much fought over during World War II in a contest to control the shoreline.

This geographical curiosity is what makes our no-fly zone feasible, and also explains the importance of Ajdabiya. If the rebels can clear the Qaddafi forces out of the eastern part of the country, and if Europe and the United States grant them diplomatic recognition, then they can probably hold on for the long haul. By the same token, Qaddafi may well hold on to the western part of the country. The momentum for actually unseating him may have leached away already. Mr Obama, in his radio address yesterday, allowed that “We are succeeding in our mission.” But he coyly refrains from defining what that mission is. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The commander who won't

I voted for Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary, in large part because his speeches thrilled me as no other presidential candidate in my lifetime. (Jack Kennedy came close.) By November however I had become disenchanted, and now I'm just befuddled. Where is the great speechifier of 2008? Peggy Noonan asks the same question in the Wall Street Journal today, and asks it better than I ever could:

I cannot for the life of me see how an American president can launch a serious military action without a full and formal national address in which he explains to the American people why he is doing what he is doing, why it is right, and why it is very much in the national interest. He referred to his aims in parts of speeches and appearances when he was in South America, but now he's home. More is needed, more is warranted, and more is deserved. He has to sit at that big desk and explain his thinking, put forward the facts as he sees them, and try to garner public support. He has to make a case for his own actions. It's what presidents do! And this is particularly important now, because there are reasons to fear the current involvement will either escalate and produce a lengthy conflict or collapse and produce humiliation.

Unlike me, Noonan is skeptical of our military action in Libya. (I only fret that it came too late.) But she is spot on--actually very gentle--in analyzing Obama's failures in this, his latest war. He is a commander-in-chief who refuses to command. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Why he dithered

I have regularly expressed my contempt for Mr. Obama's dithering over the past month, while a democratic movement bled on the sands of North Africa. But here is Fouad Ajami in the Wall Street Journal with an analysis of the president's failure that is more, um, nuanced than mine:

Everywhere Mr. Obama looked, he saw Iraq. We couldn't rescue Tripoli and Benghazi because of what we had witnessed in Fallujah and Sadr City. Iraq was Mr. Obama's entry into the foreign world, it was his opposition to that war that gave him a sense of worldliness and gravitas. He had made much of being "a student of history." But history didn't stretch far for him, and in a man who claimed affinity with distant peoples and places, there was a heavy dosage of parochialism. It was history's odd timing: A great historical rupture in the Arab world, bearing within it the promise of remaking a flawed political tradition that knew no middle ground between despotism and nihilistic violence, happened on the watch of an American president proud of his deliberateness and his detachment from history's passions.

Worth a read. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Can he vote 'present' by absentee ballot?

So here's the score: the French stepped up to the plate. (Remember how we used to mock them? "Ah, the French!" we would giggle. "Always there when they need us!") The British of course stepped up to the plate. Heck, the Arab League stepped up to the plate. And even the United Nations Security Council stepped up to the plate, albeit with five abstentions. As for the most powerful man in the world, the forty-fourth president of the United States--well, Mr Obama skipped off to Brazil. Only then (and evidently only after he was prodded by Hillary Clinton) did he let it be known that he was, after all, in support of hard measures in Libya.

If there has been a more contemptible performance by an American president in the past hundred years, I can't think of what it could possibly be. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Great moments in world leadership

Unlike the president of the United States, I am a busy man and must work for a living, so I don't follow Women's Tournament Challenge basketball, whatever that might be. If you have more leisure for such things, here are Mr. Obama's picks (or is it "pick"?) from the official White House website. What a great thing it must be, to have nothing pressing on one's mind!

Next up: a visit to Brazil. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Reviews, options, consultations, discussions

The word from White House dot gov:

Readout of President Obama's meeting with his national security team on Libya

At today’s meeting, the President and his national security team reviewed the situation in Libya and options to increase pressure on Gaddafi. In particular, the conversation focused on efforts at the United Nations and potential UN Security Council actions, as well as ongoing consultations with Arab and European partners.

The President instructed his team to continue to fully engage in the discussions at the United Nations, NATO and with partners and organizations in the region.

Well, that's a huge relief. For a month now, I feared that the United States of America wasn't going to do anything to help the Libyan democracy movement. Not to worry! Our best minds are reviewing the situation. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Obama as Ike

In one of the weirdest op-eds of recent years, David Brooks (the house conservative for the New York Times) glories in the passivity of Barack Obama:

The campaign of 2008 was marked by soaring calls for transformation. Now the administration spends much of its time reacting to events and counseling restraint.

The Arab masses have seized control of the international agenda with their marches and bravery. The Republicans on Capitol Hill and in Madison, Wis., have seized control of the domestic agenda with calls for spending cuts.

The Obama administration has reacted to both of these movements by striking a prudent, middling course. Internationally, the administration has sought a subtle (overly subtle) balance between democracy and stability. Domestically, the president offered a budget so tepid that it effectively ceded center stage. He called for a few cuts but asked people not to get carried away.

On Friday, President Obama gave a press conference that perfectly captured his current phase. He acknowledged rising gas prices but had no new energy policy to announce. On Libya, he emphasized the need to deliberate carefully our steps ahead but had no road map to propose. On the federal budget fight, he spoke passionately about the need to reach a compromise. But when given the chance to talk about what it might look like, he rose above the fray and vaguely counseled balance and moderation.

It is easy to see why the president should be striking this pose now. Prudence is always a nice trait in a leader, especially in the face of a thorny problem like Libya. At a time when the nation is anxious, Obama is coming across as a cautious and safe pair of hands. The man is clearly not going to do anything rash.

If this appeared in National Review, it would sound like condemnation. But Mr. Brooks intends to praise Mr. Obama.

Not doing anything rash? Heck, the man isn't doing any at all. He's just sitting there, waiting for his luck to change. Ike ended the Korean War, submitted three balanced budgets, created the Interstate highway system, and got the Civil Rights Bill of 1957 signed into law. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Time indeed!

One of the neat things about subscribing to The New Yorker is the email that arrives most every week with a preview of the coming issue's articles, with a link to the online edition in case you can't wait to read one of them. Thus it was that I hurried to investigate "David Remick on Obama and the Middle East." (Not available to non-subscribers.) I just naturally assumed that it dealt with the great issue of the day--Libya's murdering of its own people--and it does in fact contain a clarion call for action: "It is time for President Obama to speak clearly and firmly."

Alas, as I should have guessed, Mr. Remick is not calling for action against an enemy--an enemy of the U.S. and of democracy--but against a friend, and the only true democracy in the region, to wit: Israel. Wouldn't you know it? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Actions, options, costs, benefits ...

 
"When it comes to U.S. military actions, whether it's a no-fly zone or other options, you've got to balance costs versus benefits," Mr. Obama said. "And, you know, I don't take those decisions lightly."

It would be fairer to say that he doesn't take those decisions at all. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Not to decide is also a decision (Sartre)

Reports the New York Times this morning: "President Obama’s national security team met at the White House on Wednesday to discuss how to oust the Libyan leader, including the possible imposition of a no-flight zone, but made no decisions, according to the White House press secretary, Jay Carney." Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Why we can't abolish the National Endowment for the Humanities

“The mean-spirited bill, H.R. 1 … eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts. These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.” -- Harry Reid, U.S. Senate majority leader. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford