"But on this issue of um uh Obama's man... man... manliness... or manhood... what's your... what's your take on this?"

This is a strangely evasive and inconclusive effort at approaching a subject!

What's going on here?!

Bob is anxious about this topic.

Althouse has a bullshit topic she can't advance.

Both of them are padding and stalling for time.

Neither of them wants to confront Obama's weakness.

 

pollcode.com free polls

The NYT editorial gives Obama something like his share of criticism for dragging America into another war.

Given the circumstances of this dramatic new war, it's hard to read "Wrong Turn on Syria: No Convincing Plan" as the equivalent of what they'd have thrown at George Bush if he'd done the same, but the criticism is substantial. There's no mention of Bush, by the way. No worse-than-Bush talk.

President Obama has put America at the center of a widening war by expanding into Syria airstrikes against the Islamic State, the Sunni extremist group known as ISIS and ISIL. He has done this without allowing the public debate that needs to take place before this nation enters another costly and potentially lengthy conflict in the Middle East.... How are Americans to know whether they have the information to make any judgment on the wisdom of his actions?...  In the absence of public understanding or discussion and a coherent plan, the strikes in Syria were a bad decision.

How do we know there is no plan or that the decision is "bad" if we're deprived of information? The premise must be that the President can never determine that a sudden, secret attack is necessary to protect America. The NYT seems to be saying the decision is "bad" because Congress and the rest of us Americans were left out of the loop.

I'm not convinced. It's possible that what Obama knew about Khorasan justified obliterating them with a sneak attack — that we just got saved from another 9/11. It's hard for a President to get credit for what doesn't happen. Rightly so. If it were easy to get credit, Presidents would resort to tricking us with claims of credit, "1984"-style.

... The White House claims that Mr. Obama has all the authority he needs under the 2001 law approving the use of force in Afghanistan and the 2002 law permitting the use of force in Iraq, but he does not.

He also claims power as Commander in Chief.

The administration also claims that the airstrikes are legal under international law because they were done in defense of Iraq. In a Sept. 20 letter to the United Nations, Iraq complained that the Islamic State was attacking its territory and said American assistance was needed to repel the threat. But the United Nations Security Council should vote on the issue.

Here's where a mention of George Bush would be particularly apt. Back to the NYT:

Meanwhile, Congress has utterly failed in its constitutional responsibilities. It has left Washington and gone into campaign fund-raising mode, shamelessly ducking a vote on this critical issue....

The silence means something. Members of Congress were informed. Maybe they understood the value of speed and secrecy here. Investigations can come later, perhaps looking into security successes, rather than, as with Benghazi, failures.

So, even though polls have shown public support for airstrikes in Syria, it may not last. Mr. Obama has said there needs to be a sustained mission against ISIS over an unlimited period; it’s unlikely the Americans would back a prolonged campaign if they don’t fully understand the aims or likelihood of success.

So there is public support, though it's hard to see how we support what we can't understand, including attacks on an enemy with a name we just saw yesterday. The NYT falls back on the problem of sustaining support for a long war. America gets tired of war, we are, inevitably, told. But we sit back and allow war. And we are harshly critical when we see that the President had a chance to preempt an attack and exercised restraint.

It is puzzling that Mr. Obama... kept details about Khorasan secret so the group would not know it was being tracked.

Puzzling... or completely understandable? The news report in the NYT says the aim was to "wipe out the leadership" of Khorasan. If we knew where they were and needed to hit them before they moved, what's the puzzle? The editorial observes that bin Laden was discussed publicly, but how many times over how many years did we have a shot at bin Laden and miss it*?

These incongruities — two enemies now, instead of one — call into question whatever sense of purpose and planning the administration hopes to project. 

Let me guess: Commander in Chief.

______________________________

* On September 10, 2001, the day before the 9/11 attacks, Bill Clinton — on a paid speaking gig before 30 businessmen in Australia — said: "I'm just saying, you know, if I were Osama bin Laden - he's a very smart guy, I've spent a lot of time thinking about him — and I nearly got him once... I nearly got him. And I could have killed him...."

"I was not here in the run-up to Iraq in 2003. It would have been fascinating to see the momentum and how it builds."

Said President Obama to an unnamed set of persons just before his ISIS speech last week, according to some unspecified persons within that set, according to Peter Baker in the NYT.

