There are a number of videos circulating about from "free Libya" showing grotesque head-loppings, executions, torture and desecration of bodies, of African mercenaries who apparently were captured or killed by the rebels in Libya. No doubt, the mercenaries were quite brutal thugs whom Qaddafi employed to coerce or kill his opponents; but the sort of barbarity we see is also the sort that we are subsidizing now with direct cash infusions, as well as with military logistics and support (and who knows whether today the on-off again U.S. participation in the NATO bombing "no-fly" zone missions is on again?). One could argue that these are isolated incidents beyond the control of the Westernized professionals who pop up on CNN and the BBC as the official face of the "rebellion", but the filmed savageries take place amid large crowds, urging the executioners and torturers on, often in an apparently jihadist manner, which suggests both race and religion contribute to the hatred of the hired enforcers. (When I was in Libya the most common complaint quietly aired against Qaddafi were his cash subsidies of all sorts to black Africans, both in and out of the country).

Because we know very little about the rebels—who they are, what is their agenda, where they get support—we have no idea whether their utopia to come would be, as Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Hillary Clinton seem to think, a fuzzy version of Turkish-style Islamic "democracy" or a sort of justice in the streets, Khomeini-style, as the graphic Youtube videos illustrate.

And if the president's Libyan misadventure was intended to be a small "teachable moment" about the eclipse of American exceptionalism abroad, then he has succeeded beyond all expectation: we have been reduced to less than France. The U.S has no mission (humanitarianism, setting up a rebel enclave, or outing Qaddafi?), no method (no-fly zone, or bombing ground troops, or inserting trainers, or supplying others who bomb?) and no planned outcome (the rebels do what? set up a democracy, set up an Islamic republic, descend into a Somalia, or carve out a Kurdish no-fly zone?).

We have loudly and self-righteously subordinated our foreign policy to the Arab League and the UN to show how multilateral we are, and then surreally subverted that new internationalist stance by going well beyond the no-fly-zone limitations, as we must, if the rebels are to win. We have still not consulted the U.S. Congress, apparently subordinating it to an inferior role to that of the Arab League. In less than 2 weeks we ceased in mediis rebus military operations and outsourced them to the Europeans (if our goal was to highlight their new autonomy and muscularity, it backfired, since they have not the wherewithal to win, and will only be embarrassed by us as errant adolescents who rue moving out and want to come back home and reenlist U.S. carrier strikes.)

What is in our favor? Libya is a tiny country of less than 7 million, with a long Mediterranean shore, near Europe, a sort of ideal NATO air theater, with a hated monster in power who has little popular support. At some point and at some time, someone, either in the U.S. or Europe, will say 'enough is enough' to this fiasco, come in, get rid of Qaddafi in messy and bloody fashion, and then we will see utter chaos, and the new "humanitarian" diplomacy of Samantha Power will end—or, rather, just begin.

We intervened in Libya to avoid a humanitarian disaster citing both UN sanction and the authorization of the Arab League, but then strange things have happened. Here are some of them:

a) We undermined both organizations when we expanded the war from a no-fly-zone to an open ended attack on Qaddafi's ground assets—even as we usually denied just that and as both organizations were reluctant to spell out such methods;

b) We have never stated the mission, sometimes talking about saving the rebels, at others of removing Qaddafi; to this day, no one either in Libya or Washington can distinguish our official from de facto policy;

c) Using the cover of the UN came at the expense of undermining the U.S. Congress; in the past, presidents who wanted to use force abroad have gone to the UN and Congress, or gone to Congress without the UN, or gone to neither. Never have we gone both to the UN and the Arab League, but not to Congress;

d) It is not just that we do not know who or what the rebels are beyond their appearances on CNN, Fox, and the BBC; we do not know what their agenda would be if they won with our help;

e) Qaddafi is a monster, but one with a propensity the last four years to woo Western intellectuals and academics (with honoraria) in the hopes his son Saif would be able to put a Western face on his tyranny; are we now bombing the very country we used to praise for being in rehab?

