They’re Adding Up: Obama’s Failures in Leadership

It’s happening more frequently now. Those liberal pundits – except for their ageism, sexism, misogyny, etc. – are drowsily awakening from the euphoria of their infatuation with Barack Obama to see that he’s mortal after all and actually may not be offering effective leadership on a few important issues such as gun control and prosecuting war criminals in the Bush Administration.

E.J. Dionne’s column today is titled Who Will Face Down the Gun Lobby? Dionne Writes:

In other words: Our president can deal with all manner of big problems, but the American gun lobby is just too strong to let him push a rational and limited gun regulation through Congress.

It's particularly infuriating that Obama offered this statement of powerlessness just a few days before today's 10th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado -- and just after a spree of mass homicides across the United States took the lives of least 57 people.

Andrew Sullivan has the war crimes issue:

And so Obama's refusal to investigate war crimes is itself against the law. And so torture's cancerous route through the legal and constitutional system continues, contaminating the future as well as the past, rendering the US incapable of upholding Geneva against other nations, because it has violated Geneva itself, and giving to every tyrant on the planet a justification for the torture of prisoners.

In this scenario, America becomes a city on a hill, where the rule of law is optional and torture acceptable if parsed into legal memos that do not pass the most basic professional sniff-test.

America becomes a banana republic.

Memo from Rumsfeld: “Link Iraq to Iran”

My friend David dropped by Katalusis yesterday and left a comment in response to my Oct. 23 post, “Wrapping the Earth in an Explosive Vest.”

The suicide bomber’s explosive vest was the ominous metaphor developed by James Carroll in his reflections on the recent Bush-Cheney mutterings about Iran and the possibility of World War III. Carroll concluded:

Iraqi civil war, conflict with Iran, Turkish-Kurdish violence, chaos throughout the Middle East - and now President Bush tells us that, if we don't defuse the regional body vest carefully, World War III will start. There it is. Bush himself acknowledging at last what, under his leadership, the United States has done. We have put an explosive vest on Earth itself.

David responded:

Because I have lived abroad in several countries, and because I speak several languages (French, German, Turkish), I have been able to have conversations with people around the world not in English but in their own languages. And they have told me in their own ways that they view the US as a "terrorist nation." We get our way by creating fear, by using force, and by sacrificing our young people. And they have noticed that the nations we don't bully are the ones that have nuclear weapons. Is it any surprise that Iran wants to have nuclear weapons? If Bush is willing to attack Iran with nuclear weapons, then he is the incarnation of Satan himself, and the whole world will suffer or
even come to an end through him. I love this world, and I love my country. Already he has caused havoc that may change our world forever. A hex on you, Bush.--David Brunet.

However, the fact that many people around the world view the US as a terrorist nation isn’t due to Bush-Cheney alone; those two had considerable help from Donald Rumsfeld. Check out Robin Wright’s article in today’s Washington Post that jarringly reminds us of the former secretary of defense’s legacy, effectively captured in Wright’s opening paragraph:

In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and wrote of the need to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.

What I can’t figure out is why more people aren't as concerned as my friend David about our country’s reputation in the world and the latest saber rattling in Washington.