Like a deer in the headlights

I’m noticing that people are a lot more nervous than they used to be, say back in the Bush days, when our greatest fear was another, possibly worse, terrorist attack that could result in scores of thousands of deaths. The pervasive nervousness these days is of the kind one might see upon entering a room where a baby is playing with half-filled bottles of nitroglycerin or maybe a loaded Glock-17.

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People seem to understand that there is a pervasive threat of grave peril as they observe Barack Obama pretending to be President and attempting to deal with all those challenges in ways that a real President would. Instead, he’s like a deer caught in the headlights as that Mack truck of uncertainty bears down upon him in the night and he is frozen in hesitant irresolution. What to do about Afghanistan, world terrorism, Iran, North Korea, the economy, swine flu and all the myriad issues that arise to confront the most powerful human being on earth? Yet all he seems capable of managing in the face of this morass is to be in perpetual campaign mode, continuing to mouth meaningless platitudes designed to hide the fact that there is little or no substance in anything he has undertaken to date. Yes, the so-called $787 billion “stimulus” package enacted by a profligate and wasteful Congress and signed into law by Mr. Obama, was passed in record time. But the fevered frenzy with which this bill was passed does not appear to have yielded the desired result, short of helping Chuck Schumer’s re-election campaign in 2010. The same holds true for the healthcare reform package the President so desperately wants. Despite his dozens of speeches in favor of fundamentally reforming the American healthcare system, a vast majority of Americans are balking at the provisions Congress wants to put into the bill because they understand the consequences to them personally. It’s interesting to note that the President has urged the passage of the stimulus bill, healthcare reform legislation and the Waxman-Markey cap and trade initiative without debate, yet can’t seem to consult enough people to make a simple decision about the war in Afghanistan, which during the presidential campaign he referred to as the “real war”. Now that he is solely in charge of the “real war”, he wants to get advice from the Chinese as to what America’s future action there should be. His treatment of General Stanley McCrystal whom he has charged with devising a strategy for furthering America’s goals in Afghanistan is nothing short of shabby, as daily, more and more American soldiers are killed in a war that seems to have no real direction. While campaigning for the White House, Obama kept excoriating President Bush for his poor handling of the “real war”. Yet it is interesting to note that during the first nine months of Barack Obama’s tenure as President, more American soldiers have died in Afghanistan than in any previous year since the beginning of the war. This does not bide well for the President’s decisiveness, given that the asked for advice from General McCrystal has been on his desk for nearly two months, apparently unread. If the President doesn’t like what the general is recommending, then he should act accordingly and appoint a commander that will give the advice he wants. This is particularly pressing, given the dramatic increase in American casualties. The lesson that all Americans can take away from this situation is that a President should be elected on the basis of executive experience, decisiveness and the ability to make tough decisions on the fly; not on the basis of oratory skills, the color of one’s skin or whether a candidate is “hot”. Clearly, Barack Obama is an empty vessel and it is entirely possible that despite his good looks, his ability to speak eloquently and the vast good will with which he entered office, he could save Jimmy Carter from being the most ineffectual President the United States has had in the past of century.