f) We have no typology of Middle East unrest, and can't distinguish why meddling in Iran is not good and meddling in Egypt is very good; and so we have no blueprint for interventions: 'no' to humanitarian crises in the Ivory Coast, 'yes' to Libya? 'No' to helping oust an Assad, but 'yes' to Qaddafi. Privately we know an inattentive Obama does have a logic: wait until a resistance movement seems 48 hours from success and then piggy-back on its momentum. But such opportunism is hardly a policy that can be articulated and sometimes it backfires, as in the sputtering rebel movement that went from a sure thing to a long shot in 72 hours.

g) Some readers may cite an earlier preemptive U.S. war against a nation state that we suddenly and unilaterally abandoned without success—such as is the present case with Libya. I cannot other than perhaps a few early punitive  raids into Mexico aimed at bandits but not the state. If you are going to take Vienna, take Vienna.

h) Obama has at least brought clarity to the past criticisms during 2001-9 and future rules of public protest: if you are going to attack an oil-producing, Muslim Arab country in the Middle East that poses no threat to U.S. security, without either public support or Congressional authorization, and wish to avoid anti-war opposition, then do so as a liberal president.

Everyone should applaud the new European muscularity, but understand it in a context of Obamism, in which the United States—unlike building past coalitions in which we gladly did the heavy lifting and faced the political fallout—has developed a new sort of 'sneaky coalition'. We will shoot most of the cruise missiles, provide most of the air support and infrastructure, but outsource the visibility and credit to our European and Arab allies. Accordingly, they will like all this, because they will receive global kudos without expending a lot of blood and treasure.

As a result, Obama's laureate status is not endangered by a third Middle East war against Muslims, and we are acting in accordance with a new multilateral posture sanctioned by the Arab League and the UN, although what we are actually doing is somewhat unclear.

Paradoxes abound: Obama soared to office talking about unpopular and illegitimate wars: yet, polls show he has not built public support to intervene nor obtained an October 2002-like approval from Congress; Obama was the reset un-Bush, but once again we are bombing an oil-rich Arab country for idealist purposes given the fact that opponents of the regime will lose if we don't.

Perhaps readers might better fathom our aims; I cannot, since our generals and politicians insist that we are only doing no-fly zones that seem to include bombing ground targets, that we only wish to protect rebels, though intervened after the president demanded that Qaddafi step down but are not pursuing that goal, and so far have not explained why the difference in the American response compared to Iran slaughtering its protestors and Saudi Arabia intervening in Bahrain.

So far all I can come up with is the following: if there is a mass protest against a Middle East regime, and if it seems almost certain that the regime will fall, then the U.S. at the opportune time will insist that the regime does fall days before it does. That seems a better barometer than whether the regime is pro-US, anti-American, merely authoritarian than genocidal, theocratic, monarchial, oligarchic, or dictatorial, etc. Obama thought Qaddafi would go; he didn't as planned; the pesky Europeans got up on their hind legs and made a stink, so now Obama is forced to enforce his rhetoric and to wage a sort of war against and not against Qaddafi, one that is and is more than a no-fly-zone, in support of and out in front of the Europeans. If Qaddafi falls, we will learn that it is due to Obama's unappreciated and underscored efforts; if he does not, and things get Mogadishu like, then he reminds us why he adopted such a low-profile intervention.

Ricochet member BlueAnt writing last week in response to Peter's conversation on Egypt asked:

What is Obama's doctrine for dealing with a hostile world, even if he's never articulated one well enough to make it a capitalized Doctrine?

I think his general principles can be distilled to a tripartite belief system:

1. Global problems started with Bush and did not transcend him; Obama's non-traditional heritage, postnational beliefs, and singular charisma thus can convince the world that America now runs and thinks like the Harvard lounge and thus perpetual world peace, man's natural condition without a Bush in power, follows;
2. Countries in the past suspicious of the U.S. had good reason to be; those once supportive of us are now suspicious; thus we must lecture former friends on their misdemeanors and ignore the felonies of once enemies;
3. Obama thinks his unique profile allows him avenues other presidents did not have (a Putin who believes in diversity apparently); thus, he alone can deal with Iranians, Syrians, Venezuelans, Cubans, etc. as fellow revolutionary progressives. To the degree a country is fully democratic, capitalist, pro-U.S. and Western (e.g. UK, Israel), it is part of a fossilized American diplomatic past. In this calculus an Ahmadinejad is an authentic revolutionary leader, with genuine cultural fides, the protestors in the street are naive in their pro-Western sympathies for secular democracy and a functioning economy, and are not representative of the true Iranian people.