It would have been fascinating... That's so professorial and distant. And read between the lines: He's seeing the momentum and how it builds now, in 2014, and he's projecting himself into the mind of George Bush, who experienced the momentum then and made the decision that seemed so wrong at the time to Barack Obama when he was not here in the White House.

Baker's source tells us:

Obama told his staff... not to evaluate their own policy based on external momentum. He would not rush to war. He would be deliberate.

I can't tell whether Obama thinks or meant to suggest that Bush responded to "external momentum," "rushe[ed] to war," and was not "deliberate." But I suspect that Obama remembers the way he judged Bush back in 2003, and he doesn't want to be what he thought George Bush was.

In forming a plan to destroy the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria using airpower and local forces, but not regular American ground troops, he searched for ways to avoid the mistakes of the past. 

Another way to put that is: Obama feels like George Bush, yet he must not be George Bush. Obama feels compelled to go to war in Iraq, but it must not be the same as what George Bush did. So he's grasping at distinctions: 1. He's taking it more slowly, being deliberate, and thoughtful. (Remember: Bush had no brain and was a cowboy.) 2. He doing it all from the air, so lofty and elevated. (Remember: Bush put boots on the ground. Ugh! Boots, so brutal! The ground, so lowly and filthy!)

“This will be a problem for the next president,” Mr. Obama said ruefully...

Ruefully.... see? Obama is not like Bush, he and his friends in the press are desperate to have you know. I've long seen "ruefully" an absurd adverbial boost to the good old verb "said." (Ask my ex-husband, the novelist, who I don't think ever used "ruefully" again after that one time I pointed it out, though I adopted "he said ruefully" to add punch to subsequent conversations. By the way, one of Elmore Leonard's 10 rules for writers was: "Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue." I'd add: Especially not "ruefully.")

“... and probably the one after that.”

But he alternated between resolve as he vowed to retaliate against President Bashar al-Assad if Syrian forces shot at American planes, and prickliness as he mocked critics of his more reticent approach to the exercise of American power.

“Oh, it’s a shame when you have a wan, diffident, professorial president with no foreign policy other than ‘don’t do stupid things,’ ” guests recalled him saying, sarcastically imitating his adversaries. “I do not make apologies for being careful in these areas, even if it doesn’t make for good theater.”

I laughed and laughed when I got to that line. Doesn’t make for good theater! But he is doing theater, the theater of thoughtfulness, the theater of reticence. He said "theater" because he was aware he was in a theater. Like an actor breaking the fourth wall, talking to the audience about the play within which he finds himself.

If we shadows have offended... That's Shakespeare. I'm trying to think of some 20th century play where an actor turns to the audience and says something close to I'm afraid this doesn’t make for good theater. It's a well-worn theatrical move. It's called "meta-reference."

And I know there's a Greek term for rhetoric like "I do not make apologies for being careful...." He's complimenting himself within the guise of self-criticism. Or are we just saying "humblebrag" these days?

We must stop the drought. Stop the drought. Now watch this drive.

A variation on a famous old quote that sprang to mind when I read this headline: "Obama Plays Water-Guzzling Desert Golf Courses Amid California Drought/After preaching shared sacrifice to assuage the California water shortage, Obama has played some of the country's thirstiest golf courses."

In case you don't get the reference:



Bush subsequently gave up golfing, saying: "I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf... I feel I owe it to the families to be as -- to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

The NYT acknowledges Obama's in trouble by reminding us that Bush was really, really bad. Remember?!!

At the website front page the teaser headline  — which is also the headline in the paper version — is:  "As Troubles Pile Up, a Crisis of Confidence for Obama." But if you click to the article, the headline becomes "Health Law Rollout’s Stumbles Draw Parallels to Bush’s Hurricane Response."

I can think of a whole bunch of non-parallels:

1. Bush's political party didn't design and enact Hurricane Katrina.

2. Bush didn't have 5 years to craft his response to the hurricane.

3. Bush didn't have the power to redesign the hurricane as he designed his response to it.

4. The Republican Bush believed he could not simply bully past the Democratic Mayor of New Orleans and the Democratic Governor of Louisiana and impose a federal solution, but the Democrat Obama and his party in Congress aggressively and voluntarily took over an area of policy that might have been left to the states.

