Idiot-in-Chief

The president also was gambling with America’s reputation, not just his own.

“ The last 18 hours–that is, President Obama’s airborne pow-wow with Gen. Stanley McChrystal and the stone-wall rejection of the president’s bid to win the Olympics for Chicago–leave my head spinning.  It’s such a weird sequence of events, such an anomalous combination of the deadly serious with the impossibly trivial, that it makes my brain hurt. Whether he wants to be or not, Barack Obama is a wartime commander-in-chief.  The war in Afghanistan, and even the “Long War” aren’t epic conflicts on a World War II-scale, but they’re damned serious fights involving vital American strategic interests.  Maybe we armchair students of American supreme command see things too much through the Roosevelt-and-Eisenhower, Lincoln-and-Grant lenses, but these are still critical moments.  They seem even moreso thanks to the president’s very public uncertainty about what course to take, and the reports that he’s had so little communication with Gen. McChrystal since he was dispatched to Kabul. The president’s decision to involve himself so publicly in the Chicago Olympic bid is almost equally perplexing.  Pundits concluded that he wouldn’t have done so unless he’d been assured of success–but Chicago didn’t make it out of the first round.  This is not just bad staff work, but recklessness of a high order ... [Is it just me?  comt] ”