All the above said, the actual implementation reflects somebody with the experience of two years in the Senate, who had never navigated outside of academia and Chicago tit-for-tat politics. So Mubarak is/is not a dictator, must leave now/yesterday/sometime soon as he serves as sort of a figurative leader/a critical transition player/a suspicious counter-revolutionary inasmuch as the U.S. must lay down conditions/advise only/respect Egyptian prerogatives, as private conversations with Egyptians are spilled to the press, Obama suggests the Cairo desire for freedom somehow channels his own support, and Biden, Clinton, and Obama contradict one another hourly.

This is very sad.  Obama has not articulated what it was about the Egyptian protests that drew his rabid support—that was found lacking when the Iranians tried the same thing against a much more internationally vicious regime; or why we can be pressing for human rights in Egypt but not with Russia, to whom we just disclosed the serial numbers of British nuclear weapons. Once one goes down the sermonizing path, as we learned from Jimmy Carter's disasters, there is no end to the number of contradictions that arise. One either then shuts up, or prepares in advance for inconsistencies and how to deal with them.

But then again, Biden, Clinton, and Obama, our policy-makers on Egypt, were the same Senate trio in September 2007 that tried to humiliate Petraeus during the surge hearings and assured the country that the surge had failed, Iraq was lost, and Petraeus was disingenuous ('suspension of disbelief'). In 2009-10, we have had our 1977 and 1978, and now sadly the reckoning is due and 2011 will be our 1979, when the world had sized Carter up and decided it was time to make 'adjustments' in Tehran, Central America, Afghanistan, etc.

It all reminds me of a tough school as a youth I went to in the proverbial barrio; there was a very nice, quite smart kid who used to lecture everyone about being nice to each other, usually under the watchful eye of playground teachers. Finally, the school's thugs and punks simply took his lunch money away—every day—teachers or not. They let him talk even more as compensation but he had to borrow his lunch money from us to eat. Quite unfair.

More By Victor Davis Hanson:

What Did Hu Jintao's Visit Mean?

Government Intervention Abroad vs. At Home

What to Expect From Mexico in 2011

Ricochet member Harlech submits this provoking question:

 Republicans oppose giant omnibus spending bills because they're full of pork and because conservatives are skeptical of the ability of government to do anything right. Yet we support a war in Afghanistan and Iraq that costs as much as these spending plans, is likely laden with as much waste (contracting boondoggles, and so on), and is even more reliant on government (including the military) to essentially build up entire countries. Why does government intervention fail at home but work overseas?

I disagree with some of these premises, though support the general notion of pay as you go for both domestic and military spending. A few points: 

A) The war in Afghanistan was predicated on the notion that in October 2001, there was a good possibility of more 9/11-like attacks originating from Taliban-held Afghanistan. We can argue over the merits of the long war, but the fact that there has been no repeat of 9/11, or even a European-style terrorist operation, suggests the rout of the Taliban from Kabul into the marginal lands has been very effective.

By 2003 in Iraq, we had 12 years of no-fly-zones, a 5-year-old Iraqi liberation act, and a vote from both houses of Congress to back the Bush-inspired 23 writs authorizing the war against Saddam, whose fall ultimately improved U.S. security and whose replacement by a consensual government offers hope for the region. We had all of this aside from the faulty intelligence about WMD. 

Both wars account for about 1% of annual American GDP, and are not the causes of our crushing debt, the great majority of which is attributable to out of control entitlements--like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security--interest, and general defense spending. Note that troops are leaving Iraq as planned, costs are being reduced, and in two years, there may be less than 10,000 American personnel of any type there.

