04 | February | 2009

Victor Davis Hanson at NRO thinks that the Obama administration may already be in the process of imploding. I agree that his first weeks in office have featured an unprecedented number of missteps, but I’m not sure the media will ever totally turn on him, after their slobbering two year love affair, no matter how mortifying it gets, they’ve got too much invested in him. If Obama goes down, he brings them down with him.

Here’s VDH’s rundown of Obama’s mistakes, thus far:

First, there were the sermons on ethics, belied by the appointments of tax dodgers, crass lobbyists, and wheeler-dealers like Richardson—with the relish of the Blago tapes still to come. (And why does Richardson/Daschle go, but not Geithner?).

Second, was the “stimulus” (the euphemism for “borrow/print money”) that was simply a way to go into debt for a generation to shower Democratic constituencies with cash.

Then third, there were the inflated lectures on historic foreign policy to be made by the clumsy political novice who trashed his own country and his predecessor in the most ungracious manner overseas to a censored Saudi-run press organ (e.g., Bush is dictatorial, the Saudi king is courageous; Obama can mend bridges that America broke to aggrieved Muslims—apparently Tehran hostages, Rushdie, serial attacks in the 1990s, 9/11, Madrid, London never apparently occurred; and neither did feeding Somalis, saving Kuwait, protesting Chechnya, Bosnia/Kosovo, billions to Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinians, help in two Afghan wars, and on and on).

Fourth, there was the campaign rhetoric of Bush shredding the Constitution—FISA, Guantánamo, the Patriot Act, Iraq, renditions, etc.—followed by “all that for now stays the same” inasmuch as we haven’t ben hit in over seven years and can’t risk another attack.

Fifth, Gibbs as press secretary is a Scott McClellan nightmare that won’t go away, given his long McClellan-like relationship with Obama (McClellan should have been fired on day hour one on the job). Blaming Fox News for Obama’s calamities is McClellan to the core and doesn’t work. He already reminds me of Reverend Wright’s undoing at the National Press Club—and he will get worse.

Six, Biden is being Biden. Already, he’s ridiculed the chief justice, trashed the former VP, bragged on himself ad nauseam in Bidenesque weird ways, and it’s only been two weeks.

And the result of all this?

At home, Obama is becoming laughable and laying the groundwork for the greatest conservative populist reaction since the Reagan Revolution.

I wish, but I have little hope that an electorate misinformed enough to vote for Obama to begin with, will ever know enough to correct their mistake, unless something truly drastic happens, which is entirely possible if you listen to Dick Cheney:

In the interview, Cheney revealed no doubts about his own course — and many about the new administration’s.

“If it hadn’t been for what we did — with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth — then we would have been attacked again,” he said. “Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the U.S.”

Cheney said “the ultimate threat to the country” is “a 9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter – a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind” that is deployed in the middle of an American city.

“That’s the one that would involve the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the one you have to spend a hell of a lot of time guarding against,” he said.

“I think there’s a high probability of such an attempt. Whether or not they can pull it off depends whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States.”

If Obama’s incompetency causes his administration to meltdown, so be it. But it had better not lead to one or more of our cities suffering a similar fate.

MORE:

Michelle Malkin does something I’ve been meaning to do: She compares Obama’s screwup infested transition period with George W. Bush’s nearly flawless one.

STILL MORE:

The American Thinker weighs in on the impending Obama disaster.

“Keep a sharp eye out in the coming weeks and months. Let’s hope the O’s will see reason somehow. But so far, the signals sent by their actions are ominous”.