5. The media were ready to slam Bush long and hard for everything — making big scandals out of things that, done by Obama, would have been forgotten a week later (what are the Valerie Plame-level screwups of Obama's?) — but the media have bent over backwards for years to help make Obama look good and to bury or never even uncover all of his lies and misdeeds.

6. If Bush experienced a disaster like the rollout of Obamacare, the NYT wouldn't use its front page to remind us of something Bill Clinton did that looked bad.

But let's check out the asserted parallels in that NYT article by Michael D. Shear:

The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.

But unlike Mr. Bush, who faced confrontational but occasionally cooperative Democrats, Mr. Obama is battling a Republican opposition that has refused to open the door to any legislative fixes to the health care law and has blocked him at virtually every turn. 

Oh, well, that's another nonparallel. Republicans oppose Obama, unlike those Democrats who sometimes helped Bush. And the NYT reinforces my point #5 (above).

But think about it this way, NYT. What if Bush and the Republicans had created the hurricane, and the Democrats adamantly believed it would be better not to have a hurricane? Would the Democrats have been "occasionally cooperative" to Republicans who smugly announced that they won the election and they've been wanting this hurricane for 100 years and canceling the hurricane was not an option?

Republicans readily made the Hurricane Katrina comparison. 

Oh? Note the wording. It doesn't say that important Republicans were bringing up Katrina on their own. I suspect that the journalist, Shear, asked various Republicans to talk about Bush and Katrina and some of them did.

“The echoes to the fall of 2005 are really eerie,” said Peter D. Feaver, a top national security official in Mr. Bush’s second term. “Katrina, which is shorthand for bungled administration policy, matches to the rollout of the website.” 

Okay, so Shear got Feaver to put a name on the assertion that Republicans made the comparison. No other Republican is named. Shear moves on to Obama's "top aides" and tells us — here's my point #5 again —  that they stressed how unlike Katrina it is, since "Mr. Obama is struggling to extend health care to millions of people who do not have it. Those are very different issues."

I agree. The health care screwup isn't a natural disaster. Obama and the Democrats made their own disaster, stepping up to do something they should have known they weren't going to be able to do well, and they lied about what they were doing to get it passed.

And yet they meant well. They wanted to help people. Unlike Bush, who — what? — asked for that hurricane?

ADDED: My point #4, above, draws from this passage in Bush's "Decision Points" (previously blogged here):

If I invoked the Insurrection Act against [Governor Blanco's] wishes, the world would see a male Republican president usurping the authority of a female Democratic governor by declaring an insurrection in a largely African American city. That left me in a tough position. That would arouse controversy anywhere. To do so in the Deep South, where there had been centuries of states' rights tensions, could unleash holy hell.

And the NYT would have framed it that way (which is my point #5).

George Bush "demanded a level of accountability and candor that this president has not."

Jennifer Rubin, on today's "Fox News Sunday":

I think the question is whether the president is ever going to order his people to cooperate. Lois Lerner took the Fifth and was then put on [administrative leave].... But [Obama] has not sent out an order as George Bush did, in the Valerie Plame decision, I do not want anyone in this administration to refuse to cooperate. That cost some people in his administration dearly. But no one took the Fifth in that case. Karl Rove testified, Scooter Libby testified. He demanded a level of accountability and candor that this president has not. And I think that whole hide the ball mentality, and the president's unwillingness to push his people forward to give a complete story is going to hurt him as well.

Drudge juxtaposes the Presidents.

What feelings are stirred?

Is Obama getting tired?

He's been traveling a lot — including going on a vacation — which is grueling. And he doesn't give priority to sleeping:

Unlike former President George W. Bush, who made getting eight hours of sleep a priority, Obama often works late into the night, averaging five or six hours of sleep, but making do with less when need be. After the Senate held a 1 a.m. vote on health care last week, Obama said he was awake to see the results.

IN THE COMMENTS: Johanna Lapp said, "It only took six words to bring down a British prime minister. Just six words":

Remember when George W. Bush threw a strike to open the 2001 World Series in New York one month after September 11th?

And then there's Barack Obama, at the 2009 All-Star Game, wearing a White Sox jacket in St. Louis — because his wife told him he looks "cute" in it...