B) "Government intervention" overseas was not the first but the last option that we considered over four administrations. In 1980-1990 we simply supplied radical Afghan and Arab insurgents against the Soviet Union, and then, naturally happy with the Soviet defeat and our own disengagement, ignored the consequences of the war. 

Yet from 1990-2001, the combination of armed former insurgents, the confidence of Islamists after claiming sole credit (falsely) for defeating the Russians, Pakistan's duplicity, our detachment, etc., conspired to allow Osama bin Laden to operate freely against us from Taliban Afghanistan.

In Iraq, we tried the realist approach after 1990, and left Saddam alone after we got him out of Kuwait. But then there was the Kurdish genocide and bloodletting of the Shiites. (It should be noted that the international critics who damned us for our cynical hands-off-approach then, would a decade later damn us for our difficult intervention to establish the now thriving Kurdish and Shia communities.) The situation with the Kurds and the Shiites led to the No-fly-zones and a decade and more of UN sanctions, all of which were reduced to caricature by 2001. Staying on in 2003, after the removal of Saddam, was an imperfect reaction to all of this

In short, there are no easy choices, and each has its drawbacks. But the present two wars must be seen in the context of prior perceived failed policies that had only passed on the problems, rather than addressed them.

Note that despite all the threats of endless neo-con preemption, we did not intervene elsewhere and have been careful not to get too involved in Pakistan or Iran, both of which could, in the future, become very scary.

Bottom line: I don't think the distrust of intrusive government at home contradicts the idea of supporting consensual governments abroad, or even fostering those governments—especially when there is little alternative and past remedies have failed. The U.S. has a long record in the Balkans, Germany, Italy, Japan, Panama, and South Korea of staying on and spending a lot in the hopes of not having to come back and spend even more at a later date. 

I think we will see more of the same in 2011 in Mexico. The drug cartel killing spree raises a number of less discussed considerations. We are told the huge American demand for drugs, both grown and manufactured, creates the problem; perhaps in part, but note that we have a longer, more porous border with Canada and we are not seeing a shoot 'em up culture arising in Calgary or Toronto over meth or heroin exporting to the U.S. Something else is going on as well. We were also told that the continuation of massive illegal immigration from Mexico to the U.S. at least had a 'safety valve' effect that lessened tensions in Mexico while earning it nation-saving foreign exchange; but after 11-16 million Mexican nationals have fled to the United States the last 20 years, exactly how has that mass flight and ensuing  remittances of an estimated $30 billion per annum made things any better in Mexico?

In short, everything from the drug industry to illegal immigration is symptomatic of a larger pathology in the sense that Mexico has not embraced open markets, truly consensual government, respect for private property, transparency, and an independent judiciary—in the style of the reformist agendas in Chile and Brazil—and thus cannot provide security and prosperity for its own people. We could legalize drugs, let in another 20 million illegal aliens, allow $100 million to be sent back to Mexico from nationals here—and there would still be violence and instability in Mexico.

The answer is not to intervene in Mexico, but in polite and friendly fashion to distance ourselves a bit from Mexico, by securing the border and ending illegal immigration. America's drug appetite, and an open border between two vastly different societies, coupled with the disruptive effect of draining Oaxaca and other provinces of working-age males, are only force multipliers of Mexico's more fundamental unwillingness or inability to fully westernize. In a larger sense, America has never been honest about American-Mexican relations of the last half-century, and the result is that millions here and in Mexico do not dare ponder exactly why millions risk their lives to come northward to a country that is constructed as some sort of exploiter in the Mexican mental landscape, and as not much better here at home in elite multicultural circles. There will be no real progress until those on both sides of the border begin the painful discussion of why America works and why apparently millions of Mexicans want to be part of it rather than of their own native Mexico. Blaming America or creating an Orwellian situation in which millions of illegally residing Mexican nationals are hyper-critical of or indifferent to the U.S., while wanting amnesty from it, is sadly illustrative of the our shared inability to address the problem.

