Barack to Johnnie: beat me, humiliate me

Caroline Glick demonstrates that just two weeks into his presidency, Obama is already in the far reaches of appeasement of Iran. Her article reminds me of Allen Drury’s 1970s Cold War novel Come, Ninevah, Come Tyre. It’s about a very liberal U.S. president who thinks that if he makes sufficient conciliatory gestures to the USSR, the latter will react in kind and the superpower standoff will be ended and the world will be at peace. So he announces a huge, unilateral drawback and reduction of U.S. forces, tantamount to a surrender in the Cold War. And what do the Soviets do in response? They instantly demand further U.S. concessions, accompanied by hostile threats. But that’s not the end. Now comes the most amazing moment of the story, showing that Drury truly understood the liberal mind. The president, instead of realizing that the Soviets’ belligerent response to his peace move has shown it to have been a fiasco, makes yet another extravagant peace move.

Read Glick’s article. You’ll see that something like that (though not yet as extreme and consequential) has happened between Johnnie and Obama. Also, I recommend the Drury novel. It is highly relevant to our time, now that, under our new president, as in some nightmare from which we thought we had long ago awakened, we seem doomed to relive every folly of liberalism, as though the spirit of every past appeaser, fictional as well as historical,—Neville Chamberlain, Henry Wallace, Adlai Stevenson, Robert A. Leffingwell, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter—had been incarnated in the current U.S. president.

Not that Busheron wasn’t a despicable appeaser, with his joshing around with enemies of our country who openly despised him. But Barack seems to be on a whole other level.

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Kidst Paulos Asrat writes from Canada:

I just read Caroline Glick’s article on Obama and Iran (actually the Middle East.) It is chilling. This is how I felt when I first watched Omaba show us his true colors in an interview almost two years ago.

It looks like we’ve (or at least I’ve) got him wrong. I kept calling him a liar. In fact, he is quite honest. I think it was too hard to take in his honesty, and people decided to take him on his “slickness” instead—his easy charm and smile, his apparent ability for conciliatory listening, when actually he was telling us what he was really about. Of course he meandered around, like when he left his church and pastor behind, but even then he never denounced it as much as left it for political expediency. And whatever his wife says—which he allows her to say—he must believe himself too, as much as we hate to come to that realization.

But, I think his behavior is more to do with rebuilding the world. I think he wants to be in control. It is his global enterprise. It is not some willy nilly liberalism here. But something more hard-core and ominous.

Caroline Glick calls him Honest Obama. She is right, I think.

Kidist continues:

I should add that what makes Obama’s behavior more chilling is Caroline Glick’s writing style. It is a matter-of-fact litany of information. In so many op-ed pieces, the “voice” of the writer gets in the way - and these days it is often snide, ironic or has a lot of angry energy.

There is a seriousness and detached observation in Glick’s writing. I haven’t read her workd before, I don’t know if this is her usual style.

August 12

LA replies

If you have not read Thucydides, I recommend reading some of him. He is one of the greatest writers. His History of the Peloponesian War has the quality you speak of. He never gives way to emotion. He describes the terrible events of Athens’ self-undoing with cold objectivity. But underneath the objectivity is a passion made stronger by the refusal to indulge in emotion.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 03, 2009 01:22 AM | Send