Victor Davis Hanson asks why so many Americans are depressed. Suggesting five themes that might provide an answer, he thinks that more than the economy explains our state of mind. I agree, but none of Dr. Hanson’s themes accounts for my despair.
I feel utterly powerless to do anything about the fellow in the Oval Office who combines infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity in roughly equal measures. It seems to me that every day he is responsible for assaults on the freedom and well being of the American people. I can’t keep up and I can’t stand to pay attention.
His aim seems to be to reduce us to government dependents. His inattention to rehabilitation of the financial system in lieu of vastly expanding the size and scope of the government is a dead giveaway, as is his lack of concern over the vast destruction of wealth his policies are working (and will continue to work).
Perhaps most depressing to me is the manifestation of his adolescent grandiosity in his stewardship of foreign policy and national security. He doesn’t understand, to take one example, that the government of Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons it can put to evil purposes. He thinks he can sweet-talk them out of achieving this objective.
He doesn’t understand that the government of Iran is a tyranny that oppresses the Iranian people. He thus addresses the mad mullahs as though they represent the people of Iran.
Contrast the new year’s messages to the Iranian people promulgated by James Kirchick (the 25-year-old assistant editor of the New Republic) and of Shimon Peres (the 85-year-old president of Israel) with Obama’s palaver. By contrast, the president of the United States is disgracing us.
Get a clue, man! The mullahs who rule Iran with an iron fist hate you and everything you represent. They hate you in part because they view you as an apostate. They hate you in part because you represent the United States. They hate you in part because you represent the American people. They don’t hate us because President Bush didn’t talk nice to them!
Make no mistake. The mullahs love the weakness and stupidity that President Obama transmits at ear-shattering levels in his message to them (and in his earlier Al Arabiya interview). They rebuff his advances because they know he will only treat their rebuffs as reasons to pursue them with renewed ardor.
Obama believes his cluelessness represents the higher wisdom. It is a source of his monumental self-regard. Thus his response to Vice President Cheney’s criticism of Obama for undoing, and vowing to undo, the Bush administration policies that kept the American people safe from attack safe for seven years after 9/11:
President Obama, rejecting former Vice President Dick Cheney’s contention that Obama has put the nation at greater risk of terrorism, suggests in an interview airing tonight on “60 Minutes” that the previous administration’s stance was an “advertisement for anti-American sentiment.”
“How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney?” Obama asks. “It hasn’t made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment.”
“Brought to justice”? Good god, man, what the hell are you talking about? I don’t know what he is talking about — they haven’t seen the inside of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia? — but I do understand what Obama means when he says the Bush policies were “a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment.” Obama and his fellow Democrats helped make them so by spreading pernicious falsehoods about their illegality and cruelty. Even worse, like the pitiful Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Obama aspires for us to be be well liked!
I am depressed because the president of the United States is a fool who will immiserate us, render us wards of the state and lose us our life and liberty to those who understand what they are about.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.