There are a number of issues at play concerning the repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell':

1. The liberal community pushing for the changes is often the most critical of the military, especially its ROTC programs and its past deployment from Vietnam to Iraq; in contrast, those most supportive of the existing military protocols are the most critical of the proposed changes. How does all that political calculus work out? Do liberals suddenly embrace ROTC programs and become more pro-military; or do conservatives get less engaged with the military? Does the new policy have no effect on either? We do not know, but we can only note the irony that the liberal community usually associated with the most hostility to the military since the Vietnam era is now suddenly the most interested in changing how the military operates daily. Does a U.S. military with openly gay enlisted personnel and officers suddenly become  beloved by the left as emblematic of a new enlightened America?
2. The policy seems to affect combat troops differently than it might non-combat personnel, in the sense that how the policy is seen by Marines in a forward base near the Hindu Kush might matter in the short term more than among Air Force personnel at a supply depot in Nevada.
3. We do not the know the full effects of a policy in wartime that does not distinguish between heterosexual and homosexual behavior. Will more gays gravitate to the military in the new enlightened climate and will that in turn discourage recruitment of others, especially those from the more conservative south and midwest to join?

One could argue that much of the success of the US military, especially its officer corps, derives from its profile—more southern, more Christian, more traditional and nationalistic—being somewhat different from that of the upscale coastal suburbs. Will that change or not—and what would be the effect on combat operations if it should?

Clearly, the record in Afghanistan is that the US military remains exceptional in comparison with its European counterparts, especially in its eagerness to accept hazardous combat assignments. If the stereotypical Gung-ho types shy away from the military, will that matter; or will we learn that homosexuality makes no difference to them?  The data is ambiguous and may suggest that while troops in general may be indifferent to gays, those troops most likely to fight in ground combat operations may well care.

Does the policy refer to admissions of being homosexual or to homosexual acts per se? That is, knowing that fellow soldiers are gay in their private lives may not be as startling to comrades under arms as displaying homosexual affection in off-combat hours. Gays will argue that we have analogous situations already with women and men serving side by side who obviously are attracted to one another, sometimes date in private life, and on occasion engage in inappropriate conduct while on duty. But does homosexuality add a new dimension to those affinities in military units that function differently from those in the civilian world? More importantly, currently men and women are not serving long periods intimately together on the ground in combat. Would fighting side by side those whom one has a natural physical attraction toward change, improve, or imperil combat morale? History is ambiguous I think on that count.

Bottom line? I don't think anyone has any idea how overt homosexuality will affect combat operations, and even less idea whether they should worry about that uncertainty during ongoing fighting in Afghanistan.

The next two years do not bode well for the United States in relation to the rest of the world.

There have been lots of ominous developments abroad lately: the Chinese order for us to butt-out of their dispute with our ally Japan over contested territory; the Japanese dust-up with the Russians; the inexplicable twitter birthday wish sent to Ahmadinejad; the latest terrorist attempts originating from Yemen that perhaps have connections with earlier foiled attacks—along with the usual rumblings from North Korea, Syria, and Iran.

I would imagine that after 21 months a general impression, fairly or not, has been created that the U.S. is either unwilling or unable to offer its traditional allies the same level of support as in the past, as America seeks a more multilateral, UN-orientated approach to problems at precisely the time when regional autocracies seek adjustments and advantages in the perceived void. Now with Obama in a holding pattern after the midterm rebuke and considered wounded, I would imagine we will see a very different 2011, perhaps analogous to the annus horribilis of 1979, when the world sized up the therapeutic proclamations of Jimmy Carter between 1977-8, then and finally let loose—the Chinese invading Vietnam, the Soviets into Afghanistan, its surrogates expanding in Central America, the rise of radical Islam and fall of the shah, the taking of the American hostages in Iran, the boycott of the Olympics and on and on.

Just as Obama now seems petulant and miffed that voters did not appreciate his new statist agenda and impatiently and ignorantly pushed back, so too abroad Obama will become disappointed with the world that did not rally to his singular outreach, but instead interpreted his reset diplomacy as weakness to be exploited rather than as magnanimity to be appreciated. And looming behind all this is the specter of massive cuts in the U.S. budget and an anticipated curtailment of U.S defense posture abroad.

In his Salon op-ed, "One and a half cheers for American decline," Tom Engelhardt applauds the notion that America is deteriorating both at home and abroad:

So here's the good news: it's actually going to feel better to be just another nation, one more country, even if a large and powerful one, on this overcrowded planet, rather than the nation. It's going to feel better to only arm ourselves to defend our actual borders, rather than constantly fighting distant wars or skirmishes and endlessly preparing for more of the same. It's going to feel better not to be engaged in an arms race of one or playing the role of the globe's major arms dealer. It's going to feel better to focus on American problems, maybe experiment a little at home, and offer the world some real models for a difficult future, instead of talking incessantly about what a model we are while we bomb and torture and assassinate abroad with impunity.

Hope for American decline is the foreign policy expression of the liberal desire for an enforced radical egalitarianism and a government of equality of result at home: the U.S. abroad learns to stop being the nail that stands up and is pounded down to resemble all the others, in UN fashion. Neutralism abroad, statism at home, the US as the EU. Ok—sounds familiar, but facts get in the way.

Even in the worst recession since the Great Depression, 300 million Americans still produce three times the goods and services of 1 billion Chinese, a society that has a rendezvous with environmental clean-up, unionism, suburban blues, an aging populace, a disastrous one-child policy, wary and increasingly angry neighbors, and the contradictions between affluence and lack of personal of freedom. The EU is imploding and worried about a hesitant US that traditionally once had allowed the EU to assume its pretensions under a US military umbrella. The EU experiment reminds us that Greece is no more the model for the world than is a bankrupt state like California one for the United States. A post-petroleum world will radically weaken Russia and the Middle East. In contrast, our singular constitution, values, freedoms, and meritocracy, if left intact, ensure that the United States can easily retain its position of global authority. Decline is not a fate, but a choice, or rather a series of insidious choices on the road to serfdom.

The odd thing is that the Obama corrective for our supposed hubris is already imploding. Trillion dollar stimuli and borrowing did not restore the economy, and as the architects of that policy have now mostly fled, and as the Democrats who voted for Obama's agenda mostly don't want to run on it, Obama himself will have to learn how to entice the engine of American commerce back again—or destroy the Democratic Party with further statism. His foreign policy of "Bush did it" is in shambles. A Mutallab, Maj. Hasan, and the Times Square plot reminded him why, after demagoguing national security, he kept open Guantanamo, expanded Predators and seems to like renditions. The only thing that has changed is that violence in Afghanistan is on page 10 when in Iraq it headlined, Hollywood is making no more movies like Rendition, Salon is not talking about the Guantanamo Gulag, and Michael Moore is no longer writing paeans to "Minutemen" insurgents. I haven't seen a vero possumus presidential seal lately either, and well over half the country is convinced that the downturn was made worse, not better, by borrowing $3 trillion from our grandchildren in the last 20 months.

Our policies toward the Middle East, China, Japan, Europe and India have already quietly dropped the soft-power preachiness, and are returning to those of the mid-2000s, apparently in the concession that the world's dangers both predated and transcended George W. Bush. Ahmadinejad appreciated the President's silence when his goons clubbed Democracy protestors, liked the apologetic videos we sent, but somehow still tells the world we planned 9/11 and Israel will soon cease to exist.

A soon to be nuclear Iran, an imploding nuclear Pakistan, an ascendant and increasingly bullying China don't give a damn whether or not American elites envision or welcome American decline; as in the 1930s, such authoritarians have an agenda, the confidence to see it through, and will stop only if, as in the past, in the 11th hour the Western liberal democracies rise to convince them otherwise. Once upon a time a number of relieved isolationist Americans, circa 1939, pointed to the Depression, the vain hope of the New Deal to get us out of it, the dead-end of capitalism, and told the world, thank god, that we could not afford to worry about Hitler, Mussolini, or Tojo, given our own economic decline and years of poverty to follow. But the latter three dictators found us anyway, even when we were not looking for them—and in response, a broke and pessimistic America in four years somehow was producing more goods and services than the world combined. Declinism is as old as the United States, as popular among elites who reap the benefits of a capitalist free America as it is rare among those who do far less well, but have far more hope for their childrens' futures.

We forget why after 1945 the United States assumed the burdens of creating a global system of free trade, open commerce and alternatives to Soviet-imposed communism—we alone had the power, economic and military, to rebuild Europe, stop the spread of Stalinism and establish pretty much the globalized world as it has come to be. If we choose to nationalize the economy and ruin it, as Britain did theirs in the 1950s, and if we choose to let the Milosevics, Saddams, and Ahmadinejads do as they please, we don't just get on with our merry lives, happy to stay home, spread the wealth, and watch the world go by. Others will have a say—just watch.

Here is the liberal pundit Bill Press, in a widely circulated quote that offers a good window into the modern liberal mind. He is outraged about Obama’s sinking polls:

I think this says more about the American people than it does about President Obama. I think it just shows once again that the American people are spoiled. Basically, spoiled-- as a people, we are too critical. We are quick to rush to judgment, we are too negative, we are too impatient. Especially impatient. We want it all solved yesterday, and if you don't, I don't care who you are -- get out of the way.

And again, basically spoiled. To the point where it makes me wonder if it's even possible to govern today. I gotta tell you, I don't think Abraham Lincoln -- who certainly didn't get everything right the first time -- could govern today.

Appreciate the progressive themes here:

1) Condescension: We are “spoiled”—meaning the less sophisticated outside of Georgetown cannot appreciate the Obama godhead: apparently near 10% unemployment, apologizing to thugs abroad, a $1.7 trillion annual deficit, socialized medicine and a constant barrage of unhinged advice from cabinet members and appointees (e.g. California farms will blow away, we are a nation of “cowards”, Mao is a hero, Bush was in on 9/11, NASA’s formost mission is to make Muslims feel good, check in with the Dept of Labor, “documented or not”, etc.) should by now have made us less spoiled.

2) Hypocrisy: “we are too negative, we are too impatient. Especially impatient.” I have a suspicion that Press did not object to Nicholson Baker's slightly negative Knopf novel imagining the assassination of George Bush, or the Toronto Film Festival award winning, somewhat critical, “docudrama” of the same theme of killing the president, much less the assorted outbursts of Al Gore (“digital brownshirts”), Jimmy Carter, and Harry Reid. Remember that even the old icon John Glen finally got in on the smearing with his, "It's the old Hitler business." Press should read Thucydides's description of Corcyra to learn of the folly of destroying social institutions when on the outside and then suddenly lamenting their yearned-for absence when on the inside.

3) Historical ignorance: “I gotta tell you, I don't think Abraham Lincoln -- who certainly didn't get everything right the first time -- could govern today.”

Hmmm. Is this the same Lincoln, who, by mid-1864 (after more than 3 years in office), was called a baboon almost daily; whose Sec. of Treasury was scheming for his job and would have to resign; whom Gen. George McClellan was assuring the country was unfit for the Presidency; whom John C. Fremont serially slandered, and who was smeared daily by Horace Greeley, James Gordon Bennet, and Manton Marble of the New York daily newspapers; who was vilified by a growing Copperhead movement; who asked his cabinet to sign resignation letters in expectation of a crushing defeat in November; and who was the object of several foiled and abandonded kidnapping and assassination plots until the final one worked? In truth, what Obama so far has put up with is about a tenth of what Bush went through by 2007, and a hundredth of the abuse that Lincoln endured and overcame.

4) Naïveté: Apparently Obamites thought that 300 million Americans were supposed to give a blank check to this administration, by staying mesmerized by the “this is our moment” and “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” banalities. This outburst simply highlights the now sudden anger at the once good things like filibusters, and the suddenly good things that used to cause anger like recess appointments; but then we live in an age when Guantanamo is virtually closed and yesterday’s airborne “terrorism” is today’s stepped up necessary targeted assassinations. One wonders not that the left wants it both ways, but that they seem to be shocked that others note that they do.